The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in
him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and
more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to
think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding
him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race
there would be Jane to reckon with.

In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born.
A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had
contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a
terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of
degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the
cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that.

Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but
Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the
dreadful open door.

Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly
out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly
Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last
eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out
of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling
he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he
couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk
more money on his unprofitable dream.

It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She
saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by
the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He
had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review
itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed
editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had
been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in
his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them;
they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with
the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements
that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his
dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had
all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted
George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.

She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't
for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't
for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these
years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married
her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some
advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances
of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than
sufficient to buy Louis out.

Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.

She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.

Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in
his office.

Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of
his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this
thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for
a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his
losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only
wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.

Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering
from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined
under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he
wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for
his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the
glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when
she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as
impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was
flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it
was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the
transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not
sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight.

The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a
natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a
book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with
the first effort.

There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a
Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a
darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could have objected to
Jane's hair. But there was Jane's delicacy. An alarming tendency to
waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him
her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system.

Jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick
child and Mabel Brodrick.

For in this dreadful year Mabel had become worse. Her malady had
declared itself. There were rumours and hushed hints of a possible
operation. Henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive
the shock. It was not to be thought of at present; not as long as
things, he said, remained quiescent.

John Brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and
less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. The
lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of
wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men
and to his wife of all women. Poor Mabel who had never done anything----

That was the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming.
She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch
in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered
her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was
supreme by divine right of suffering.

Again, every day, Jane trod the path over the Heath to Wimbledon. And
sometimes Henry found her at John's house and drove her back in his
motor (he had a motor now). Once, boxed up with him in the closed car
(it was March and the wind was cold over the Heath), she surprised him
with a question.

"Henry, is it true that if Mabel had had children she'd have been all
right?"

"Yes," he said curtly, wondering what on earth had made her ask him
that.

"It's killing her then--not having them?"

"That," he said, "and the desire to have them."

"How cruel it is, how detestable--that she should have _this_----"

"It's Nature's revenge, Jane, on herself."

"And she was so sweet, she would have loved them----"

The Doctor brooded. He had a thing to say to her.

"Jinny, if you'd put it away--altogether--that writing of yours--you'd
be a different woman."

"Different?"

"You'd be happier. And, what's more, you'd be well, too. Perfectly
well."

"This is not the advice I should give you," he went on, addressing her
silence, "if you were an unmarried woman. I urge my unmarried patients
to work--to use their brains all they can--and married ones, too, when
they've no children. If poor Mabel had done _something_ it would have
been far better. But in your case it's disastrous."

Jane remained silent. She herself had a premonition of disaster. Her
restlessness was on her. Her nerves and blood were troubled again by the
ungovernable, tyrannous impulse of her power. It was not the year she
should have chosen, but because she had no choice she was working
through everything, secretly, in defiance of Henry's orders. She
wondered if he knew. He was looking at her keenly, as if he had at any
rate a shrewd suspicion.

"I hardly think," he said, "it's fair to Hugh."

Henry was sure of his facts, and her silence made him surer. She _was_
at it again, and the question was how to stop her?

The question was laid that night before the family committee. It met in
the library at Moor Grange almost by Brodrick's invitation. Brodrick was
worried. He had gone so far as to confess that he was worried about
Jane. She wanted to write another book, he said, and he didn't know
whether she was fit.

"Of course she isn't fit," said the Doctor. "It must be stopped. She
must be made to give it up--altogether."

Brodrick inquired who was to make her? and was told that _he_ was. He
must put his foot down. He should have put it down before.

But Brodrick, being a Brodrick, took an unexpected line.

"I don't know," he said slowly, "that we've any right to dictate to her.
It's a big question, and I think she ought to be allowed to decide it
for herself."

"She isn't fit," said Henry, "to decide anything for herself."

Brodrick sent a level look at him.

"You talk," said he, "as if she wasn't responsible."

"I should be very sorry to say who is and who isn't. Responsibility is a
question of degree. I say Jane is not at the present moment in a state
to decide."

"It sounds," said Brodrick, laughing in his bitterness, "very much as if
you thought she wasn't sane. Of course I know she'd put a cheque for a
hundred pounds into a drawer and forget all about it. But it would be
more proof of insanity in Jinny if she remembered it was there."

"It would indeed," said Sophy.

"We're not discussing Jinny's talent for finance," said Henry.

"I suppose," said Brodrick, "what we _are_ discussing is her genius?"

