Putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable.

There was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such
light as comes only from the deeps. Her upper lip quivered with a
movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either.

"Are you sure," she said, "that Mrs. Brodrick wouldn't mind?"

"Jinny? Oh dear me, no. It was her idea."

Her face changed again. The light and flush of life withdrew. Her
sallowness returned. She had the fixed look of one who watches the
perishing under her eyes of a beloved dream.

"And you," she said, as if she read him, "are not quite sure whether you
really want me?"

"Should I ask you if I didn't want you? My only doubt was whether you
would care to come. Will you?"

He looked at her with his intent look. It bore some faint resemblance to
the look he had for Jane. Her light rose. She met his gaze with a flame
of the sacrificial fire.

"I'll do whatever you want," she said.

That was how Gertrude came back to Brodrick's house.

"And now," Jane wrote to Sophy Levine, "we're all happy."

But Sophy in her wisdom wondered. As soon as she heard of Gertrude's
installation she rushed over to Putney at the highest speed of her
motor-car.

She found Jane on the lawn, lying back in her long chair. An expression
of great peace was on her face.

She had been writing. Some sheets of manuscript lay under the chair
where she had thrust them out of Sophy's sight. She had heard the
imperious trump of the motor-car, sounding her doom as it swung on to
the Heath.

Sophy looked at her sister-in-law and said to herself that, really,
Henry did exaggerate. She could see nothing in the least abnormal about
Jane. Jane, when you took her the right way, was just like anybody else.

Gertrude was out. She had gone over to Roehampton to see Frances. Sophy
judged the hour propitious.

"It works," said Jane in answer to her question; "it works beautifully.
You don't know, Sophy, what a hand that woman has. Just go indoors and
look about you. You can see it working."

"I couldn't stand another woman's hand in my house," said Sophy,
"however beautifully it worked."

"Is it my house? In a sense it's hers. There's no doubt that she made it
about as perfect as a house could be. It was like a beautiful machine
that she had invented and kept going. Nobody but Gertrude could have
kept it going like that. It was her thing and she loved it."

Sophy's face betrayed her demure understanding of Gertrude's love.

"Gertrude," said Jane, "couldn't do my work, and it's been demonstrated
that I can't do hers. I don't believe in turning people out of their
heaven-appointed places and setting them down to each other's jobs."

"If you could convince me that Gertrude's heaven-appointed place is in
your husband's house----"

"She's proved it."

"He wasn't your husband then."

"Don't you see that his being my husband robs the situation of its
charm, the vagueness that might have been its danger?"

"Jinny--it never answers--a double arrangement."

"Why not? Why not a quadruple arrangement if necessary?"

"That would be safe. It's the double thing that isn't. You've got to
think of Hugh."

"Poor darling, as if I didn't."

"I mean--of him and her."

"Together? Is that your----Oh, I can't. It's unthinkable."

"You might have thought of her, then."

"I did. I did think of her."

"My dear--you know what's the matter with her?"

"That," said Jane slowly, "is what I thought of. She might have been
happy if it hadn't been for me."

"That was out of the question," said Sophy, with some asperity.

"Was it? Well, anyhow, she's happy now."

"Jinny, you're beyond anything. Do you mean to tell me that was what you
did it for?"

"Partly. I had to have some one. But, yes, that's why I had Gertrude."

"Well, if you did it for Gertrude it was cruel kindness. Encouraging her
in her preposterous----"

"Don't, Sophy. There couldn't be anything more innocent on earth."

"Oh, innocent, I dare say. But I've no patience with the folly of it."

"I have. It might so easily have been me."

"You? I don't see you making a fool of yourself."

"I do. I can see myself making an eternal fool. _You_ wouldn't, Sophy,
you haven't got it in you. But I could cry when I look at Gertrude. We
oughtn't to be talking about it. It's awful of us. We've no right even
to know."

"My dear, when it's so apparent! What does Hugh think of it?"

"Do you suppose I've given her away to him?"

"I imagine he knows."

"If he does, he wouldn't give her away to me."

"I'm afraid, dear, she gave herself away."

"Don't you see that that makes it all the worse for her? It makes it
horrible. Think how she must have suffered before she _could_. The only
chance for her now is to have her back, to face the thing, and let it
take its poor innocent place, and make it beautiful for her, so that she
can endure it and get all the happiness she can out of it. It's so
little she can get, and I owe it to her. I made her suffer."

Sophy became thoughtful.

"After all, Jinny," she said, "you _are_ rather a dear. All the same, if
Gertrude wasn't a good woman----"

"But she _is_ a good woman. That's why she's happy now."

Sophy arranged her motor-veil, very thoughtfully, over and around a
smile.

This conversation had thrown light on Jinny, a light that to Sophy's
sense was beautiful but perilous, hardly of the earth.




XLIII


Down in the garden at Roehampton, Gertrude and Frances Heron were more
tenderly and intimately discussing the same theme.

Frances was the only one of the Brodricks with whom tenderness and
intimacy were possible for one in Gertrude's case. She was approachable
through her sufferings, her profound affections, and the dependence of
her position that subdued in her her racial pride.

Gertrude had confessed to a doubt as to whether she ought or ought not
to have gone back.

"I don't know," said Frances, "that it was very wise."

"Perhaps not, from the world's point of view. If I had thought of
_that_----" she stopped herself, aware that scandal had not been one of
any possibilities contemplated by the Brodricks.

