"Shall you mind, Hugh?"

"Oh dear me, no. I shall be very comfortable here with Gertrude."

"And Gertrude," she murmured, "will be very comfortable here with you."

That evening, about nine o'clock, the parlour-maid announced to Brodrick
in his study that Miss Winny and Mr. Eddy had called. They were in the
dining-room. When Brodrick asked if Mrs. Brodrick was with them he was
told that the young gentlemen had said expressly that it was Mr.
Brodrick whom they wished to see.

Brodrick desired that they should be brought to him. They were going
away, to stay somewhere with a school-fellow of Winny's, and he supposed
that they had looked in to say good-bye.

As they entered something told him, as he had not been told before, that
his young niece and nephew had grown up. It was not Winny's ripening
form and trailing gown, it was not the golden down on Eddy's upper lip;
it was not altogether that the outline of their faces had lost the
engaging and tender indecision of its youth. It was their unmistakable
air of inward assurance and maturity.

After the usual greetings (Brodrick was aware of a growing restraint in
this particular) Eddy, at the first opening, made for his point--_their_
point, rather. His uncle had inquired with urbane irony at what hour the
family was to be bereaved of their society, and how long it would have
to languish----

They were going, Eddy said, at ten in the morning, and a jolly good
thing too. They weren't coming back, either, any sooner than they could
help. They--well, they couldn't "stick it" at home just now.

They'd had (Winny interpolated) a row with Uncle Henry, a gorgeous row
(the colour of it was in Winny's face).

Brodrick showed no sign of surprise, not so much as a raised eyebrow. He
asked in quiet tones what it was all about?

Eddy, standing up before his uncle and looking very tall and manly,
gazed down his waistcoat at his boots.

"It was about Jin-Jin," Winny said.

(Eddy could almost have sworn that his uncle suffered a slight shock.)

"We can't stick it, you know, the way they're going on about her. The
fact is," said the tall youth, "we told Uncle Henry that, and he didn't
like it."

"You did, did you?"

"Yes. I know you'll say it isn't our business, but you see----"

"You see" (Winny explained), "we're so awfully fond of her."

Brodrick knew that he ought to tell the young rascals that their being
fond of her didn't make it any more their business. But he couldn't.

"What did you say to your Uncle Henry?"

He really wanted to know.

"Oh, we said it was all humbug about Jinny being neurotic. He's neurotic
himself and so he thinks everybody else is. He's got it regularly on the
brain."

(If, Brodrick thought, Henry could have heard him!)

"You can't think," said Winny, "how he bores us with it."

"I said he couldn't wonder if she _was_ neurotic, when you think what
she's got to stand. The boresomeness----" He left the idea to its own
immensity.

"Of what?" said Brodrick.

"Well, for one thing, you know, of living everlastingly with Gertrude."

Brodrick said, "Gertrude doesn't bore anybody."

"She doesn't bore _you_, Uncle Hugh, of course, because you're a man."

(Winny said that.)

"Then," said Eddy, "there's _us_. You know, we're an awful family for a
woman like Jinny to have married into. There isn't one of us fit to
black her boots. And I believe Uncle Henry thinks she wasn't made for
anything except to bring more of us into the world."

Brodrick's face displayed a fine flush.

"_You_'re all right, Uncle Hugh."

Brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute.

"I keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her."

"What else did you say to him?"

Eddy became excited. "Oh--I got in one before we left--I landed him
neatly. I asked him why on earth--if he thought she was neurotic--he let
her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any
fat nurse would have done the job as well? And why he let her break her
neck, running round after Aunt Mabel? I had him there."

"What did your Uncle say to that?" (Brodrick's voice was rather faint.)

"He didn't say anything. He couldn't--oh--well, he _did_ say my
impertinence was unendurable. And I said _his_ was, when you think what
Jinny is."

He meditated on it. He had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent
youth.

"We really came," Winny said, "to know whether Jinny _is_ going away?"

"She is going away," said Brodrick, "for three months."

He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed
him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "And _if_--she has
to stay a year?"

"She shall stay," Brodrick said.




LX


She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on
the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and
nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as
long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody
would find her.

Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the
place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut
off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside;
it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The
white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light
through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to
the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according
as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.

The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight
into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room
for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway
led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door
that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the
house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.

By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table,
at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both
windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had
said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny
on the open moor.

For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was
assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a
surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the
severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it
from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the
window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as
the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft
forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.

Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild
earth and wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older
and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of
her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its
joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had
most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven.
Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the
likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an
endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.

And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered
these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on
the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met
in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the
sweet earth of the south-west.

Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She
was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her
forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond
her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration
and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself,
tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not
going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at
all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.

There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it
seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She
got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.

Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser
and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not
to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's
wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again
the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the
impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and
strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more
virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to
restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's
plan.

And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her
every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote,
assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay.
Brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the
children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with Gertrude. His
letters contained little besides praise of Gertrude. There was no
reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay.

She stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her
staying. Walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled
from her passion by the half-darkness, her Idea came back to her. It
came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost.
It had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with
her. But through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent
ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and
labour of creation.

When she reached the farm she found George Tanqueray sitting in the
porch. The lamp-light through the open door revealed him.

"Whatever brought you here?" she said.

"What always brings me."

She understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was
in subjection to the Idea.

"Have you come to turn me out?" she said.

"No, Jinny."

He explained that he was staying in the village, at the Three Crowns. He
had arrived that evening and had walked over.

He followed her into the deep kitchen. At the supper-table his place had
been laid for him already. He had ordered it so.

He looked at her, smiling an apology.

"Is it all right?" he said.

"Perfectly all right, George."

They talked all evening and far into the night. She parted from him at
the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. Under the ash-trees her Idea
showed in its immense and luminous perfection. It trembled into life. It
drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room.

She had found what she had come for.

That was the effect he always had on her.




LXI


Brodrick had been alone in the first fortnight that followed Jane's
extraordinary departure. Instead of settling down to be comfortable with
Gertrude, he had packed her off to the seaside with the children and
their nurse. He had often wondered what he should do without Gertrude.
Now he knew. He knew by incontrovertible experiment that he could not do
without her at all. Everything, even the silver-chiming clock, went
wrong in her absence.

If, before that fortnight, Brodrick had been asked suddenly with what
feelings he regarded Gertrude Collett, he would have replied that he was
unaware of regarding the lady with any feelings, or indeed of regarding
her intimately at all. And he would have told the simple truth; for
Brodrick was of all men the most profoundly unaware.

Of course, there was gratitude. He had always been aware of that. But in
that fortnight his gratitude took on immense proportions, it became a
monstrous and indestructible indebtedness. He would have said that such
a feeling, so far from making him comfortable with Gertrude, would have
made him very uncomfortable, much more uncomfortable than he cared to
be. But curiously it was not so. In his renewed intercourse with
Gertrude he found a vague, exquisite satisfaction. The idea of not
paying Gertrude back in any way would have been intolerable; but what he
felt now was so very like affection that it counted as in some measure a
return. It was as if he had settled it in his own mind that he could now
meet the innocent demands which the angelic woman seemed to make.
Goodness knew it wasn't much to ask, a little attention, a little
display of the feeling so very like affection, after all that she had
done.

It pleased him now when he came, mooning drearily, into the
drawing-room, to find Gertrude in possession. He was almost always
tired now, and he was glad to lie back in an easy-chair and have his tea
handed to him by Gertrude. He looked forward, in fancy, to the
children's hour that followed tea-time, and he had made a great point at
first of having them to himself. But as a matter of fact, being almost
always tired, he enjoyed their society far more sincerely when Gertrude
was there to keep them in order.

That was her gift. She had been the genius of order ever since she had
come into his house--good gracious, was it ten years ago? Her gift made
her the most admirable secretary an editor could have. But she was more
than that now. She was a perfect companion to a physically fatigued and
intellectually slightly deteriorated man. He owned to the deterioration.
Jane had once told him that his intellect was a "lazy, powerful beast."
It seemed to him now, humbly regarding it, that the beast was and always
had been much more lazy than powerful. It required constant stimulus to
keep it going. His young ambition and his young passion for Jane Holland
had converged to whip it up. It flagged with the dying down of passion
and ambition. Things latterly had come a bit too late. His dream had
been realized too late. And he hadn't realized it, either. Jane had
realized it for him. No sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into
his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. He had
become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. He
showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and
harassed father of a family. He had put off intellectual things. His
deterioration weighed on him when he thought of Jane. But Gertrude's
gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state.

Sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the September
evenings, there would be long silences. Gertrude never broke a silence.
She was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it--he could almost feel
her holding it--tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as
if she were afraid that it would break. She gave him so much sense of
her presence and no more. She kept before him, humbly, veiled from his
vision, the fact that she was there to serve him.

Sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. It was not the poignant
shyness of her youth which Brodrick had once found so distressing. It
conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the
quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. Its physical sign was the
pale, suffused flame in Gertrude's face, and that web of air across her
eyes. There was a sort of charm about it.

Sometimes, coming upon Gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find
her sad. He said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety.
It was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another
woman's responsibilities. He thought that Jane had sometimes been a
little hard on her. He supposed that was her (Jane's) feminine way. The
question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether
there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her.
He was, in fact, profoundly sorry for Gertrude, more profoundly sorry
than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had
kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. Well,
he wanted her enough now in all conscience.

Then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing Gertrude were to
go? It was not conceivable, her going.

For, above all her gifts, Gertrude was an incomparable mother to those
unfortunate children (since Jane's departure Brodrick had begun to think
definitely of his children as unfortunate). It was distinctly
pleasurable the feeling with which he watched her ways in gathering them
to her side and leading them softly from the room when "Daddy was busy,"
or when "poor Daddy was so tired." More than once he found himself
looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys
in the garden. Solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered
whether little Jacky were not _too_ solemn, too preternaturally quiet
for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding Gertrude's hand. He
remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when
Jinny----And remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a
sore heart and a set face.

Three weeks passed thus. There was a perceptible increase in Gertrude's
shyness and sadness.

One evening after dinner she came to him in his study. He rose and drew
forward a chair for her. She glanced at his writing-table and at the
long proof-sheets that hung from it, streaming.

"I mustn't," she said. "You're busy."

"Well--not so busy as all that. What is it?"

"I've been thinking that it would perhaps be better if I were to leave."

"To leave? What's put that into your head?"

She did not answer. She appeared to him dumb with distress.

"Have the children been too much for you?"

"Poor little darlings--no."

"Little monkeys. Send them to me if you can't manage them."

"It isn't that. It is--I don't think it's right for me to stay."

"Not _right_?"

"On the children's account, I mean."

He looked at her and a shade, a tremor, of uneasiness passed over his
face.

"I say," he said, "you don't think they're unhappy?"

(She smiled).

"--Without their mother?" He jerked it out with a visible effort.

"No. If they were I shouldn't be so uneasy."

"Come, you don't want them to be unhappy, do you?"

"No. I don't want anybody to be unhappy. That's why I think I'd better
go."

"On their account?" he repeated, hopelessly adrift.

"Theirs, and their mother's."

"But it's on their account--and--their mother's--that we want you."

"I know; but it isn't fair to them or to--Mrs. Brodrick that they should
be so dependent on me."

"But--they're babies."

"Not quite--now. It isn't right that I should be taking their mother's
place, that they should look to me for everything."

"But," he broke in irritably, "they don't. Why should they?"

"They do. They must. You see, it's because I'm on the spot."

"I see." He hid his frowning forehead with one hand.

"I know," she continued, "it can't be helped. It isn't anybody's fault.
It's--it's inevitable."

"Yes. For the present it's--inevitable."

They both paused on that word.

"I suppose," he said, "you're really afraid that they'll get too fond of
you?"

"Yes."

"They're very fond of their mother, aren't they?"

"Yes--if she were always here."

"Of course, it does make your position a little difficult. Still, we
don't want them to fret for her--we don't want them not to be fond of
you. Besides, if you went, what on earth would they do without you?"

"They must learn to do without me. They would have some one else."

"Yes, and they'll be fond of _her_."

"Not in the same way. I think perhaps I've given myself too much to
them. There's something unusual, something tragic in the way they cling
to me. I know it's bad for them. I try to check it, and I can't. And
I've no right to let it go on. Nobody has a right except their mother."