"I'm not saying anything at all about her genius. We've every reason to
recognize her genius and be proud of it. It's not a question of her
mind. It's a question of a definite bodily condition, and as you can't
separate mind from body" (he shrugged his shoulders), "well--there you
are. I won't say don't let her work; it's better for her to use her
brain than to let it rust. But let her use it in moderation.
Moder--ation. Not those tremendous books that take it out of her."

"Are you sure they do take it out of her? Tanqueray says she'll be ill
if she doesn't write 'em."

"Tanqueray? What does he know about it?"

"More than we do, I suspect. He says the normal, healthy thing for her
is to write, to write tremendous books, and she'll suffer if we thwart
her. He says we don't understand her."

"Does he suggest that _you_ don't understand her?" asked Sophy.

Brodrick smiled. "I think he was referring more particularly to Henry."

Henry tried to smile. "He's not a very good instance of his own theory.
Look at his wife."

"That only proves that Tanqueray's books aren't good for his wife. Not
that they aren't good for Tanqueray. Besides, Prothero says the same
thing."

"Prothero!"

"He ought to know. He's a doctor."

Henry dismissed Prothero with a gesture.

"Look here, Hugh. It simply comes to this. Either there must be no more
books or there must be no more children. You can't have both."

"There shall be no more children."

"As you like it. I don't advise it. Those books take it out of her
more."

He lowered his voice.

"I consider her last book responsible for that child's delicacy."

Brodrick flinched visibly at that.

"I don't care," the Doctor went on, "what Prothero and Tanqueray say.
They can't know. They don't see her. No more do you. You're out all day.
I shouldn't know myself if Gertrude Collett hadn't told me."

"Oh--Gertrude Collett."

"Nobody more likely to know. She's on the spot, watching her from hour
to hour."

"What did she tell you?"

"Why--that she works up-stairs, in her room--for hours--when she's
supposed to be lying down. She's doing it now probably."

"Gertrude knows that for a fact?"

"A fact. And she knows it was done last year too, before the baby was
born."

"And _I_ know," said Brodrick fiercely, "it was not."

"Have her in," said Sophy, "and ask her."

Brodrick had her in and asked her. Gertrude gave her evidence with a
gentle air of surprise that there could be any doubt as to what Mrs.
Brodrick had been up to--this year, at any rate. She flushed when
Brodrick confronted her with his certainty as to last year. She could
not, in the face of Brodrick's certainty, speak positively as to last
year.

She withdrew herself hastily, as from an unpleasant position, and was
followed by Sophy Levine.

"There's nothing for it," said Henry, "but to tell her."

"About the child?"

"About the child."

There was a terrible pause.

"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?"

"I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up."

Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was
heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw
the look that passed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear.
The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held
for her.

Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face
averted.

It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her.

"Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew."

"I might have known," she answered.

She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay--that
there'd be no end to my paying."




LIII


The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was,
indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not
say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care
that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.

That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked
on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the
highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to
its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They
refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they
remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as
they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or
excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing
was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin
against the family, the race.

And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she
would have to pay for it.

But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that
they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the
expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful
prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day
of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that
she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would
stand by her.

More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a
sheltering and protecting wall.

She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that
she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her
sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living
body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and
day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced
her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and
bloodless veins.

There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain,
was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and
subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. It appeased
her desire for expiation.

They needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. If she
could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. John Henry
Brodrick stood solid and sane, a Brodrick of the Brodricks, rosy and
round with nourishment, not a nerve, Henry said, in his composition, and
the stomach of a young ostrich. It was in little Hugh's little stomach
and his nerves that the mischief lay. The screaming, Henry told her, was
a nervous system. It was awful that a baby should have nerves.

Henry hardly thought that she would rear him. He didn't rub that in, he
was much too tender. He replied to her agonized questioning that, yes,
it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. With
incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. She had him night
and day. She washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him
with her own hands. It was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she
gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when
she slept. For she had bad nights with him because of the screaming.

Brodrick had had bad nights, too. It had got on his nerves, and his
digestion suffered. Jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of
the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. He went unwillingly, and
with a sense of cowardice and shame. He couldn't think how Jinny could
stand it with _her_ nerves.

She stood it somehow, in her passion for the child. It was her heart,
not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. Beyond her heavy-eyed
fatigue she showed no signs of strain. Henry acknowledged in her that
great quality of the nervous temperament, the power of rising
high-strung to an emergency. He intimated that he rejoiced to see her on
the right track, substituting for the unhealthy excesses of the brain
the normal, wholesome life of motherhood. He was not sure now that he
pitied her. He was sorrier, ten times sorrier, for his brother Hugh.