"_I_ was not thinking of it, I assure you," said Frances. "I only
wondered whether it were right." She elucidated her point. "For you, for
your happiness, considering----"

"I'm not thinking of my own happiness, or I couldn't do it. No, I
couldn't do it. I was thinking"--her voice sank and vibrated, and rose,
exulting, to the stress--"of _his_."

Frances looked at her with gentle, questioning eyes. Hugh's happiness,
no doubt, was the thing; but she wondered how Gertrude's presence was to
secure it.

Slowly, bit by bit, with many meditative pauses, many sinkings of her
thought into the depths, as if she sounded at each point her own
sincerity, Gertrude made it out.

"Mrs. Brodrick is very sweet and very charming, and I know they are
devoted. Still"--Gertrude's pause was poignant--"still--she _is_
unusual."

"Well, yes," said Frances.

"And one sees that the situation is a little difficult."

Frances made no attempt to deny it.

"It always is," said Gertrude, "when the wife has an immense, absorbing
interest apart. I can't help feeling that they've come, both of them, to
a point--a turning point, where everything depends on saving her, as
much as possible, all fret and worry. It's saving him. There are so many
things she tries to do and can't do; and she puts them all on him."

"She certainly does," said Frances.

"If I'm there to do them, it will at least prevent this continual
friction and strain."

"But you, my dear--you?"

"It doesn't matter about me." She was pensive over it. "If I solve his
problem----"

"It will be very hard for you."

"I can bear anything if he's happy."

Frances smiled sadly. She had had worse things than that to bear.

"Of course," she said, "if you know--if you're sure that you care--in
that way----"

"I didn't know until the other day, when I came back. It's only when you
give up everything that you really know."

Frances was silent. If any woman knew, she knew. She had given up her
husband to another woman. For his happiness she had given the woman her
own name and her own place, when she might have shamed her by refusing
the divorce he asked for.

"It wouldn't have been right for me to come back," said Gertrude, "if I
hadn't been certain in my own heart that I can lift this feeling, and
make it pure." Her voice thickened slightly. "It _is_ pure. I think it
always was. Why should I be ashamed of it? If there's anything spiritual
in me, it's _that_."

Frances was not the woman to warn her of possible delusion; to hint at
the risk run by the passion that disdains and disowns its kindred to the
flesh.

She raised her eyes of tragedy, tender with unfallen tears.

"My dear," she said, "you're a very noble woman."

Across the narrow heath-path, with a lifted head, with flame in her
heart and in her eyes, Gertrude made her way to Brodrick's house.

And once again, with immutable punctuality, the silver-chiming clock
told out the hours; fair hours made perfect by the spirit of order
moving in its round. It moved in the garden, and the lawn was clean and
smooth; the roses rioted no longer; the borders and the paths were
straight again. Indoors, all things on which Gertrude laid her hand slid
sweetly and inaudibly into their place. The little squat god appeared
again within his shrine; and a great peace came upon Brodrick and on
Brodrick's house.

It came upon Jane. She sank into it and it closed over her, a
marvellous, incredible peace. At the turning point when everything
depended upon time, when time was all she wanted and was the one thing
she could not get, suddenly time was made new and golden for her, it was
given to her without measure, without break or stint.

Only once, and for a moment, Gertrude Collett intruded on her peace,
looking in at Jane's study window as she passed on soft feet through the
garden.

"Are you happy _now_?" she said.




XLIV


She moved with such soft feet, on so fine and light a wing that, but for
the blessed effects of it, they were hardly aware of her presence in the
house. Owing to her consummate genius for self-effacement, Brodrick
remained peculiarly unaware. The bond of her secretaryship no longer
held them. It had lapsed when Brodrick married, and Gertrude found
herself superseded as the editor grew great.

For more than a year Brodrick's magazine had had a staff of its own, and
its own office where Miss Addy Ranger sat in Gertrude's seat. Addy no
longer railed at the impermanence and mutability of things. Having
attained the extreme pitch of speed and competence, she was now
established as Brodrick's secretary for good. She owed her position to
Jane, a position from which, Addy exultantly declared, not even
earthquakes could remove her.

You would have said nothing short of an earthquake could remove the
"Monthly Review." It looked as if Brodrick's magazine, for all its
dangerous splendour, had come to stay, as if Brodrick, by sheer fixity
and the power he had of getting what he wanted, would yet force the
world to accept his preposterous dream. He had gone straight on, deaf to
his brother-in-law's warning and remonstrance; he had not checked for
one moment the flight of his fantasy, nor changed by one nervous
movement his high attitude. Month after month, the appearance of the
magazine was punctual, inalterable as the courses of the moon.

Bold as Brodrick was, there was no vulgar audacity about his venture.
The magazine was not hurled at people's heads; it was not thrust on
them. It was barely offered. By the restraint and dignity of his
advertisements the editor seemed to be saying to his public, "There it
is. You take it or you leave it. In either case it is there; and it will
remain there."

And strangely, inconceivably, it did remain. In nineteen-six Brodrick
found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his
ambition. He had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with
the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. He counted as a
power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. Authors believed in him,
adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. Other editors
admired him cautiously; they praised him to his face; in secret they
judged him preposterous, but not absurd. They all prophesied his
failure; they gave him a year, or at the most three years.

