Of course, in a way Owen was right. They didn't want all the money. But
what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you
wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. And then, in the
first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. To begin with, she
had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. They were always
bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to Owen. And
she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give Owen's long legs
space to ramp up and down in. The den he had chosen had been too small
for him. He was better, she thought, since he had had his great room.
The house justified itself. It was reassuring to know that whatever
happened they would have a roof over their heads. But it could not be
denied that she had been extravagant.

And Owen had been the least shade extravagant too. He had found a poet
even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no
balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had
given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again.
And on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a
slum, and "advanced him," as the medical student put it, twenty pounds
to go to America with.

He had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had
confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had
done.

"It was a sudden impulse," he said. "I yielded to it."

"Oh, Owen dear, don't have another soon. These impulses are ruinous."

He sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to
Laura.

"Well," she said, "I suppose it was worth it. It must have given you an
exquisite pleasure."

"It did. That's where the iniquity comes in. It gave me an exquisite
pleasure at your expense."

"_You_ give me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do."

Her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at
her feet and took her hands in his. He bowed his head over them and
kissed them.

"Do you know what you are?" she said. "You're a divine prodigal."

"Yes," he said, kissing her, "I'm a prodigal, a dissolute,
good-for-noting wastrel. I adore you and your little holy hands; but I'm
not the least use to you. You ink your blessed little fingers to the
bone for me, and I take your earnings and fling them away--in--in----"
He grew incoherent with kissing.

"In one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with
her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him.

But Owen was not pleased in the very least.

"That," said he, "is precisely what I do."

He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening
eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to
support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small
woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and
here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was
incredible, abominable, but it was his.

She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in
her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung
away from his sunken waist.

"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that,
when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your
own savings that you flung. It _was_, dear," she insisted.

"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at
least. It all comes back to that."

"I wish _you_ wouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see,"
she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"

"If you only did!"

"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and
suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"

"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."

"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you _do_ have. You
think, and _I_ think, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow
that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why
make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it,
or who spends it?"

He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from
him.

"That's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites
that have ever been. All the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and
loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's
physical expense. The thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. Those
Brodricks are perfectly right."

Laura raised her head. "They? What have they got to do with you and me?"

"A good deal. They supply me with work, which they don't want me to do,
in order to keep me from sponging on my wife. They are admirable men.
They represent the sanity and decency of the world pronouncing judgment
on the fact. No Brodrick ever blinked a fact. When people ask the
Brodricks, What does that fellow Prothero do? they shrug their shoulders
and say, 'He has visions, and his wife pays for them.'"

"But I don't. It's the public that pays for them. And your wife has a
savage joy in making it pay. If it wasn't for that I should loathe my
celebrity more than Jinny ever loathed hers. It makes me feel sillier."

"Poor little thing," said Prothero.

"Well--it's hard that _I_ should have to entertain imbeciles who
wouldn't read _you_ if they were paid."

He knew that that was the sting of it for her.

"They're all right," he said. "It's your funny little humour that they
like. I like it, too."

But Laura snapped her teeth and said, "Damn! Damn my humour! Well--when
they use it as a brickbat to hurl at your head."

She quoted furiously, "'While her husband still sings to deaf ears, Mrs.
Prothero has found the secret of capturing her public. She has made her
way straight to its heart. And the heart of Mrs. Prothero's public is
unmistakably in the right place.' Oh--if Mrs. Prothero's public knew
what Mrs. Prothero thinks of it. I give them what they want, do I? As if
I gave it them because they want it. If they only knew why I give it,
and how I'm fooling them all the time! How I make them pay--for _you_!
Just think, Owen, of the splendid, the diabolical irony of it!"

"So very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce."

"Just think," she went on, "how I'm enjoying myself."

"Just think," said Prothero, "how I am not."

"Then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment,
which is what you want."

The clock struck six. She went out of the room, and returned, bringing
an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. She warmed
it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment
under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat.

All the way to Fleet Street, Prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat,
meditated tenderly on his wife's humour.




LVI


Nothing, Tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the Kiddy spreading
her diminutive skirts before Prothero, to shelter that colossal figure.

But the Kiddy, ever since Tanqueray had known her, had refused to be
pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating
touch of sympathy. She was always breaking loose from the hands that
tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror,
always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. And
she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in
front. The wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in
their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. She had
turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph;
she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it
were, a gay and pretty gown.