Gertrude Collett agreed with the Doctor. She insisted that it was
Brodrick and not Jane who suffered. Gertrude was in a position to know.
She hinted that nobody but she really did know. She saw more of him than
any of his family. She saw more of him than Jane. Brodrick's suffering
was Gertrude's opportunity, the open, consecrated door where she entered
soft-footed, angelic, with a barely perceptible motion of her ministrant
wings. Circumstances restored the old intimate relation. Brodrick was
worried about his digestion; he was afraid he was breaking up
altogether, and Gertrude's solicitude confirmed him in his fear. Under
its influence and Gertrude's the editor spent less and less of his time
in Fleet Street. He found, as he had found before, that a great part of
his work could be done more comfortably at home. He found, too, that he
required more than ever the co-operation of a secretary. The increased
efficiency of Addy Ranger made her permanent and invaluable in Fleet
Street. Jane's preoccupation had removed her altogether from the affairs
of the "Monthly Review." Inevitably Gertrude slid into her former place.

She had more of Brodrick now than she had ever had; she had more of the
best of him. She was associated with his ambition and his dream. Now
that Jane's hand was not there to support it, Brodrick's dream had begun
to sink a little, it was lowering itself almost to Gertrude's reach. She
could touch it on tiptoe, straining. She commiserated Jane on her
exclusion from the editor's adventures and excitements, his untiring
pursuit of the young talents (his scent for them was not quite so
infallible as it had been), his curious or glorious finds. Jane smiled
at her under her tired eyes. She was glad that he was not alone in his
dream, that he had some one, if it was only Gertrude.

For, by an irony that no Brodrick could possibly have foreseen, Jane's
child separated her from her husband more than her genius had ever done.
Her motherhood had the fierce ardour and concentration of the disastrous
power. It was as if her genius had changed its channel and direction,
and had its impulse bent on giving life to the half-living body. Nothing
else mattered. She could not have travelled farther from Brodrick in her
widest, wildest wanderings. The very hours conspired against them. Jane
had to sleep in the afternoon, to make up for bad nights. Brodrick was
apt to sleep in the evenings, after dinner, when Jane revived a little
and was free.

The year passed and she triumphed. The little half-living body had
quickened. The child, Henry said, would live; he might even be fairly
strong. His food nourished him. He was gaining weight and substance.
Jane was to be congratulated on her work which was nothing short of a
miracle. _Her_ work; _her_ miracle; Henry admitted it was that. He had
had to stand by and do nothing. He couldn't work miracles. But if Jane
had relaxed her care for a moment there was no miracle that could have
saved the child.

To Jane it _was_ a miracle. It was as if her folding arms had been his
antenatal hiding-place; as if she had brought him forth with anguish a
second time.

She would not have admitted that she loved him more than his brother.
Jacky was as good as gold; but he was good with Gertrude and happy with
Gertrude. The baby was neither good nor happy with anybody but Jane.
Between her and the little twice-born son there was an unbreakable tie.
He attached himself to his mother with a painful, pitiful passion. Out
of her sight he languished. He had grown into her arms. Every time he
was taken from them it was a rending of flesh from tender flesh.

His attachment grew with his strength, and she was more captured and
more chained than ever. He "had" her, as Tanqueray would have said, at
every turn. Frances and Sophy, the wise maternal women, shook their
heads in their wisdom; and Jane smiled in hers. She was wiser than any
of them. She had become pure womanhood, she said, like Gertrude. She
defied Gertrude's womanhood to produce a superior purity.

Brodrick had accepted the fact without astonishment. The instinct of
paternity was strong in him. Once married to Jane her genius had become
of secondary importance. The important thing was that she was his wife;
and even that was not so important as it had been. Only last year he had
told her, jesting, that he never knew whether she was his wife or not.
He hardly knew now (they saw so little of each other); but he did know
that she was the mother of his children.

In the extremity of her anguish Jane had not observed this change in
Brodrick's attitude. But now she had leisure to observe. What struck her
first was the way Gertrude Collett had come out. It was in proportion as
she herself had become sunk in her maternal functions that Gertrude had
emerged. She was amazed at the extent to which a soft-feathered angel,
innocent, heaven knew, of the literary taint, could constitute herself a
great editor's intellectual companion. But Gertrude's intellect retained
the quality of Gertrude. In all its manifestations it was soothing and
serene. And there was not too much of it--never any more than a tired
and slightly deteriorated editor could stand.