Some wondered that a man like Brodrick, solid, if you like, but after
all, well, of no more than ordinary brilliance, should have gone so far.
It was said among them that Jane Holland was the power behind Brodrick
and his ordinary brilliance and his most extraordinary magazine. The
imagination he displayed, the fine, the infallible discernment, the
secret for the perfect thing, were hers, they could not by any
possibility be Brodrick's.

Caro Bickersteth, who gathered these impressions in her continuous
intercourse with the right people, met them with one invariable
argument. If Brodrick wasn't fine, if he wasn't perceptive, if he hadn't
got the scent, Caro challenged them, how on earth did he discern Jane
Holland? His appreciation of her, Caro informed one or two eminent
critics, had considerably forestalled their own. He was the first to
see; he always was the first. He had taken up George Tanqueray when
other editors wouldn't look at him, when he was absolutely unknown. And
when Caro was reminded that there, at any rate, Jane Holland had been
notoriously behind Brodrick's back, and that the editor was, notoriously
again, in love with her, Caro made her point triumphantly, maintaining
that to be in love with Jane Holland required some subtlety, if it came
to that; and pray how, if Brodrick was devoid of it, did Jane Holland
come to be in love with _him_?

It was generous of Caro, for even as sub-editor she was no longer
Brodrick's right hand. To the right and to the left of him, at his back
and perpetually before him, all round about him she saw Jane.

The wonder was that she saw her happy. It was Jane who observed to Caro
how admirably they all of them, she, Addy Ranger, Gertrude, Brodrick,
and those two queer women, Jane Brodrick and Jane Holland, were settled
down into their right places, with everything about them incomparably
ordered and adjusted.

Jane marvelled at the concessions that had been made to her, at the
extent to which things were being done for her. Her hours were no longer
confounded and consumed in supervising servants, interviewing
tradespeople, and struggling with the demon of finance. They were all,
Jane's hours, serenely and equitably disposed. She gave her mornings to
her work, a portion of the afternoon to her son, and her evenings to her
husband. Sometimes she sat up quite late with him, working on the
magazine. Brodrick and the baby between them divided the three hours
which were hers before dinner. The social round had ceased for Jane.
Brodrick had freed her from the destroyers, from the pressure of the
dreadful, clever little people. She was hardly yet aware of the more
formidable impact of his family.

What impressed her was Brodrick's serene acceptance of her friends, his
authors. He was wonderful in his brilliant, undismayed enthusiasm, as he
followed the reckless charge, the shining onset of the talents. He
accepted even Tanqueray's murderous, amazing ironies. If Brodrick's
lifted eyebrows confessed that Tanqueray was amazing, they also
intimated that Brodrick remained perpetually unamazed.

But, as an editor, he drew the line at Arnott Nicholson.

It was the sensitive Nicky who first perceived and pointed out a change
in Jane. She moved among them abstractedly, with mute, half alienated
eyes. She seemed to have suffered some spiritual disintegration that was
pain. She gave herself to them no longer whole, but piecemeal. At times
she seemed to hold out empty, supplicating hands, palms outward,
showing that she could give no more. There was, she seemed to say, no
more left of her.

Only Tanqueray knew how much was left; knew of her secret, imperishable
resources, things that were hidden profoundly even from herself; so
hidden that, even if she gave him nothing, it was always possible to him
to help himself. To him she could not change. His creed had always been
the unchangeableness, the indestructibility of Jinny.

Still, he assented, smiling, when little Laura confided to him that to
see Jane Brodrick in Brodrick's house, among Brodricks, was not seeing
Jinny. There was too much Brodrick. It would have been better, said
Laura, if she had married Nicky.

He agreed. There would never have been too much of Nicky. But Laura
shook her head.

"It isn't a question of proportion," she said. "It isn't that there's
too much Brodrick and too little Jinny. It's simply that Jinny isn't
there."

Jane knew how she struck them. There was sadness for her, not in their
reproaches, for they had none, but in their recognition of the things
that were impossible. They had always known how it would be if she
married, if she was surrounded by a family circle.

There was no denying that she was surrounded, and that the circle was
drawing rather tight. And she was planted there in the middle of it,
more than ever under observation. She always had been; she had known it;
only in the beginning it had not been quite so bad. Allowances had been
made for her in the days when she did her best, when she was seen by all
of them valiantly struggling, deplorably handicapped; in the days when,
as Brodrick said, she was pathetic.

For the Brodricks as a family were chivalrous. Even Frances and Sophy
were chivalrous; and it had touched them, that dismal spectacle of Jane
doing her sad best. But now she was in the position of one to whom all
things have been conceded. She was in for all the consequences of
concession. Everything had been done for her that could be done. She was
more than ever on her honour, more than ever pledged to do her part. If
she failed Brodrick now at any point she was without excuse. Every nerve
in her vibrated to the touch of honour.

Around her things went with the rhythm of faultless mechanism. There was
no murmur, no perceptible vibration at the heart of the machine. You
could not put your finger on it and say that it was Gertrude. Yet you
knew it. Time itself and the awful punctuality of things were in
Gertrude's hand. You would have known it even if, every morning at the
same hour, you had not come upon Gertrude standing on a chair winding up
the clock that Jane invariably forgot to wind. You felt that by no
possibility could Gertrude forget to wind up anything. She herself was
wound up every morning. She might have been a clock. She was wound up by
Brodrick; otherwise she was self-regulating, provided with a
compensation balance, and so long as Brodrick wound her, incapable of
going wrong. Jane envied her her secure and secret mechanism, her
automatic rhythm, the delicate precision of her ways. Compared with them
her own performance was dangerous, fantastic, a dance on a tight-rope.
She marvelled at her own preternatural poise.