And now, again, Tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her
pathos. The spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement;
though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely
an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. The Kiddy was minute, but her
achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime.

She sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming
book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every
appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public
with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them,"
was her reiterated comment on her own performances.

Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his
peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in
her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable
levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly
soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The
irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his
account."

"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.

She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs,
hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the
pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.

She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she
came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a
premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray
knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her
courage on the dreadful eve.

It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly
escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his
recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It
looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together.
Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this
indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for
Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the
risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves
thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they
cared what was said about them.

Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by
congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.

"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my
popularity!"

"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."

She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held
itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not
care.

"I think your popularity, _and_ you, my child, the most beautiful sight
I've ever seen for many a long year."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You may laugh at me," she said.

"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted
to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her
knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.

"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy;
and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn
anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never
will know."

"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."

"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms
into a splendid poem."

It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the
miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of
divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became
perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds
and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was
transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She
touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.

"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he
would see.

"Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision;
smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted Tanqueray.

"What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?"

"I expect what always has happened, and worse."

"So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a
place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go
on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the
brokers. It's a generation of brokers."

"Beasts!"

"Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture--real--and
pictures is _'is_ line."

"Aunt's lodger, I assure you, will be thoroughly well damned if he takes
any stock in Owen."

"'E 'asn't seen Mr. Prothero," said Rose, "and you'll frighten Minny if
you use such language."

Tanqueray ignored the interruption. "Owen, you see, is dangerous. He
regards the entire Stock Exchange as a bankrupt concern. The Stock
Exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for Owen. If
a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and
all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his
own. You can't have it both ways."

"I know. He knows it. We'd rather have it this way. I oughtn't to talk
as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. It's me it hurts,
not him."

"It hurts me, too, Kiddy. I can't stand it when I see the filthy curs
rushing at him. They've got to be kicked into a corner. I'm prepared for
them, this time."

He rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which
he gave to her.

"Just look through that and see if it's any good."

It was his vindication of Owen Prothero.

"Oh----"

She drew in her breath. "How you _have_ fought for him."

"I'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too."

He drew her attention to a passage where he called upon Heaven to forbid
that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. He was only
concerned with explaining why Prothero was and would remain unacceptable
to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of Prothero
as an indictment of his generation. She would see how he had rubbed it
in.

She followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points
he made. There, where he showed that there was no reason why this Celt
should be an alien to the Saxon race. Because (her heart leaped as she
followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. He was not
the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a
fantastic dreamer. He was a man of realities, the very type (Tanqueray
had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed Englishmen adore, a surgeon,
a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. He had never
blinked a fact (Laura smiled as she remembered how Owen had said that
that was what a Brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. But
(Tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his
subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who saw _through_ the
things that other men see. And to say that he saw, that he saw through
things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the
visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind
it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its
eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and
hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass
of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and
divine transparency. It was simple and self-evident to him that the
world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. It was also clear as
daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and
multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end
communion between God and the soul. To him this communion was a fact, a
fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. It was so
natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets
sing about their love and their mistresses. So simple and so
self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems
"Transparences."

"It sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees."

"I don't," said Tanqueray. "I only see _him_."

At that, all of a sudden, the clever imp broke down.

"George," she said, "I love you--I don't care if Rose _does_ hear--I
love you for defending him."

[Illustration: "George," she said ... "I love you for defending him."]

"Love me for something else. He doesn't need defending."

"Not he! But all the same I love you."

It was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown
him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of
it.




LVII


They were right. Worse things were reserved for Prothero than had
happened to him yet. Even Caro Bickersteth had turned. Caro had done her
best to appreciate competently this creator adored by creators. Caro,
nourished on her "Critique of Pure Reason," was trying hard to hold the
balance of justice in the "Morning Telegraph"; and according to Caro
there was a limit. She had edited Shelley and she knew. She was frankly,
as she said, unable to follow Mr. Prothero in his latest flight. There
was a limit even to the imagination of the mystic, and to the poet's
vision of the Transcendent. There were, Caro said, regions of ether too
subtle to sustain even so imponderable a poet as Mr. Prothero. So there
wasn't much chance, Tanqueray remarked, of their sustaining Caro.