Jane had observed (pitifully) the deterioration and the tiredness. A
falling off in the high fineness of the "Monthly Review" showed that
Brodrick was losing his perfect, his infallible scent. The tiredness she
judged to be the cause of the deterioration. Presently, when she was
free to take some of his work off his shoulders, he would revive.
Meanwhile she was glad that he could find refreshment in his increased
communion with Gertrude. She knew that he would sleep well after it. And
so long as he could sleep----

She said to herself that she had done Gertrude an injustice. She was
wrong in supposing that if Hugh had been married to their angel he would
have tired of her, or that he would ever have had too much of her. You
couldn't have too much of Gertrude, for there was, after all, so very
little to have. Or else she measured herself discreetly, never giving
him any more than he could stand.

But Gertrude's discretion could not disguise from Jane the fact of her
ascendency. She owed it to her very self-restraint, her amazing
moderation. And, after all, what was it but the power, developed with
opportunity, of doing for Brodrick whatever it was that Jane at the
moment could not do? When Jane shut her eyes and tried to imagine what
it would be like if Gertrude were not there, she found herself inquiring
with dismay why, whatever would he do without her? What would she do
herself? It was Gertrude who kept them all together. She ran the house
noiselessly on greased wheels, she smoothed all Brodrick's rose-leaves
as fast as Jane crumpled them. Without Gertrude there would be no peace.

Before long Jane had an opportunity of observing the fine height to
which Gertrude _could_ ascend. It was at a luncheon party that they
gave, by way of celebrating Jane's return to the social life. The Herons
were there, the young people, who had been asked without their mother,
to celebrate Winny's long skirts; they and the Protheros and Caro
Bickersteth. Jane was not sure that she wanted them to come. She was
afraid of any disturbance in the tranquil depths of her renunciation.

Laura said afterwards that she hardly knew how they had sat through that
luncheon. It was not that Jinny wasn't there and Brodrick was. The awful
thing was that both were so lamentably altered. Brodrick was no longer
the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of
the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of
business. It was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining
him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. Jinny sat
opposite him, a pale Mater Dolorosa. Her face, even when she talked to
you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were
listening for her child's cry. She was silent for the most part, passive
in Prothero's hands. She sat unnoticed and effaced; only from time to
time the young girl, Winny Heron, sent her a look from soft eyes that
adored her.

On the background of Jane's silence and effacement nothing stood out
except Gertrude Collett.

Prothero, who had his hostess on his right hand, had inquired as to the
ultimate fate of the "Monthly Review." Jane referred him to Miss Collett
on his left. Miss Collett knew more about the Review than she did.

Gertrude flushed through all her faded fairness at Prothero's appeal.

"Don't you know," said she, "that it's in Mr. Brodrick's hands entirely
now?"

Prothero did know. That was why he asked. He turned to Jane again. He
was afraid, he said, that the Review, in Brodrick's hands, would be too
good to live.

"_Is_ it too good to live, Gertrude?" said she.

Gertrude looked at Brodrick as if she thought that _he_ was.

"I don't think Mr. Brodrick will let it die," she said. "If he takes a
thing up you can trust him to carry it through. He can fight for his
own. He's a born fighter."

Down at her end of the table beside Brodrick, Laura listened.

"It has been a bit of a struggle, I imagine, up till now," said Prothero
to Jane.

"Up till now" (it was Gertrude who answered) "his hands have been tied.
But now it's absolutely his own thing. He has realized his dream."

If she had seen Prothero's eyes she would have been reminded that
Brodrick's dream had been realized for him by his wife. She saw nothing
but Brodrick. For Gertrude the "Monthly Review" _was_ Brodrick.

She drew him for Prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of
literature. She framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel
wreath.

Eddy Heron cried, "Hear, hear!" and "Go it, Gertrude!" and Winny wanted
to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. She was told that an
editor's ears were past tingling. But he flushed slightly when Gertrude
crowned herself and him. They were all listening to her now.

"I assure you," she was saying, "_we_ are not afraid."

She was one with Brodrick, his interests and his dream.

She was congratulated (by Jane) on her championship of the champion, and
Brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be
frightened; they were safe enough.

It struck Laura that Brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man
who has realized his dream.

"All the same," said Prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems I
sent you."

"Dear Owen," said Jane, "do you think they'll sink him?"

"As far as that goes," Brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of
George Tanqueray's. That'll show you what we can afford."

"Or what George can afford," said Jane. It was the first spark she had
emitted. But it consumed the heavy subject.

"By the way," said Caro Bickersteth, "where _is_ George Tanqueray?"

Laura said that he was somewhere in the country. He was always in the
country now.

"Without his wife," said Caro, and nobody contradicted her. She went on.

"You great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. The law
ought to provide for it. Genius, in either party, if you can establish
the fact, should annul the contract, like--like any other crucial
disability."