She was steady; they could never say she was not steady. And they could
never say it was not difficult. She had so many balls to keep going.
There was her novel; and there was Brodrick, and the baby, and
Brodrick's family, and her own friends. She couldn't drop one of them.

And at first there came on her an incredible, effortless dexterity. She
was a fine juggler on her tight-rope, keeping in play her golden balls
that multiplied till you could have sworn that she must miss one. And
she never missed. She kept her head; she held it high; she fixed her
eyes on the tossing balls, and simply trusted her feet not to swerve by
a hair's-breadth. And she never swerved.

But now she was beginning to feel the trembling of the perfect balance.
It was as if, in that marvellous adjustment of relations, she had
arrived at the pitch where perfection topples over. She moved with tense
nerves on the edge of peril.

How tense they were she hardly realized till Tanqueray warned her.

It was on Friday, that one day of the week when Brodrick was kept late
at the office of the "Morning Telegraph." And it was August, two months
after the coming of Gertrude Collett. Tanqueray, calling to see Jane, as
he frequently did on a Friday, about five o'clock in the afternoon,
found her in her study, playing with the baby.

She had the effrontery to hold the baby up, with his little naked legs
kicking in Tanqueray's face. At ten months old he was a really charming
baby, and very like Brodrick.

"Do you like him?" she said.

He stepped back and considered her. She had put her little son down on
the floor, where, by an absurd rising and falling motion of his rosy
hips, he contrived to travel across the room towards the fireplace.

Tanqueray said that he liked the effect of him.

"The general effect? It _is_ heartrending."

"I mean his effect on you, Jinny. He makes you look like some nice,
furry animal in a wood."

At that she snatched the child from his goal, the sharp curb of the
hearthstone, and set him on her shoulder. Her face was turned up to him,
his hands were in her hair. Mother and child they laughed together.

And Tanqueray looked at her, thinking how never before had he seen her
just like that; never before with her body, tall for sheer slenderness,
curved backwards, with her face so turned, and her mouth, fawn-like,
tilting upwards, the lips half-mocking, half-maternal.

It was Jinny, shaped by the powers of life.

"Now," he said, "he makes you look like a young Mænad; mad, Jinny, drunk
with life, and dangerous to life. What are you going to do with him?"

At that moment Gertrude Collett appeared in the doorway.

She returned Tanqueray's greeting as if she hardly saw him. Her face was
set towards Jane Brodrick and the child.

"I am going," said Jane, "to give him to any one who wants him. I am
going to give him to Miss Collett. There--you may keep him as long as
you like."

Gertrude advanced, impassive, scarcely smiling. But as she took the
child from Jane, Tanqueray saw how the fine lines of her lips tightened,
relaxed, and tightened again, as if her tenderness were pain.

She laid the little thing across her shoulder and went from them without
a word.

"He goes like a lamb," said Jane. "A month ago he'd have howled the
house down."

"So that's how you've solved your problem?" said Tanqueray, as he closed
the door behind Miss Collett.

"Yes. Isn't it simple?"

"Very. But you always were."

From his corner of the fireside lounge, where he seated himself beside
her, his eyes regarded her with a grave and dark lucidity. The devil in
them was quiet for a time.

"That's a wonderful woman, George," said she.

"Not half so wonderful as you," he murmured. (It was what Brodrick had
once said.)

"She's been here exactly two months and--it's incredible--but I've begun
another book. I'm almost half through."

His eyes lightened.

"So it's come back, Jinny?"

"You said it would."

"Yes. But I think I told you the condition. Do you remember?"

She lowered her eyes, remembering.

"What was it you said?"

"That you'd have to pay the price."

"Not yet. Not yet. And perhaps, after all, I shan't have to. I mayn't be
able to finish."

"What makes you think so?"

"Because I've been so happy over it."

Of a sudden there died out of her face the fawn-like, woodland look, the
maternal wildness, the red-blooded joy. She was the harassed and
unquiet Jinny whom he knew. It was so that her genius dealt with her.
She had been swung high on a strong elastic, luminous wave; and now she
was swept down into its trough.

He comforted her as he had comforted her before. It was, he assured her,
what he was there for.

"We're all like that, Jinny, we're all like that. It's no worse than I
feel a dozen times over one infernal book. It's no more than what you've
felt about everything you've ever done--even Hambleby."

"Yes." She almost whispered it. "It _is_ worse."

"How?"

"Well, I don't know whether it is that there isn't enough time--yet, or
whether I've really not enough strength. Don't tell anybody I said so.
Above all, don't tell Henry."

"I shouldn't dream of telling Henry."

"You see, sometimes I feel as if I was walking on a tight-rope of time,
held for me, by somebody else, over an abyss; and that, if somebody else
were suddenly to let go, there I should be--precipitated. And sometimes
it's as if I were doing it all with one little, little brain-cell that
might break any minute; or with one little tight nerve that might snap.
It's the way Laura used to feel. I never knew what it was like till now.
Poor little Laura, don't you remember how frightened we always were?"

He was frightened now. He suggested that she had better rest. He tried
to force from her a promise that she would rest. He pointed out the
absolute necessity of rest.