But the weight of Caro's utterances increased, as they circulated,
formidably, among the right people. All the little men on papers
declared that there was a limit, and that Prothero had passed it.

It was barely a year since the publication of his last volume, and they
were annoyed with Prothero for daring to show his face again so soon in
the absence of encouragement. It looked as if he didn't care whether
they encouraged him or not. Such an attitude in a person standing on his
trial amounted to contempt of court. When his case came up for judgment
in the papers, the jury were reminded that the question before them was
whether Mr. Prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with
the title of "Transparences," and the sub-title of "Poems," was or was
not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. And judgment in
Prothero's case was given thus: Any writer who wilfully and deliberately
takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff
that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the
sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in
simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a
mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet.
He stands condemned in the interests of Reality.

Laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last
touch kindled her to flame. It even drew fire from Owen.

"If I gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if I brought them the
dead body of God with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call
that poetry. I bring them the living body of God rejoicing in life, and
they howl at me. What their own poets, their Wordsworths and Tennysons
and Brownings showed them in fits and flashes, I show them in one
continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. They might complain, the
beggars, if I'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. But when I've
let them off, Laura, with a few songs!"

They were alone in his big room. Nina and Tanqueray and Jane had come
and praised him, and Laura had been very entertaining over Prothero's
reviews. But, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor
beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand.
Prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with Laura, turned over the
pages of his poems. He was counting them, to prove the slenderness of
his offence.

"Listen to this," he said. "They can't say it's _not_ a song."

He read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held
him against the onslaught of the world.

Her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. She lay back, as it
were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. It was the
questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song
of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a
net, to snare the wings of God. It was the song of her outcasting, of
the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of
her wantoning in the joy of the supernal, who forgot God in possessing
him. It was the song of birth, of the soul's plunging into darkness and
fire, of the weaving round her of the fleshy veils, the veils of
separation, the veils of illusion; the song of her withdrawal into her
dim house, of her binding and scourging, and of her ceaseless breaking
on the wheel of time, till she renews her passion and the desire of her
return. It was the song of the angels of mortal life, sounding its
secrets; angels of terror and pain, carding the mortal stuff, spinning
it out, finer and yet more fine, till every nerve becomes vibrant, a
singing lyre of God; angels of the passions and the agonies, moving in
the blood, ministers of the flame that subtilizes flesh to a transparent
vehicle of God; strong angels of disease and dissolution, undermining,
pulling down the house of pain.

He paused and she raised her head.

"Owen--that's what you once tried to make me see. Do you remember?"

"Yes, and you said that I was intoxicated and that it was all very dim
and disagreeable and sad."

"I didn't understand it then," she said.

"You don't understand it now. You feel it."

"Why didn't I feel it then? When you said it?"

"I didn't say it. How could I? There's no other way of saying it but
this. It isn't a theory or a creed; if it were it could be stated in a
thousand different ways. It's the supreme personal experience, and this
is the only form in which it could possibly be conveyed. These words
were brought together from all eternity to say this thing."

"I'm not sure that I'm convinced of the truth of it, even now. I only
feel the passion of it. It's the passion of it, Owen, that'll make it
live."

"The truth and the passion of it are the same thing," he said.

He went on chanting. The music gathered and rose and broke over her in
the last verse, in the song of consummation, of the soul's passion,
jubilant, transcendent, where, of the veils of earth and heaven, the
veils of separation and illusion, she weaves the veil of the last
bridal, the fine veil of immortality.

In the silence Laura stirred at his side. She had possessed herself of
his hand again and held it firmly, as if she were afraid that he might
be taken from her in his ecstasy.

She was thinking: He used that theme before, in the first poem of his I
ever heard. He was mistaken. There was more than one way of saying the
same thing. She reminded him of this earlier poem. Surely, she said, it
was the same thing, the same vision, the same ecstasy, or, if he liked,
the same experience?

He did not answer all at once; he seemed to be considering her
objection, as if he owned that it might have weight.

No, he said presently, it was not the same thing. Each experience was
solitary, unique, it had its own incommunicable quality. He rose and
found the earlier poem, and brought it to her that she might see the
difference.