"Or," Jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal
act, like suicide? You can always acquit them afterwards on the ground
of temporary insanity."

"How would you deal," said Brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?"

"Mixed----?" Caro feigned bewilderment.

"When a norm--an ordinary--person marries a genius? It's a racial
difference."

("Distinctly," Caro murmured.)

"And wouldn't it be hard to say which side the lunacy was on?"

Laura would have suspected him of a bitter personal intention had it not
been so clear that Jinny's genius was no longer in question, that her
flame was quenched.

It was Caro who asked (in the drawing-room, afterwards) if they might
see the children.

Gertrude went up-stairs to fetch them. Eddy Heron watched her softly
retreating figure, and smiled and spoke.

"I say, Gee-Gee's going strong, isn't she?"

Everybody affected not to hear him, and the youth went on smiling to his
unappreciated self.

Gertrude appeared again presently, bringing the children. On the very
threshold little Hugh struggled in her arms and tried to hurl himself on
his mother. His object attained, he turned his back on everybody and
hung his head over Jane's shoulder.

But little John Henry was admirably behaved. He wandered from guest to
guest, shaking hands, in his solemn urbanity, with each. He looked
already absurdly unastonished and important. He was not so much his
father's son as the son of all the Brodricks. As for little Hugh, it was
easy enough, Prothero said, to see whose son _he_ was. And Winny Heron
cried out in an ecstasy that he was going to be a genius, she was sure
of it.

"Heaven forbid," said Brodrick. Everybody heard him.

"Oh, Uncle Hughy, if he was like Jin-Jin!" Allurement and tender
reproach mingled in Winny's tone.

She turned to Jane with eyes that adored and loved and defended her. "I
wish you'd have dozens of babies--darlings--like yourself."

"And I wish," said Eddy, "she'd have dozens of books like her last one."

Eddy was standing, very straight and tall, on his uncle's hearth. His
chin, which was nothing if not determined, was thrust upwards and
outwards over his irreproachable high collar. Everybody looked at Eddy
as he spoke.

"What I want to know is why she doesn't have them? What have you all
been doing to her? What have _you_ been doing to her, Uncle Hughy?"

He looked round on all of them with the challenge of his young eyes.

"It's all very well, you know, but I agree with Miss Bickersteth. If
you're a genius you've no business to marry--I mean nobody's any
business to marry you."

"Mine," said Caro suavely, "was a purely abstract proposition."

But the terrible youth went on. "Mine isn't. Uncle Hugh's done a good
thing for himself, I know. But it would have been a jolly sight better
thing for literature if he'd married Gee-Gee, or somebody like that."

For there was nothing that young Eddy did not permit himself to say.

Little Hugh had begun to cry bitterly, as if he had understood that
there had been some reflection on his mother. And from crying he went on
to screaming, and Gertrude carried him, struggling violently, from the
room.

The screams continued in the nursery overhead. Jane sat for a moment in
agony, listening, and then rushed up-stairs.

Gertrude appeared, serene and apologetic.

"Can't anything be done," Brodrick said irritably, "to stop that
screaming?"

"It's stopped now," said Winny.

"You've only got to give him what he wants," said Gertrude.

"Yes, and he knows he's only got to scream for it."

Gertrude's eyebrows, raised helplessly, were a note on the folly and
infatuation of the child's mother.

Caro Bickersteth and Laura left, hopeless of Jane's return to them.
Prothero stayed on, conferring with the editor. Later, he found himself
alone in the garden with Jane. He asked then (what they were all longing
to know) when she was going to give them another book?

"Never again, Owen, never again."

He reproached her.

"Ah--you don't know what it's been, this last year," she said. "George
told me I should have to pay for it. So did Nina. And you see how I've
paid."

His eyes questioned her.

"Through my child."

He turned to her. His eyes were pitiful but incredulous.

"Owen--Nina said there'd be no end to my paying. But there shall be an
end to it. For a year it's been one long fight for his little life, and
I've won; but he'll never be strong; never, I'm afraid, like other
children. He'll always remind me----"

"_Remind_ you?"

"Yes. They say I'm responsible for him. It's the hard work I've done.
It's my temperament--my nerves."

"_Your_ nerves?"

"Yes. I'm supposed to be hopelessly neurotic."

"But you're not. Your nerves are very highly-strung--they're bound to
be, or they wouldn't respond as perfectly as they do--but they're the
_soundest_ nerves I know. I should say you were sound all over."

"_Should_ you?"

"Certainly."

"Then" (she almost cried it) "why should he suffer?"