"That's it. I'm afraid to rest. Lest--later on--there shouldn't be any
time at all."

"Why shouldn't there be?"

"Things," she said wildly and vaguely, "get hold of you. And yet, you'd
have thought I'd cut myself loose from most."

"Cut yourself looser."

"But--from what?"

"Your relations."

"How can I. I wouldn't if I could."

"Your friends, then--Nina, Laura, Prothero, Nicky--me."

"You? I can't do without you."

He smiled. "No, Jinny. I told you long ago you couldn't."

He was moved, very strangely moved, by her admission. He had not had to
help himself to that. She had given it to him, a gift from the unseen.

"Well," he said presently, "what are you going to do?"

"Oh--struggle along somehow."

"I wouldn't struggle too hard." He meditated. "Look here, our natural
tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it's people that do all the
mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. We'll believe anything
rather than that. But we've got to recognize that it's capricious. It
comes and goes."

"Still, people do count. My brother-in-law, John Brodrick, makes it go.
Whereas you, Tanks, I own you make it come."

"Oh, I make it come, do I?"

He wondered, "What does Brodrick do?"

His smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder.

She turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face,
thus estranged and averted. He thought he knew the source of it and its
secret. It also was a gift from the unseen.

When he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed
where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal
passion.

And Gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like
Tanqueray, she thought she knew.




XLV


There were moments when she longed to be as Gertrude, a woman with one
innocent, uncomplicated aim. She was no longer sorry for her. Gertrude's
passion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly
appeased. She bore within her no tyrannous divinity. She knew nothing of
the consuming and avenging will.

Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it
went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it,
past all bounds.

For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the
house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of
his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no
place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision.
They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were
solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the
light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the grass was
green under their feet. The things they touched were saturated with
their presence. There was no sign of ardent life they had not.

And not only was she surrounded by their visible bodies, but their souls
possessed her; she became the soul of each one of them in turn. It was
the intimacy, the spiritual warmth of the possession that gave her her
first sense of separation, of infidelity to Brodrick. The immaterial,
consecrated places were invaded. It was as if she closed her heart to
her husband and her child.

The mood continued as long as the vision kept its grip. She came out of
it unnerved and exhausted, and terrified at herself. Bodily
unfaithfulness seemed to her a lesser sin.

Brodrick was aware that she wandered. That was how he had always put it.
He had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. It was the way
of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that
had attracted him. He understood that sort of thing. It was his own
comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face
of his family's tradition. No Brodrick had ever married a woman who
wandered, who conceivably would want to wander.

And Jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances
for. And with each wandering she became increasingly difficult to find.

Still, hitherto he had had his certainty. Her spirit might torment him
with its disappearances; through her body, surrendered to his arms, he
had had the assurance of ultimate possession. At night her genius had no
power over her. Sleeping, she had deliverance in dreams. His passion
moved in her darkness, sounded her depths; through all their veils of
sleep she was aware of him, and at a touch she turned to him.

Now it was he who had no power over her.

One night, when he came to her, he found a creature that quivered at his
touch and shrank from it, fatigued, averted; a creature pitifully
supine, with arms too weary to enforce their own repulse. He took her in
his arms and she gave a cry, little and low, like a child's whimper. It
went to his heart and struck cold there. It was incredible that Jinny
should have given such a cry.

He lay awake a long time. He wondered if she had ceased to care for him.
He hardly dared own how it terrified him, this slackening of the
physical tie.

He got up early and dressed and went out into the garden. At six o'clock
he came back into her room. She was asleep, and he sat and watched her.
She lay with one arm thrown up above her pillow, as the trouble of her
sleep had tossed her. Her head was bowed upon her breast.

[Illustration: It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife]

His watching face was lowered as he brooded over the marvel and the
mystery of her. It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife, whose face
had been so tender to him, whose body utterly tender, utterly
compassionate. He tried to realize the marvel and mystery of her genius.
He knew it to be an immortal thing, hidden behind the veil of mortal
flesh that for the moment was so supremely dear to him. He wondered once
whether she still cared for Tanqueray. But the thought passed from him;
it could not endure beside the memory of her tenderness.

She woke and found his eyes fixed on her. They drew her from sleep, as
they had so often drawn her from some dark corner where she had sat
removed. She woke, as if at the urgence of a trouble that kept watch in
her under her sleep. In a moment she was wide-eyed, alert; she gazed at
him with a lucid comprehension of his state. She held out to him an arm
drowsier than her thought.

"I'm a brute to you," she said, "but I can't help it."

She sat up and gathered together the strayed masses of her hair.

"Do you think," she said, "you could get me a cup of tea from the
servant's breakfast?"

He brought the tea, and as they drank together their mutual memories
revived.

"I have," said she, "the most awful recollection of having been a brute
to you."

"Never mind, Jinny," he said, and flushed with the sting of it.

"I don't. That's the dreadful part of it. I can't feel sorry when I want
to. I can't feel anything at all."

She closed her eyes helplessly against his.

"It isn't my fault. It isn't really me. It's It."

He smiled at this reference to the dreadful Power.

"The horrible and brutal thing about it is that it stops you feeling. It
would, you know."

"Would it? I shouldn't have thought it would have made _that_
difference."

"That's just the difference it does make."

He moved impatiently. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I wouldn't talk about it--only--it's much better that you should know
what it is, than that you should think it's what it isn't."

She looked at him. His forehead still displayed a lowering incredulity.