She shook her head; but she had to own that the difference was immense.
It was the difference (so she made it out) between a vision that you
were sure of, and a vision of which you were not so sure. And--yes--it
was more than that; it was as if his genius had suffered incarnation,
and its flame were intenser for having passed through flesh and blood.
It was the incorruptible spirit that cried aloud; but there was no
shrill tenuity in its cry. The thrill it gave her was unlike the shock
that she remembered receiving from the poem of his youth, the shiver
they had all felt, as at the passing by of the supersensual. Her
husband's genius commanded all the splendours, all the tumultuous
energies of sense. His verse rose, and its wings shed the colours of
flame, blue, purple, red, and gold that kindled into white; it dropped
and ran, striking earth with untiring, impetuous feet, it slackened; and
still it throbbed with the heat of a heart driving vehement blood. But,
she insisted, it was the same vision. How could she forget it? Did he
suppose that she had forgotten the moment, four years ago, when
Tanqueray had read the poem to them, and it had flashed on her----?

"Oh yes," he said; "it flashed all right. It flashed on me. But it did
no more. There was always the fear of losing it. The difference is
that--now--there isn't any fear."

She said, "Ah, I remember how afraid you were."

"I was afraid," he said, "of you."

She rose and lifted her arms to him and laid her hand on his shoulders.
He had to stoop to let her do it. So held, he couldn't hope to escape
from her candid, searching eyes.

"You aren't afraid of me now? I haven't made it go? You haven't lost it
through me?"

"You've made it stay."

"Have I? Have I done that for you?"

He drew in his breath with a sob of passion. "Ah--the things you do!"

"None of them matter except that," she said.

She left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "Why bother,
then, about the other stupid things?"

It was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt
so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in
one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a
fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the
one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly
abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down
and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As
for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and
knew that she had made it.

It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and
counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference
she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his
vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried
through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and
difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and
the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.

He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most
hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it
had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time
it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering
batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off
clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the
danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and
fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and
delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of
coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now
that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint
appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to
stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and
continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except
his fear.

He had tested it because of his fear. He had chosen his profession as
the extreme test, because of his fear. He had given up his profession,
again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's
way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being
caught and branded and tied down. He had thought that to be forced into
a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships
of God, to cut himself off for ever from his vision.

Looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his
fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. He had put
away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. He had tied himself to a
woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. He would have judged this
attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing
anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in.
And it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it
thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that
his vision had become secure. It really stayed. He could turn from it,
but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will.

She was right. If he could take that from her, if he was in for it to
that extent, why _did_ he bother about the other stupid things?

And yet he bothered. All that autumn he worked harder than ever at his
journalism. He seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going
on the "Morning Telegraph." He went the round of the theatres on first
nights, reporting for the "Morning Telegraph" on plays that were beneath
the notice of its official dramatic critic. He reviewed poetry and
_belles lettres_ for the "Morning Telegraph;" and he did a great deal of
work for it down in Fleet Street with a paste-pot and a pair of
scissors.

Prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last
poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit
invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura
said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing
with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his
heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted
himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His
spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the
grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he
piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a
pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it.

In December he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north
wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis.

And at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the
Consumption Hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the
house with the iron gate. And Laura at Owen's side lay awake in her
fear.




LVIII


There was one thing that Prothero, in his journalism, drew the line at.
He would not, if they paid him more than they had ever paid him, more
than they had ever dreamed of paying anybody, he would not review
another poet's work. For some day, he said, Nicky will bring out a
volume of his poems, and in that day he will infallibly turn to me. If,
in that day, I can lay my hand upon my heart and swear that I never
review poetry, that I never have reviewed it and never shall, I can look
Nicky in his innocent face with a clean soul.

But when Nicky actually did it (in the spring of nineteen-nine) Prothero
applied to Brodrick for a holiday. He wanted badly to get out of town.
He could not--when it came to the agonizing point--he could not face
Nicky.

At least that was the account of the matter which Tanqueray gave to
Brodrick when the question of Prothero's impossibility came up again at
Moor Grange. Brodrick was indignant at Prothero's wanting a holiday, and
a month's holiday. It was preposterous. But Jane had implored him to let
him have it.

