But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about
women's drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you
harm. He wanted to hold on to what he'd got. It was tricky; it came and
went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up
with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.

Nina assured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was,
she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian
jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden
him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the manuscript,
should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or
three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly,
were all about God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. Owen
Prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she
said, to handicap him.

Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she
proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson.
Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were
very far from appreciating him. He knew a multitude of little men on
papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about
singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it,
might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote
for the papers.

The reading was fixed for Friday at four o'clock. Tanqueray, who
detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero's sake. His
letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the
others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally.
She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things
were going badly at the moment.

Laura, however, was the first to arrive.

"Who is this man of Nina's?" said she.

"I don't know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."

She showed her Nina's letter.

Laura's face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly
indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.

"But why God?" was her profane comment.

"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."

Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to
believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her
arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George
Tanqueray.

Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro
Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.

He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to
banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt,
impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here
to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow
Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for
Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray,
too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was
always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him.
There was Brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland
had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott
Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small
thing and an easy thing for her to do.

It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank,
in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his
little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the
unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does
not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women.
He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.

And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected
in the sorrow of this thought.

Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had
been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could
also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with
the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be
pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And
from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he
could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he
could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on
concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had
threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial
co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to
do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he
hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.

As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with
resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.

And Jane, who knew what passed in Brodrick's mind, was downcast in her
turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him,
that she was always trying to get at him.

Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the
manuscript. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of
the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at
Tanqueray over Nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her;
Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they
could look at Jane.

It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero's poems
of the Vision of God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane,
absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; to
Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to
Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the
mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.

They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul's mortal
terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul,
of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine
consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of God.

Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was
dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude of extreme depression.
His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a
sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to
himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by
Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his
desire, sublimely renouncing.

Brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his
lowering brows, looked up at Jane's, gathering from them her judgment of
Owen Prothero. Prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and
Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a
gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and
troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a
creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp
flame of the spirit.

It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers
for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader's
voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.

Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul
surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away
into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.

And Laura, who did not believe in God, Laura sat motionless, her small
insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over
her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange
softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face
of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes
were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared
at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.

She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came
forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his
own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had
sunk into. Everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating
passage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic
and curt.

Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "He
_is_ great," said poor Nicky.

"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."

Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and
Jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him.

Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she
turned eastwards with Nina.

"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.

"It depends," said Nina. "He's seen George."

"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know
him."

Nina's face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten
look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it
said.

"He hasn't got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was
overwrought. "He's got to be heard. You've heard him."

"It's because I've heard him that I want to see him."

Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The
small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen
suffering, its despondency, its doubt.

Nina was stung by compassion.

"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.

"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't."

"All right. You shall. I'll make him come."




XXIII


Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from
George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused
to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the
autumn, at their own and not Prothero's expense.

How the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and Tanqueray was
careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance
of Jinny's way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray's hands, had been
meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray
vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They
had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared
to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland
must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every
other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger
of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their
enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr.
Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public
that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional
opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss
Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them.
They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own
sake, she would reconsider it.

Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.

"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you're paying
for Prothero's poems?"

To that Jinny had replied, "It's what I wanted to do, and there wasn't
any other way."

Owen Prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. His
innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made
and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created
for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to
incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his
innocence. Tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant;
Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met
Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had
not met him.

It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey
of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this
incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept
Nina's unlicked Celt outside women's drawing-rooms.

She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than
not, at Tanqueray's rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray's wife did not
count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and
she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it
was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray's wife.

One afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She
approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy
little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.

But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across,
obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before
the door.

Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the
house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the
little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs.
Tanqueray.

She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the
doctor was.

"Don't go, Jinny," he said.

She searched his face.

"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"

He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She
recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from
him.

"Oh, dear me, no," he said.

"May I see her--afterwards?"

"Of course you may see her. But"--he smiled--"if you'll come up-stairs
you'll see Prothero."