"If you don't believe me, ask George Tanqueray."

"George Tanqueray?"

His nerves felt the shock of the thought that had come to him, just now
when he watched her sleep. He had not expected to meet Tanqueray again
so soon and in the open.

"How much do you think he cares for poor Rose when he's in the state I'm
in?"

His face darkened as he considered her question. He knew all about poor
Rose's trouble, how her tender flesh and blood had been made to pay for
Tanqueray's outrageous genius. He and Henry had discussed it. Henry had
his own theory of it. He offered it as one more instance of the
physiological disabilities of genius. It was an extreme and curious
instance, if you liked, Tanqueray himself being curious and extreme. But
it had not occurred to Brodrick that Henry's theory of Tanqueray might
be applied to Jane.

"What on earth do you know about George Tanqueray?" he said. "How
_could_ you know a thing like that?"

"I know because I'm like him."

"No, Jinny, it's not the same thing. You're a woman."

She smiled, remembering sadly how that was what George in a brutal
moment had said she was not to be. It showed after all how well he knew
her.

"I'm more like George Tanqueray," she said, "than I'm like Gertrude
Collett."

He frowned, wondering what Gertrude Collett had to do with it.

"We're all the same," she said. "It takes us that way. You see, it tires
us out."

He sighed, but his face lightened.

"If nothing's left of a big strong man like George Tanqueray, how much
do you suppose is left of me? It's perfectly simple--simpler than you
thought. But it has to be."

It was simpler than he had thought. He understood her to say that in its
hour, by taking from her all passion, her genius was mindful of its own.

"I see," he said; "it's simply physical exhaustion."

She closed her eyes again.

He saw and rose against it, insanely revolted by the sacrifice of
Jinny's womanhood.

"It shows, Jinny, that you _can't_ stand the strain. Something will have
to be done," he said.

"Oh, what?" Her eyes opened on him in terror.

His expression was utterly blank, utterly helpless. He really hadn't an
idea.

"I don't know, Jinny."

He suggested that she should stay in bed for breakfast.

She stayed.

Down-stairs, over the breakfast-table, he presented to Gertrude Collett
a face heavy with his suffering.

He was soothed by Gertrude's imperishable tact. She was glad to hear
that Mrs. Brodrick had stayed in bed for breakfast. It would do her
good.

At dinner-time they learned that it had done her good. Gertrude was glad
again. She said that Mrs. Brodrick knew she had always wanted her to
stay in bed for breakfast. She saw no reason why she should not stay in
bed for breakfast every morning.

Henry was consulted. He said, "By all means. Capital idea." In a week's
time, staying in bed for breakfast had made such a difference to Jane
that Gertrude was held once more to have solved the problem. Brodrick
even said that if Jane always did what Gertrude wanted she wouldn't go
far wrong.

The Brodricks all knew that Jane was staying in bed for breakfast. The
news went the round of the family in three days. It travelled from Henry
to Frances, from Frances to Mabel, from Mabel to John, and from John to
Levine and Sophy. They received it unsurprised, with melancholy
comprehension, as if they had always known it. And they said it was very
sad for Hugh.

Gertrude said it was very sad for everybody. She said it to Brodrick one
Sunday morning, looking at him across the table, where she sat in Jane's
place. At first he had not liked to see her there, but he was getting
used to it. She soothed him with her stillness, her smile, and the soft
deepening of her shallow eyes.

"It's very sad, isn't it," said she, "without Mrs. Brodrick?"

"Very," he said. He wondered ironically, brutally, what Gertrude would
say if she really know how sad it was. There had been another night like
that which had seemed to him the beginning of it all.

"May I give you some more tea?"

"No, thank you. I wonder," said he, "how long it's going to last."

"I suppose," said he, "it must run its course."

"You talk like my brother, as if it were an illness."

"Well--isn't it?"

"How should I know? I haven't got it."

He rose and went to the window that looked out on to the garden and the
lawn and Jane's seat under the lime-tree. He remembered how one summer,
three years ago, before he married her, she had lain there recovering
from the malady of her genius. A passion of revolt surged up in him.

"I suppose, anyhow, it's incurable," he said, more to himself than to
Gertrude.

She had risen from her place and followed him.

"Whatever it is," she said, "it's the thing we've got most to think of.
It's the thing that means most to her."

"To her?" he repeated vaguely.

"To her," she insisted. "I didn't understand it at first; I can't say I
understand it now; it's altogether beyond me. But I do say it's the
great thing."

"Yes," he assented, "it's the great thing."

"The thing" (she pressed it) "for which sacrifices must be made."

Then, lest he should think that she pressed it too hard, that she rubbed
it into him, the fact that stung, the fact that his wife's genius was
his dangerous rival, standing between them, separating them, slackening
the tie; lest he should know how much she knew; lest he should consider
her obtuse, as if she thought that he grudged his sacrifices, she faced
him with her supreme sincerity.

"You know that you are glad to make them."

She smiled, clear-eyed, shining with her own inspiration. She was the
woman who was there to serve him, who knew his need. She came to him in
his hour of danger, in his dark, sensual hour, and held his light for
him. She held him to himself high.

He was so helpless that he turned to her as if she indeed knew.

"Do you think," he said, "it does mean most to her?"

"You know best," she said, "what it means."

It sank into him. And, as it sank, he said to himself that of course it
was so; that he might have known it. Gertrude left it sinking.