Jinny would give a good deal, Tanqueray imagined, to get out of town
too. It was more terrible for her to face Nicky than for any of them.
Tanqueray himself was hiding from him at that moment in Brodrick's
study. But Jinny, with that superb and incomprehensible courage that
women have, was facing him down there in the drawing-room.

It was in the drawing-room, later on in the afternoon, that Brodrick
found his wife, shrunk into a corner of the sofa and mopping her face
with a pocket-handkerchief. Tanqueray had one knee on the sofa and one
arm flung tenderly round Jinny's shoulder. He met, smiling, the
husband's standstill of imperturbable inquiry.

"It's all right, Brodrick," he said. "I've revived her. I've been
talking to her like a father."

He stood looking down at her, and commented--

"Nicky brought a book of poems out and Jinny cried."

"It was th--th--the last straw," sobbed Jinny.

Brodrick left them together, just to show how imperturbable he was.

"George," she said, "it was horrible. Poor Nicky stood there where you
are, waiting for me to say things. And I couldn't, I couldn't, and he
saw it. He saw it and turned white----"

"He _is_ white," said Tanqueray.

"He turned whiter. And he burst out into a dreadful perspiration. And
then--oh, don't laugh--it was so awful--he took my hand and wrung it,
and walked out of the room, very dignified and stiff."

"My dear child, he only thought you were speechless with emotion."

But Jane was putting on her hat and coat which lay beside her.

"Let's get out somewhere," she said, "anywhere away from this
intolerable scene. Let's tear over the Heath."

She tore and he followed. Gertrude saw them go.

She turned midway between Putney and Wimbledon. "Oh, how my heart aches
for that poor lamb."

"It needn't. The poor lamb's heart doesn't ache for itself."

"It does. I stabbed it."

"Not you!"

"But, George--they were dedicated to me. Could my cup of agony be
fuller?"

"I admit it's full."

"And how about Nicky's?"

"Look here, Jinny. If you or I or Prothero had written those poems we
should be drinking cups of agony. But there is _no_ cup of agony for
Nicky. He believes that those poems are immortal, and that none of us
can rob them of their immortality."

"But if he's slaughtered--and he will be--if they fall on him and tear
him limb from limb, poor innocent lamb!"

"He isn't innocent, your lamb. He deserves it. So he won't get it. It's
only poets like Prothero who are torn limb from limb."

"I don't know. There are people who'd stick a knife into him as soon as
look at him."

"If there are he'll be happy. He'll believe that there's a plot against
him to write him down. He'll believe that he's Keats. He'll believe
anything. You needn't be sorry for him. If only you or I had Nicky's
hope of immortality--if we only had the joy he has even now, in the
horrible act of creation. Why, he's never tired. He can go on for ever
without turning a hair, whereas look at _our_ hair after a morning's
work. Think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired,
never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor
Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We
get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply
hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour."

Their wild pace slackened.

"It's a dog's life, yours and mine, Jinny. Upon my soul, for mere
sensation, if I could choose I'd rather be Nicky."

He paused.

"And then--when you think of his supreme illusion----"

"Has he another?"

"You know he has. If all of us could believe that when the woman we love
refuses us she only does it because of her career----"

"If he _did_ believe that----"

"Believe it? He believes now that she didn't even refuse him. He thinks
he renounced her--for the sake of her career. It's quite possible he
thinks she loves him; and really, considering her absurd behaviour----"

"Oh, I don't mind," she moaned, "he can believe anything he likes if it
makes him happier."

"He _is_ happy," said George tempestuously. "If I were to be born again,
I'd pray to the high gods, the cruel gods, Jinny, to make me mad--like
Nicky--to give me the gift of indestructible illusion. Then, perhaps, I
might know what it was to live."

She had seen him once, and only once, in this mood, the night he had
dined with her in Kensington Square six weeks before he married Rose.

"But you and I have been faithful to reality--true, as they say, to
life. If the idiots who fling that phrase about only knew what it meant!
You've been more faithful than I. You've taken such awful risks. You
fling your heart down, Jinny, every time."

"Do you never take risks? Do you never fling your heart down?"

He looked at her. "Not your way. Not unless I _know_ that I'll get what
I want."

"And haven't you got it?"

"I've got most of it, but not all--yet."

His tone might or might not imply that getting it was only a question of
time.

"I say, where are you going?"

She was heading rapidly for Augustus Road. She wanted to get away from
George.