"Well, it's awfully nice of you to feel like that about it. But as you
say, I don't see how it's to be helped. I think you're taking an
exaggerated view--conscientiously exaggerated. They're too young, you
know, to be very tragic."

She smiled as through tears.

"I don't think you'll save tragedy by going. Besides, what should I do?"

"You?"

"Yes. You don't appear to have thought of me."

"Don't I?" She smiled again, as if at some secret, none too happy, of
her own.

"If I had not thought of you I should never have come here a second
time. If I had not thought of you I should not have thought of going."

"Did you think I wanted you to go?"

"I--was not quite sure."

He laughed. "Are you sure now?"

She looked at him again.

"I _do_ help you by staying?"

He was overwhelmed by his indebtedness.

"Most certainly you do. I must have been very ungracious if you haven't
realized how indispensable you are."

"If you're sure of that--I'll stay."

"Good."

He held out his hand and detained hers for a moment. "Are you sure you
don't want to leave us? I'm not asking too much of you?"

She withdrew her hand.

"You have never asked too much."

Thus Gertrude uncovered the knees of the gods.




LXII


Four days in every week Jane had a letter from Gertrude and once a week
a letter from Brodrick. She was thus continually assured that all was
well and that Brodrick was very comfortable with Gertrude.

She was justified in staying on, since her genius had come back to her,
divinely placable, divinely propitiated and appeased.

She knew that in a measure she owed this supreme reconciliation to
George Tanqueray. Her genius was virile. He could not give it anything,
nor could it have taken anything he gave. He was passive to her vision
and humble, on his knees, as he always had been, before a kindred
immortality. What he did for her was to see her idea as she saw it, but
so that through his eyes she saw steadily and continuously its power and
perfection. She was aware that in the last five years she had grown
dependent on him for that. For five years he had lifted her out of the
abyss when she had found herself falling. Through all the surgings and
tossings that had beset her he had kept her from sinking into the trough
of the wave. Never once had he let go his hold till he had seen her
riding gaily on the luminous crest.

His presence filled her with a deep and strong excitement. For two
years, in their long separations, she had found that her craving for it
was at times unbearable. She knew that when her flame died down and she
was in terror of extinction, she had only to send for him to have her
fear taken from her. She had only to pick up a book of his, to read a
sentence of his, and she would feel herself afire again. Everything
about him, his voice, his look, the touch of his hand, had this
penetrating, life-giving quality.

Three weeks passed and Tanqueray was still staying in his inn at
Chagford. In the mornings they worked, he on his book and she on hers.
She saw him every afternoon or evening. Sometimes they took long walks
together over the moors. Sometimes they wandered in the deep lanes.
Sometimes, in rainy weather, they sat indoors, talking. In the last five
years Tanqueray (who never used to show his work) had brought all his
manuscripts for her to read. He brought them now. Sometimes she read to
him what she had written. Sometimes he read to her. Sometimes he left
his manuscript with her and took hers away with him. They discussed
every doubtful point together, they advised each other and consulted.
Sometimes they talked of other things. She was aware that the flame he
kindled leaned to him, drawn by his flame. She kept it high. She wanted
him to see how divine it was, and how between him and her there could be
no question of passion that was not incorruptible, a fiery intellectual
thing.

But every day Tanqueray walked up from the village to the farm. She
looked on his coming as the settled, natural thing. Brodrick continued
to assure her that the children were happy without her, and that he was
very comfortable with Gertrude; and Tanqueray reiterated that it was all
right, all perfectly right.

One day he arrived earlier than usual, about eleven o'clock. He proposed
that they should walk together over the moor to Post Bridge, lunch at
the inn there and walk back. Distance was nothing to them.

They set out down the lane. There had been wind at dawn. Southwards,
over the hills, the clouds were piled up to the high sun in a riot and
glory of light and storm. The hills were dusk under their shadow.

The two swung up the long slopes at a steady pace, rejoicing in the
strong movement of their limbs. It was thus that they used to set out
together long ago, on their "days," over the hills of Buckinghamshire
and Hertfordshire. Jane remarked that her state now was almost equal to
that great freedom. And they talked of Brodrick.