He never for a moment suspected that she had rubbed it in.




XLVI


They were saying now that Jane left her husband too much to Gertrude
Collett, and that it was hard on Hugh.

They supposed, in their unastonished acceptance of the facts, that
things would have to go on like this indefinitely. It was partly Hugh's
own fault. That was John Brodrick's view of it. Hugh had given her her
head and she was off. And when Jane was off (Sophy declared) nothing
could stop her.

And yet she was stopped.

Suddenly, in the full fury of it, she stopped dead.

She had given herself ten months. She had asked for ten months; not a
day more. But she had not allowed for friction or disturbance from the
outside. And the check--it was a clutch at the heart that brought her
brain up staggering--came entirely from the outside, from the uttermost
rim of her circle, from Mabel Brodrick.

In January, the last but three of the ten months, Mabel became ill. All
autumn John Brodrick's wife had grown slenderer and redder-eyed, her
little high-nosed, distinguished face thinned and drooped, till she was
more than ever like a delicate bird.

Jane heard from Frances vague rumours of the source of Mabel's malady.
The powers of life had been cruel to the lady whom John Brodrick had so
indiscreetly married.

It was incredible to all of them that poor Mabel should have the power
to stay Jinny in her course. But it was so. Mabel had became attached to
Jinny. She clung, she adhered; she drew her life through Jinny. It was
because she felt that Jane understood, that she was the only one of them
who really knew. It was, she all but intimated, because Jane was not a
Brodrick. When she was with the others, Mabel was reminded perpetually
of her failure, of how horribly she had made John suffer. Not that they
ever said a word about it, but they made her feel it; whereas Jinny had
seen from the first that she suffered too; she recognized her perfect
right to suffer. And when it all ended, as it was bound to end, in a bad
illness, the only thing that did Mabel any good was seeing Jinny.

That was in January (they put it all down to the cold of January); and
every day until the middle of February when Mabel was about again, Jane
tramped across the Heath to Augustus Road, always in weather that did
its worst for Mabel, always in wind or frost or rain. She never missed a
day.

Sometimes Henry was with her. He made John's house the last point of his
round that he might sit with Mabel. He had never sat with her before; he
had never paid very much attention to her. It was the change in Henry
that made Jane alive to the change in Mabel; for the long, lean, unhappy
man, this man of obstinate distastes and disapprovals, had an extreme
tenderness for all physical suffering.

Since Mabel's illness he had dropped his disapproving attitude to Jane.
She could almost have believed that Henry liked her.

One day as they turned together into the deep avenue of Augustus Road,
she saw kind grey eyes looking down at her from Henry's height.

"You're very good to poor Mabel, Jinny," he said.

"I can't do much."

"Do what you can. We shan't have her with us very long."

"Henry----"

"She doesn't know it. John doesn't know it. But I thought I'd tell you."

"I'm glad you've told me."

"It's a kindness," he went on, "to go and see her. It takes her mind off
herself."

"She doesn't complain."

"No. She doesn't complain. But her mind turns in on itself. It preys on
her. And of course it's terrible for John."

She agreed. "Of course, it's terrible--for John." But she was thinking
how terrible it was for Mabel. She wondered, did they say of her and of
_her_ malady, how terrible it was for Hugh?

"This is a great interruption to your work," he said presently, with the
peculiar solemnity he accorded to the obvious.

Her pace quickened. The frosty air stung her cheeks and the blood
mounted there.

"It won't hurt you," he said. "You're better when you're not working."

"Am I?" said she in a voice that irritated Henry.




XLVII


In February the interruption ceased. Mabel was better. She was well
enough for John to take her to the Riviera.

Jane was, as they said, "off" again. But not all at once; not without
suffering, for the seventh time, the supreme agony of the creator--that
going down into the void darkness, to recall the offended Power, to
endure the tortures that propitiate the revolted Will.

Her book was finished in March and appeared in April. Her terror of the
published thing was softened to her by the great apathy and fatigue
which now came upon her; a fatigue and an apathy in which Henry
recognized the beginning of the illness he had prophesied. He reminded
her that he had prophesied it long ago; and he watched her, sad and
unsurprised, but like the angel he invariably was in the presence of
physical suffering.

She was thus spared the ordeal of the birthday celebration. It was
understood that she would give audience in her study to her friends, to
Arnott Nicholson, to the Protheros and Tanqueray. Instead of all going
in at once, they were to take it in turns.

She lay there on her couch, waiting for Tanqueray to come and tell her
whether this time it was life or death.

Nicky's turn came first. Nicky was unspeakably moved at the sight of
her. He bent over her hand and kissed it; and her fear misread his mood.

"Dear Nicky," she said, "are you consoling me?"

He stood solemnly before her, inspired, positively flaming with
annunciation.

"Wait--wait," he said, "till you've seen Him. I won't say a word."

Nicky had never made himself more beautiful; he had never yet, in all
his high renouncing, so sunk, so hidden himself behind the splendour
that was Tanqueray.

"And Prothero" (he laid beauty upon beauty), "he'll tell you himself.
He's on his knees."

The moments passed. Nicky in his beauty and his pain wandered outside in
the garden, leaving her to Prothero and Laura.

And in the drawing-room, where Tanqueray waited for his turn, Jane's
family appraised her triumph. Henry, to Caro Bickersteth in a corner,
was not sure that he did not, on the whole, regret it. These books
wrecked her nerves. She was, Henry admitted, a great genius; but great
genius, what was it, after all, but a great Neurosis?