"Do you mean to say you don't know what's the matter with him?"

"Owen----"

"He's a Brodrick. He's got their nerves."

"_Their_ nerves? I didn't know they had any."

"They've all got them except Mrs. Levine. It's the family trouble. Weak
nerves and weak stomachs."

"But Henry----"

"_He_ has to take no end of care of himself."

"How do you know?"

"It's my business," he said, "to know."

"I keep on forgetting that you're a doctor too." She meditated. "But
Sophy's children are all strong."

"No, they're not. Levine told me the other day that they were very
anxious about one of them."

"Is it--the same thing that my child has?"

"Precisely the same."

"And it comes," she said, "from them. And they never told me."

"They must have thought you knew."

"I didn't. They made me think it was my fault. They let me go through
all that agony and terror. I can't forgive them."

"They couldn't have known."

"There was Henry. He must have known. And yet he made me think it. He
made me give up writing because of that."

"You needn't think it any more. Jacky gets his constitution from you,
and it was you who saved the little one."

"He made me think I'd killed him. It's just as well," she said, "that I
should have thought it. If I hadn't I mightn't have fought so hard to
make him live. I might have been tormented with another book. It was the
only thing that could have stopped me."

She paused. "Perhaps--they knew that."

"It's all right," she said presently. "After all, if there is anything
wrong with the child, I'd rather Hugh didn't think it came from him."

She had now another fear. It made her very tender to Brodrick when,
coming to him in the drawing-room after their guests had departed, she
found him communing earnestly with Gertrude. A look passed between them
as she entered.

"Well, what are you two putting your heads together about?" she said.

Gertrude's head drew back as if a charge had been brought against it.

"Well," said Brodrick, "it was about the child. Something must be done.
You can't go on like this."

She seated herself. Her very silence implied that she was all attention.

"It's bad for him and it's bad for you."

"What's bad for him?"

"The way you've given yourself up to him. There's no moderation about
your methods."

"If there had been," said she, "he wouldn't be alive now."

"Yes, yes, I know that. But he's all right now. He doesn't want that
perpetual attention. It's ruining him. He thinks he's only got to scream
loud enough for anything and he gets it. Every time he screams you rush
to him. It's preposterous."

Jane listened.

"The fact is," said Brodrick, bracing himself, "you have him too much
with you."

"I _must_ have him with me."

"You mustn't," said Brodrick, with his forced gentleness.

"You think I'm bad for him?"

He did not answer.

"Gertrude--do _you_ think I'm bad for him?"

Gertrude smiled. She did not answer any more than Brodrick.

"Miss Collett agrees with me," said Brodrick.

"She always does. What do I do to him?"

"You excite him."

"Do I, Gertrude?"

Gertrude's face seemed to be imploring Brodrick to be pitiful, and not
to rub it in.

"Do I?"

"The child," said Gertrude evasively, "is very sensitive."

"And you create," Brodrick said, "an atmosphere----"

"A what?"

"An atmosphere of perpetual agitation--of emotion----"

"You mean my child is fond of me."

"Much too fond of you. It's playing the devil with him."

"Poor mite--at _his_ age! Well--what do you propose?"

"I propose that he should be with somebody who hasn't that effect, who
can keep him quiet. Miss Collett very kindly offered----"

"Dear Gertrude, you can't. You've got your hands full."

"Not so full that they can't hold a little more." Gertrude said it with
extreme sweetness.

"Can they hold Hughy?"

"They've held Jacky," said Brodrick, "for the last year. _He_ never
gives any trouble."

"He never feels it. Poor Baby has got nerves----"

"Well, my dear girl, isn't it all the more reason why he should be with
somebody who hasn't got 'em?"

"Poor Gertrude, she'll have more nerves than any of us if she has to
look after the house, and the accounts, and Jacky, and Hughy, and
_you_----"

"She doesn't look after me," said Brodrick stiffly, and left the room.

Jane turned to Gertrude.

"Was that your idea, or his?"

"How can any idea be mine," said Gertrude, "if I always agree with Mr.
Brodrick? As a matter of fact it was the Doctor's."

"Yes. It was very like him."

"He spoke to Mr. Brodrick yesterday. And I am glad he did."

"Why are you glad?"

"Because it was taken out of my hands. I don't want you to think that I
interfere, that I put myself forward, that I suggested this arrangement
about the children. If it's to be, you must understand distinctly that I
and my ideas and my wishes have nothing to do with it. If I offered
myself it was because I was compelled. Mr. Brodrick was at his wits'
end."

("Poor dear, _I_ drove him there," said Jane.)