"There aren't many husbands," she said, "who would let their wives go
off like this for months at a time."

"Not many. He has his merits."

"When you think of the life I lead him at home it takes heaps off his
merit. The kindest thing I can do to him is to go away and stay away.
George, you don't know how I've tormented the poor darling."

"I can imagine."

"He was an angel to bear it."

She became pensive at the recollection.

"Sometimes I wonder whether I ought, really, to have married. You told
me that I oughtn't."

"When?"

"Six years ago."

"Well--I'm inclined to say so still. Only, the unpardonable sin in a
great artist--isn't so much marrying as marrying the wrong person."

"He isn't the wrong person for me. But I'm afraid I'm the wrong person
for him."

"It comes to the same thing."

"Not altogether." She pondered. "No doubt God had some wise purpose when
he made Hugh marry me. I can see the wise purpose in Owen's marrying
Laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying Nina; but when it comes
to poor, innocent Hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman
like me----"

"Don't put it on God. His purpose was wise enough."

"What was it?"

"Why--obviously--that I should have married you, that Hugh should have
married Gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have
married Rose."

"Poor little Rose!"

"Poor little Rose would have been happy with her draper; Gertrude would
have been happy with Brodrick; you--no, I, would have been divinely
happy with you."

She laughed. "Oh, would you!"

"_That_ was the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of
us, bent on frustrating the divine will--I beg Gertrude's
pardon--Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."

"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out
so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."

"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us
have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you--look at me."

She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you
is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have
quite as much of each other as is good for us. If _we_ were to tear each
other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."

Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.

Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.

She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought.
It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous
egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A
reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never
was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound
an instinct of self-preservation.

Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very
ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved
them at the roots.

It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to
him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous
that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds.
His cruelty (for it _was_ cruelty from the poor parasite's point of
view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.

It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could
never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her
suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as
a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and
indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great
thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he
accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And
it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved
almost complete oblivion of her.

But Jane--Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature
as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things
as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave
as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic
about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven.
She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.

He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it
and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his
arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.

Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given
to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever.
She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had
drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from
disaster.

(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever
since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)

They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They
drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They
stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of
the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay
between them and the farm lane.

The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung
across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the
landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line
after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the
hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to
darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.

Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly.
She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a
haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like
lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of
perished streams, the green grass ran like water.

"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're
talking."

"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."

The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she
could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw
everything must see.

A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.

Then Tanqueray spoke.

"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and
poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"

"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."

"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while
it makes us poor devils blind as bats."

"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."

"Ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight."

Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.

"Jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from
Wendover?"

She did not answer him.

"Jinny--we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped
everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."

It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was
strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time
and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their
vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they
plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.

"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.

"Don't let's talk about it any more."

"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns
it to poison."

"Yes."

"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"

"Not in the beginning. If we only had----"

"We didn't know it then."

"_I_ knew it," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me, then?"

"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."

"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."

"Risked it?"

"Risked it."

"But I risked losing you altogether. What did _you_ risk?"

He was silent.

"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."

"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"

"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."

"If you'd let me see it."

"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see
it. _That_ was where I went wrong."

"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made
me _feel_ it."

"How could I?"

"That was it. You couldn't."

"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."

"How did you know?"

"Oh--_you_ took good care of that."

"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"

She smiled.

"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."

"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"

"Why indeed?"

"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the
unhappy man."

"Still--there it is. We can't get over it."

"_You_ could have got over it. It wasn't made for you."

"It was made for all women. And for one who has been wrecked by it there
are millions who have been saved. It was made for me more than any of
them."

"If you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness."

"Would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to
somebody who had no use for them and showed it?"

"You insist that I showed it?"

"You showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted."

"There you're wrong. There was a moment--if you'd only known it."

"I did know."

"What did you know?"

"I knew there was some power I had, if I had known how to use it."

"And didn't you?"

"I don't know. You see, I didn't try."

"You know how to use it now, I can tell you, with a vengeance."

"No. It isn't the same power, I think."

"At any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? That if _you_'d
chosen you might have done anything with me?"