Not far from them Louis Levine, for John's benefit, calculated the
possible proceeds of the new book. Louis smiled his mobile smile as he
caught the last words of Henry's diagnosis. Henry might say what he
liked. Neurosis, to that extent, was a valuable asset. He could do,
Louis said, with some of it himself.

Brodrick, as he surveyed with Tanqueray the immensity of his wife's
achievement, wondered whether, for all that, she had not paid too high a
price. And Sophy Levine, who overheard him, whispered to Frances that it
was he, poor dear, who paid.

Tanqueray got up and left the room. He had heard through it all the
signal that he waited for, the sound of the opening of Jane's door.

Her eyes searched his at the very doorway. "Is it all right, George?"
she whispered. Her hand, her thin hand, held his until he answered.

"It's tremendous."

"Do you remember two years ago--when you wouldn't drink?"

"I drank this time. I'm drunk, Jinny, drunk as a lord."

"I swore I'd make you drink, this time; if I died for it."

She leaned back in the corner of her couch, looking at him.

"Thank heaven you've never lied to me; because now I know."

"I wonder if you do. It's alive, Jinny; it's organic; it's been
conceived and born." He brought his chair close to the table that stood
beside her couch, a barrier between them. "It's got what we're all
praying for--that divine unity----"

"I didn't think it could have it. _I_'m torn in pieces."

"You? I knew you would be."

"It wasn't the book."

"What was it?" he said fiercely.

"It was chiefly, I think, Mabel Brodrick's illness."

"_Whose_ illness?"

"John's wife's. You don't know what it means."

"I can see. You let that woman prey on you. She sucks your life. You're
white; you're thin; you're ill, too."

She shook her head. "Only tired, George."

"Why do you do it? Why do you do it, Jinny?" he pleaded.

"Ah--I must."

He rose and walked up and down the room; and each time as he turned to
face her he burst out into speech.

"What's Brodrick doing?"

She did not answer. He noticed that she never answered him when he spoke
of Brodrick now. He paid no heed to the warning of her face.

"Why does he let his beastly relations worry you? You didn't undertake
to marry the whole lot of them."

He turned from her with that, and she looked after him. The set of his
shoulders was square with his defiance and his fury.

He faced her again.

"I suppose if _he_ was ill you'd have to look after him. I don't see
that you're bound to look after his sisters-in-law. Why can't the
Brodricks look after her?"

"They do. But it's me she wants."

He softened, looking down at her. But she did not see his look.

"You think," said she, "that it's odd of her--the last thing anybody
could want?"

His face changed suddenly as the blood surged in it. He sat down, and
stretched his arms across the table that was the barrier between them.
His head leaned towards her with its salient thrust, its poise of
impetus and forward flight.

"If you knew," he said, "the things you say----"

His hands made a sudden movement, as if they would have taken hers that
lay nerveless and helpless, almost within their grasp.

She drew her hands back.

"It's nearly ten o'clock," she said.

"Do you want me to go?"

She smiled. "No. Only--they'll say, if I sit up, that that's what tires
me."

"And does it? Do _I_ tire you?"

"You never tire me."

"At any rate I don't destroy you; I don't prey on you."

"We all prey on each other. _I_ prey on you."

"You? Oh--Jinny!"

Again there was a movement of his hands, checked, this time, by his own
will.

"Five minutes past ten, George. They'll come and carry me out if I don't
go."

"Who will?"

"All of them, probably. They're all in there."

"It's preposterous. They don't care what they do to you themselves; they
bore you brutally; they tire you till you're sick; they hand you on to
each other, to be worried and torn to pieces; and they drag you from
anybody who does you good. They don't let you have five minutes'
pleasure, Jinny, or five minutes' peace. Good Lord, what a family!"

"Anyhow, it's _my_ family."

"It isn't. You haven't got a family; you never had and you never will
have. They don't belong to you, and you don't belong to any of them, and
you know it----"

She rose. "All the same, I'm going to them," she said. "And that reminds
me, how's Rose?"

"Perfectly well, I believe."

"It's ages since I saw Rose. Tell her--tell her that I'm coming to see
her."

"When?" he said.

"Some day next week."

"Sunday?"

He knew, and she knew that he knew, that Sunday was Brodrick's day.

"No, Monday. Monday, about four."




XLVIII


Tanqueray was realizing more and more that he was married, and that his
marriage had been made in that heaven where the spirit of creative
comedy abides. In spite of the superb sincerity of his indifference, he
found it increasingly difficult to ignore his wife. It had, in fact,
become impossible now that people no longer ignored _him_. Rose, as the
wife of an obscurity, could very easily be kept obscure. But, by a
peculiar irony, as Tanqueray's genius became recognized, Rose, though
not exactly recognized in any social sense, undoubtedly tended to
appear. Tanqueray might dine "out" without her (he frequently did), but
when it came to asking people back again she was bound to be in
evidence. Not that he allowed himself to tread the ruinous round. He
still kept people at arm's length. Only people were more agreeably
disposed towards George Tanqueray recognized than they had been towards
George Tanqueray obscure, and he in consequence was more agreeably
disposed towards them. Having made it clearly understood that he would
not receive people, that he barred himself against all intrusions and
approaches, occasionally, at the length of his arm, he did receive them.
And they immediately became aware of Rose.