"Not there," he protested, perceiving her intention.

"I must."

He followed her down the long road where the trees drooped darkly, and
he stood with her by the gate.

"How long will you be?" he said.

"I can't say. Half-an-hour--three-quarters--ever so long."

He waited for an hour, walking up and down, up and down the long road
under the trees. She reappeared as he was turning at the far end of it.
He had to run to overtake her.

Her face had on it the agony of unborn tears.

"What is it, Jinny?" he said.

"Mabel Brodrick."

She hardly saw his gesture of exasperation.

"Oh, George, she suffers. It's terrible. There's to be an
operation--to-morrow. I can think of nothing else."

"Oh, Jinny, is there no one to take care of you? Is there no one to keep
you from that woman?"

"Oh don't--if you had seen her----"

"I don't want to see her. I don't want _you_ to see her. You should
never have anything to do with suffering. It hurts you. It kills you.
You ought to be taken care of. You ought to be kept from the sight and
sound of it." He gazed wildly round the Heath. "If Brodrick was any good
he'd take you out of this damned place."

"I wouldn't go. Poor darling, she can't bear me out of her sight. I
believe I've worn a path going and coming."

They had left the beaten path. Their way lay in a line drawn straight
across the Heath from Brodrick's house. It was almost as if her feet had
made it.

"Jinny's path," he said.

They were silent, and he gathered up, as it were, the burden of their
silence when he stopped and faced her with his question--

"How are you going on?"




LIX


A YEAR passed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to
Tanqueray's question.

She had gone on somehow. He himself had made it easier for her by his
frequent disappearances. He had found a place somewhere on Dartmoor
where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little
people, where he hid himself from Rose. It helped her--not to have the
question raised.

Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with
his question. He had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in
her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution,
a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as I do?
Why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"

It seemed so simple, Tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered
why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the
last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long
as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be
entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And
it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third
child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show
what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the
world and she shall be my daughter."

But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth
dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick's death. Jane had been
with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.

After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay
quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed
to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being
utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough
to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the
little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude's hands. Every day
brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room
with Gertrude, led by her hand.

For six weeks Brodrick had been left very much to Gertrude. And
Gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered
herself into the peace she made.

But in March Jane was on her feet again. In April Brodrick took her to
the Riviera, and her return (in May) was the return of that brilliant
and distracting alien who had invaded Brodrick's house seven years ago.
Jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that
Henry admitted that he would not have known her. To which she had rather
ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well.

Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that
life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of
course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and
through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even
Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a
physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had
been inclined to agree with Henry that genius--her genius at any
rate--was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more.
Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane
lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified.
She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she
had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever
happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two
sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her
dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously
feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray
had said she was not to be--a mere woman.

Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she
was to go on.

But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous
energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius
had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health,
and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate
and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her
low.

It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It
would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It
had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its
maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had
never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make
terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and
adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only
tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent.

She went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the
half-hour before bed-time.

Brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him--her
monstrous proposal to go away--for three months. He asked her if three
months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her
children?

"I know," she said, "but if I don't----"

"Well?"

"I shall go to pieces."

He looked at her critically, incredulously.

"Why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "Is there anything
you want that you don't have here? Is there any mortal thing that can be
done that isn't done?"

"Not any mortal thing."

"What is it then?"

"Hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family?
And that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven
to one?"

"Whoever _does_ come down on you?"

"John," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday."

Brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. John, since his
bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house.

"And I suppose," he said, "he bored you?"

"No, but he will call when I'm writing."

"Why on earth don't you send him away?"

"I would, if Mabel hadn't died. But how can you when he's unhappy? It
would hurt him so. And yet, supposing you were to die, what would John
say if I were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his
dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his
hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference
between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? That's more or
less what John does to me. The only thing is to get away."

However, it was for Brodrick to decide, she said. And Brodrick said he
couldn't decide until he had thought it over.

She was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's
family by her proposal to go away for three months. The scandal was not
altogether unconnected with George Tanqueray, since it was at his
suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. If she had
proposed to take it with him they could hardly have shown themselves
more horrified.