"It's put me in a very difficult position. I have to appear to be taking
everything on myself, to be thrusting myself in everywhere, whereas the
truth is I can only keep on" (she closed her eyes, as one dizzied with
the perilous path she trod) "by ignoring myself, putting myself
altogether on one side."

"Do you hate it?" Jane said softly.

"No. It's the only way. But sometimes one is foolish--one looks for a
little recognition and reward----"

Jane put her hands on the other woman's shoulders and gazed into her
face.

"We do recognize you," she said, "even if we don't reward you. How can
we, when you've done so much?"

"My reward would be--not to be misunderstood."

"Do I misunderstand you? Does _he_?"

"Mr. Brodrick? Never."

"I, then?"

"You? I think you thought I wanted to come between you and the
children."

"I never thought you wanted to come between me and anything."

Her hands that held her dropped.

"But you're right, Gertrude. I'm a brute and you're an angel."

She turned from her and left her there.




LIV


She knew that she had dealt a wound, and she was sorry for it. It was
awful to see Gertrude going about the house in her flagrant secrecy. It
was unbearable to Jane, Gertrude's soft-flaming, dedicated face, and
that little evasive, sacred look of hers, as if she had her hand for
ever on her heart, hiding her wound. It was a look that reminded Jane,
and was somehow, she felt, intended to remind her, that Gertrude was
pure spirit as well as pure womanhood in her too discernible emotion.
Was it not spiritual to serve as she served, to spend as she spent
herself, so angelically, bearing the dreadful weight of Brodrick's
marriage--the consequences, so to speak, of that corporeal tie--on her
winged shoulders?

She could see that Hugh looked at it in that light (as well he might)
when one evening he spoke remorsefully of the amount they put on her.

A month had passed since he had given the care of his children into
Gertrude's hands. She was up-stairs now superintending their disposal
for the night. He and Jane were alone in a half-hour before dinner,
waiting for John and Henry and the Protheros to come and dine. The house
was very still. Brodrick could not have believed that it was possible,
the perfection of the peace that had descended on them. He appealed to
Jane. She couldn't deny that it was peace.

Jane didn't deny it. She had nothing whatever to say against an
arrangement that had turned out so entirely for the children's good. She
kept her secret to herself. Her secret was that she would have given all
the peace and all the perfection for one scream of Hughy's and the
child's arms round her neck.

"You wouldn't know," Brodrick said, "that there was a child in the
house."

Jane agreed. Ah, yes, if _that_ was peace, they had it.

Well, wasn't it? After that infernal row he made? You couldn't say
anything when the poor little chap was ill and couldn't help it, but you
couldn't have let him cultivate screaming as a habit. It was wonderful
the effect that woman had on him. He couldn't think how she did it. It
was as if her mere presence in a room----

He thought that Jane was going to admit that as she had admitted
everything, but as he looked at her he saw that her mouth had lifted at
its winged corners, and her eyes were darting their ominous light.

"It's awful of me, I know," she said, "but her presence in a room--in
the house, Hugh--makes me feel as if _I_ could scream the roof off."

(He glanced uneasily at her.)

"She makes me want to _do_ things."

"What things?" he inquired mildly.

"The things I mustn't--to break loose--to kick over the traces----"

"You don't surprise me." He smoothed his face to the expression proper
to a person unsurprised, dealing imperturbably with what he had long ago
foreseen.

"Sometimes I think that if Gertrude were not so good, I might be more
so. You're all so good," she said. "_You_ are so good, so very, very
good."

"I observe," said Brodrick, "a few elementary rules, as you do
yourself."

"But I don't want," she said, "to observe them any more. I want to put
my foot through all the rules."

The front door bell rang as the chiming clock struck eight.

"That's John," he said, "and Henry."

"Did you ever put your foot through a rule? Did John? Did Henry? Fancy
John setting out on an adventure with his hair brushed like that and his
spectacles on----"

They were announced. She rose to greet them. They waited. The clock with
its soft silver insistence struck the quarter. It was awful, she said,
to have to live with a clock that struck the quarter; and Henry shook
his head at her and said, "Nerves, Jinny, nerves."

John looked at his watch. "I thought," said John, "you dined at eight."

"So did I," said Brodrick. He turned to Jane. "Your friend Prothero does
not observe the rule of punctuality."

"If they won't turn up in time," said Henry, "I should dine without
them."

They did dine ultimately. Prothero turned up at a quarter to nine,
entering with the joint. Laura was not with him. Laura couldn't, he
said, "get off."

He was innocent and unconscious of offence. They were not to bring back
the soup or fish. Roast mutton was enough for him. He expected he was a
bit late. He had been detained by Tanqueray. Tanqueray had just come
back.