"I knew that any other woman could have done the same."

"Then why not you?"

"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my
poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."

"Good God! So _that_ was your view of it? I was sacrificed to your
invincible ignorance."

"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"

"Honourable?"

"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."

"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."

They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them
closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green
branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.

"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."

"_I_ couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."

"I know. You were afraid then."

"Yes. I was mortally afraid."

Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their
farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened
out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed
to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.

"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you
know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of?
What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us
down, that turns again and rends us."

"You thought you saw that in me?"

"I don't see it now."

"Not now," he whispered.

They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The
lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood
facing him as one who waits.

"Not now," he said aloud.

He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.

"If we could always be here, Jinny----"

She turned from him, afraid.

"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.

He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face
she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the
face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed.
It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were
pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in
their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her
two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"

She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep
stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor
of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.




LXIII


That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where
George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally
afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more
inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.

In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of
the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day
into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very
early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.

She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held
her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When
she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was
there also and she faced it.

She was down too late for any train that could take her away before
noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.

She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the
window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was
from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual
that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was
very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to
benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that
Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an
overcoat.

She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure.
Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude
had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.

They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.

She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind
supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he _had_ written. There
rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had
a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the
least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a
long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill,
down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.

And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the
splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and
her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It
was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And
she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.

Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his
bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the
calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance
and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than
the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a
more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's,
"With you--there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to
powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"

She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was
another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home
early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm
people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over
the hours that she had still to spare.

Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not
so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have
suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to
Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.

But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George
Tanqueray.

It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her
certainty that he would come. And he was there in the doorway before her
mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance.

She fell on him with Hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would
have slain him with it.

He stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. As evidence
supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the
editor. He had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then.
Jinny was being "had," he said.

He had not come there to talk about Brodrick, or to think about him. He
was not going to let Jinny think about him either.

He had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of
the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be
overtaken by the mood of the cool morning.

Jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now)
in the leather case it travelled in. She had a hat with a long veil on.
Tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of
her departure.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said.

"I'm going back."

"Why?"

"Haven't I told you?"

Positively he had forgotten Brodrick.

He began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his
cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that
her fear was folly.

She was grateful to him for that.

"All the same," she said, "I'm going. I wasn't going to stay here in any
case."

"You were going?"

"Yes."

"And do you suppose I'm going to let you go? After last night?"

"After--last--night--I _must_ go. And I must go back."

"No. Remember what you said to me last night. We know ourselves and we
know each other now as God knows us. We're not afraid of ourselves or of
each other any more."

"No," she said. "I am not afraid."

"Well--you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage
to go on?"

"You think I'm a coward still?"

"A coward." He paused. "I beg your pardon. I forgot that you had the
courage to go back."

Her face hardened as they looked at each other.

"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand
there staring at me and you don't care a damn."

"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."

"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll
remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two
children."

"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.

"Jinny--_that_ ought never to have happened. You should have left that
to the other women."

"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."

"You _are_----"

"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."

"My God. I don't care what you are."

He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not
touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in
her supernatural self-possession.

"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."

"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way.
This--this is different."

She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her
such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her--as by fire.

"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny--if I only wanted you for
myself--but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you
didn't suffer----"

"I'm not suffering."

"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with
it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all
that."

"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."

"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."

"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not--not as
you want me to."

He smiled. "How do you think I want you to?"

"Well--you know."

"I know that I care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or
whether you care or not, so long as I can put a stop to that brutality."

"There isn't any brutality. I've got everything a woman can want."

"You've got everything any other woman can want."

She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."

[Illustration: She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."]

"For heaven's sake be honest. What is the use of lying, to me of all
people? Don't I know how happy you are?"

"But I am--I am, George. It's only this horrid, devilish thing that's
been tacked on to me----"

"That beautiful, divine thing that God made part of you, the thing that
you should have loved and made sacrifices to--if there were to have been
sacrifices--the thing you've outraged and frustrated, and done your best
to destroy, in your blind, senseless lust for what you call happiness.
You've no right to make It suffer."

"They say suffering's the best thing that can happen to it."