She knew how monstrous her conduct must appear to them. She could see it
all so clearly from their point of view. That had always been after all
her poor merit, that she could see things from other people's point of
view. Her vision indeed of them, of the way they took things, was apt to
be so vivid, so engrossing that it left her with no point of view of her
own. She carried into life itself and all its relations her virtue as an
artist, that effacement of her observing self in favour of the thing
observed.

That, Nina told her, was her danger. Nina happened to be with her on the
day when another family committee met and sat upon her case. They were
sitting on it now, up-stairs with Brodrick in his study. She knew
infallibly what their judgment would be. Just as she had seemed to them
so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant,
insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. She
said to herself that it was all very well for Nina to talk. This insight
was a curse. It was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel
what they were feeling. And they were seven to one, so that when she
gave them pain she had to feel seven times the pain she gave.

But after all they, her judges, could take care of themselves. This
family, that was one consolidated affection, was like a wall, it would
shelter and protect her so long as she was content to be sheltered and
protected; if she dashed herself against it it would break her in
pieces.

And Nina was saying, "Can't you take it into your own hands? Why should
you let these people decide your fate for you?"

"Hugh will decide it," she said. "He's with them up-stairs now."

"Is he asking their advice?"

"No, they're giving it him. That's my chance, Nina."

"Your chance?"

"My one chance. They'll put his back up and, if it's only to show them,
he'll let me go."

"Do you mean to say, Jinny, that if he didn't you wouldn't go?"

"I don't even know that I'd go if he minded very much."

"I wish to goodness George Tanqueray was here. He might make you----"

"What has he ever made me do?"

"He might make you see it."

"I do see it," said Jane.

She closed her eyes as one tired with much seeing. Nina's presence
hardly helped her. Nina was even more profoundly disturbing than George
Tanqueray; she had even less of consolation to offer to one torn and
divided, she herself being so supreme an instance of the glory of the
single flame.

The beauty and the wonder of it--in Nina--was its purity. Nina showed to
what a pitch it had brought her, the high, undivided passion of her
genius. Under it every trace of Nina's murkiness had vanished. She had
lost that look of restless, haggard adolescence, that horrible
intentness, as if her hand was always on the throat of her wild beast.
You saw, of course, that she had suffered; but you saw too that her
genius was appeased by her suffering. It was just, it was compassionate;
it had rewarded her for every pang.

Jane found herself saying beautiful things about Nina's genius. It was
the flame, unmistakably the pure flame. If solitude, if virginity, if
frustration could do that----She knew what it had cost Nina, but it was
worth it, seeing what she had gained.

Nina faced her with the eyes that had grown so curiously quiet.

"Ah, Jinny," she said, "could _you_ have borne to pay my price?"

She owned that she could not.

Up-stairs Brodrick faced his family where it sat in judgment upon Jane.

"What does she complain of?" said John.

"Interruption," said Hugh. "She says she never has any time to herself,
with people constantly running in and out."

"She doesn't mind," said Sophy, "how much time she gives to the
Protheros and the rest of them. Nina Lempriere's with her now. She's
been here three solid hours. As for George Tanqueray----"

John shook his head.

"That's what I don't like, Hugh, Tanqueray's hanging about the house at
all hours of the day and night. However you look at it, it's a most
undesirable thing."

"Oh--Tanqueray," said Brodrick, "_he_'s all right."

"He's anything but all right," said Henry. "A fellow who notoriously
neglects his wife."

"Well," said Brodrick, "I don't neglect mine."

"If you give her her head," said Henry.

He scowled at Henry.

"You know, Hugh," said Frances, "she really will be talked about."

"She's being talked about now," said Brodrick, "and I don't like it."

"There's no use talking," said John sorrowfully, and he rose to go.

They all rose then. Two by two they went across the Heath to John's
house, Sophy with Henry and Frances with John; and as they went they
leaned to each other, talking continuously about Hugh, and Tanqueray,
and Jane.

"If Hugh gives in to her in this," said Henry, "he'll always have to
give in."

"I could understand it," said Sophy, "if she had too much to do in the
house."

"It's not," said Frances, "as if there was any struggle to make ends
meet. She has everything she wants."

"Children----" said John.

"It's preposterous," said Henry.

When Nina had gone Brodrick came to Jane.

"Well," he said, "do you still want to go away for three months?"

"It's not that I want to, but I must."

"If you must," he said, "of course you may. I dare say it will be a very
good thing for you."