Involuntarily Brodrick looked at Jane.

Prothero had to defend her from a reiterated charge of neurosis brought
against her by Henry, who observed with disapproval her rejection of
roast mutton.

Over coffee and cigarettes Prothero caught him up and whirled him in a
fantastic flight around his favourite subject.

There were cases, he declared, where disease was a higher sort of
health. "Take," he said, "a genius with a pronounced neurosis. His body
may be a precious poor medium for all ordinary purposes. But he couldn't
have a more delicate, more lyrical, more perfectly adjusted instrument
for _his_ purposes than the nervous system you call diseased."

When he had gone Henry shook off the discomfort of him with a gesture.

"I've no patience with him," he said.

"He wouldn't expect you to have any," said Jane. "But you've no idea of
the patience he would have with _you_."

She herself was conscious of a growing exasperation.

"I've no use for him. A man who deliberately constructs his own scheme
of the universe, in defiance," said Henry, "of the facts."

"Owen couldn't construct a scheme of anything if he tried. Either he
sees that it's so, or he feels that it's so, or he knows that it's so,
and there's nothing more to be said. It's not a bit of good arguing with
him."

"I shouldn't attempt to argue with him, any more than I should argue
with a lunatic."

"You consider him a lunatic, do you?"

"I consider him a very bad neurotic."

"If you can't have genius without neurosis," said Jane, "give me
neurosis. You needn't look at me like that, Henry. I know you think I've
got it."

"My dear Jane----"

"You wouldn't call me your dear Jane if you didn't."

"We're wandering from the point. I think all I've ever said was that
Prothero may be as great a poet, and as neurotic as you please, but he's
nothing of a physiologist, nor, I should imagine, of a physician."

"There you're wrong. He did splendid work out in Africa and India. He's
got as good a record as you have in your own profession. It's no use
your looking as if you wished he hadn't, for he has."

"You mistake me. I am delighted to hear it. In that case, why doesn't he
practise, instead of living on his wife?"

"He doesn't live on her. His journalism pays for his keep--if we're
going to be as vulgar as all that."

Jinny was in revolt.

"I imagine all the same," said John, "that Prothero's wife is
considerably the better man."

"She'd hate you if she knew you'd said so."

"Prothero's wife," said Henry, "is a lady for whom I have the very
highest admiration. But Prothero is impossible. _Im_--possible."

Jane left the room.




LV


It seemed to have struck everybody all at once that Prothero was
impossible. That conviction was growing more and more upon his
publishers. His poems, they assured him, were no longer worth the paper
they were written on. As for his job on the "Morning Telegraph," he was
aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and
precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on
Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly
kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence,
implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as a continuous
idiot.

His impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of Laura's
marvellous achievement. Laura's luck persisted (she declared) because
she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture
to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn
into the columns of the "Morning Telegraph," became increasingly
obscure. It made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his
high place and his praise. Of course she knew that it was not _his_
place or _his_ praise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of
her appraisers set him high. Obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what
he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him.
She knew the uses of unpopularity. It kept him perfect; sacred in a way,
and uncontaminated. It preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his
vision. His genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. It swung in
ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon.

She would not have had it otherwise. It was through Owen's obscurity
that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the
unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who
could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her
fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as
much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or
Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt.

As for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked
him to have made it, if he could. An opulent poet was ridiculous, the
perversion of the sublime. If one of them was to be made absurd by the
possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it
should be she.

The size of Laura's income, contrasted, as Prothero persisted in
contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. Large and
comfortable as it appeared to Prothero, it was not yet so large nor was
it so comfortable that Laura could lie back and rest on it. She was
heartrending, irritating, maddening to Prothero in her refusals to lie
back on it and rest. She toiled prodigiously, incessantly,
indefatigably. She implored Prothero to admit that if she was prodigious
and incessant, she _was_ indefatigable, she never tired. There was
nothing wonderful in what she did. She had caught the silly trick of it.
It could be done, she assured him, standing on your head. She enjoyed
doing it. The wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her
enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. He argued
vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary
to set your teeth and go at it like that.

And the more he argued the more Laura laughed at him. "I can't help it,"
she said; "I've got the habit. You'll never break me of it, after all
these years."

For the Kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the
memory of her former poverty. She had no illusions. She had never had
them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. After all, looking
at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. And
it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. It
had no stability. It might at any moment cease. She might have an
illness, or Owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the
pace _he_ went at it. Or the "Morning Telegraph" might throw him over.
All sorts of things might happen. In her experience they generally did.