"Not Its suffering. _Your_ suffering is--the pain that makes you alive,
that stings and urges and keeps you going--going till you drop. To feel
the pull of the bit when you swerve on the road--Its road--to have the
lash laid about your shoulders when you jib--that's good. You women need
the lash more than we because you're more given to swerving and
jibbing. Look at Nina. _She_ was lashed into it if any woman ever was."

"She isn't the only one, George."

"I hope she isn't. God is good to the great artists sometimes, and he
was good to her."

"Do you suppose Laura thinks so?"

"Laura's not a great artist."

"And do you suppose Owen was thinking of Nina's genius when he married
Laura instead of her?"

"I don't think that Owen was thinking at all. It's not the thinkers who
are tools in the hands of destiny, dear child."

His gaze fell on the manuscript she was packing.

"Jinny, you know--you've always known that you can't do anything without
me."

"It seems as if I couldn't," she admitted.

"Well--be honest with me."

She looked at her watch. "There's not much time for me to be honest in,
but I'll try."

She sat down. She meditated a moment, making it out.

"You're right. I can't do much without you. I'm not perfectly alive when
you're not there. And I can't get away from you--as I can get away from
Hugh. I believe I remember every single thing you ever said to me. I'm
always wanting to talk to you. I don't want--always--to talk to Hugh.
But--I think more of him."

It seemed to her that it was only now that she really made it out. Her
fear had been no test, it threw no light on her, and it had passed. It
was only now, with Tanqueray's passionately logical issue facing her,
that she knew herself aright.

"There's another thing. I can't be sorry for you. I know I'm hurting
you, and I don't seem to care a bit. You can't make me sorry for you.
But I'm sorry for Hugh all the time."

"God forbid that you should be sorry for me, then."

"God does forbid it. It's not that Hugh _makes_ me sorry for him; he
never lets me know; but I do know. When his little finger aches I know
it, and I ache all over--I think it's aching a bit now; that's what
makes me want to go back to him."

"I see--Pity," said the psychologist.

"No. Not pity. It's simply that I know he needs me more than you do.
That's why I need him more than I need you."

"Pity," he reiterated, with a more insistent stress.

"No."

"Never mind what it is, if it's something that you haven't got for me."

"It is something that I haven't got for you. There isn't time," she
said, "to go into all that."

As she spoke he heard wheels grinding the stones in the upper lane, the
shriek of the brake grinding the wheel, and the shuffling of men's feet
on the flagged yard outside.

He shut the door and faced her, making his last stand.

"You know what you're going back to."

"I know."

"To suffer," he said, "and to cause suffering--to
one--two--three--innocent people."

"No. Things will be different."

"They won't. _We_ shall be the same."

She shook her head a little helplessly.

"At any rate," he said, "_you_ won't be different."

"If I could--if I only could be----"

"But you can't. You know you can't."

"I can--if I give it up--once for all."

"What? Your divine genius?"

"Whatever it is. When I've killed that part of me I shall be all right.
I mean--_they_'ll be all right."

"You can't kill it. You can starve it, drug it, paralyze it, but you
can't kill it. It's stronger than you. You'll go through hell--I know
it, I've been there--you'll be like a drunkard trying to break himself
of the drink habit."

"Yes. But some day I shall break myself, or be broken; and there'll be
peace."

"_Will_ there!"

"There'll be something."

She rose. The wheels sounded nearer, and stopped. The gate of the
farmyard opened. The feet of the men were at the door.




LXIV


Whatever Tanqueray thought of Brodrick's chill, it and the fear it
inspired in Gertrude had been grave enough to keep him in the house. For
three days (the last of September) he had not been in Fleet Street, in
his office.

There was agitation there, and agitation in the mind of the editor and
of his secretary. Tanqueray's serial was running its devastating course
through the magazine, and the last instalment of the manuscript was
overdue (Tanqueray was always a little late with his instalments).
Brodrick was worried, and Gertrude, at work with him in his study, tried
to soothe him. They telephoned to the office for the manuscript. The
manuscript was not there. The clerk suggested that it was probably still
with the type-writer, Miss Ranger. They telephoned to Miss Ranger, who
replied that the manuscript had been typed and sent to the author three
weeks ago for revision.