She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high
above Rose and her movements and her troubles.

He paused at the door.

"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of
you."

"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"

"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."

"George, is he really there?"

"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away
from you."

"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."

He laughed and they went in.

The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at
some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct
of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the
singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of
the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by
the guile she judged dishonourable.

Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the
doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.

They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that
had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and
vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that
they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.

It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was
obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow
now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed
through strange climates.

It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she
knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that
must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself
secretly defining it. Tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain
and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she
had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of
his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his
singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion.
When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently
nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an
incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable
distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made
swift by hunger.

Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also
suggested the thing she at last said.

"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."

Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had
been.

"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out
for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint
and----"

She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"

"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"

"It's natural," she pleaded.

"Natural? It's one of the most unnatural marriages I've ever come
across. It's a crime against nature for a man like Tanqueray to have
taken that poor little woman--who is nature pure and simple--and condemn
her to----"

She drew back visibly. "I know. He doesn't see it," she said.

"He doesn't see anything. He doesn't even know she's there. How can he?
His genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of
it outside his own imagination. That's where you are with your great
realists."

She gazed at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so
estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact.

"You mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?"

He shrugged his shoulders at her reference.

"He would have more room," he said, "that would be all. He could at any
rate afford to take more risks."

They were silent again.

"I believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. I shall have to go."

Jane turned her head. The sounds he heard so distinctly were inaudible
to her.

They proved to be footsteps on the staircase, footsteps that could never
have been Rose's nor yet Tanqueray's. They paused heavily at the door.
Some one was standing there, breathing.

A large woman entered very slowly, and Jane arrived, also slowly, at the
conclusion that it must be Mrs. Eldred, George's wife's aunt.

Mrs. Eldred acknowledged her presence and Prothero's by a vague movement
of respect. It was not till Prothero had gone that she admitted that she
would be glad to take a chair. She explained that she was Rose's aunt,
and that she had never been up them stairs before and found them tryin'.

Jane expressed sorrow for that fact and for Rose's illness.

Mrs. Eldred sighed an expository sigh.

"She's frettin' an' she's worritin'. She's worritin' about 'Im. It isn't
natch'ral, that life 'E leads, and it's tellin' on 'er."

"Something's telling on her."

Mrs. Eldred leaned forward and lowered her voice. "It's this way, miss.
'E isn't properly a 'usban' to 'er."

"You shouldn't say that, Mrs. Eldred. He's very fond of her."

"Fond of 'er I dare say 'E may be. But 'E neglec's 'er."

"You shouldn't say that, either."

"Well, miss, I can't 'elp sayin' it. Wot else _is_ it, when 'E shuts
'imself up with 'is writin' all day long and 'alf the night, and she
a-settin' and a-frettin'?"

She looked round the room, apparently recognizing with resentment the
scene of Tanqueray's perpetual infidelity.

"But," said Jane, "he'd be away as much if he was in business."

"'Ef 'E was in business there'd be the evenin's to look forward to. And
there'd be 'is Saturdays and Sundays. As it is, wot is there for her to
look forward to?"

"At any rate she knows he's there."

"It's knowin' that 'E's there wot does it. It's not as if she 'ad a
'ouse to look after, or a little baby to take 'er mind orf of 'im."

"No, it isn't."

A sound of yapping came faintly up from the ground-floor.

"That's Joey," said Mrs. Eldred tearfully, "'er Pom as she was so fond
of. I've brought 'im. And I've brought Minny too."

"Minny?" Jane had not heard of Minny.

"The cat, miss. They'll keep 'er company. It's but right as she should
'ave them."

Jane assented warmly that it was but right.

"It's not," Mrs. Eldred continued, "as if she came reg'lar, say once in
a week, to see 'er uncle and me. She'll go to Camden Town and set with
that poor old Mr. Gunning. Give Rose any one that's ill. But wot is that
_but_ settin'? And now, you see, with settin' she's ill. It's all very
well when you're brought up to it, but she isn't. Rose'd be well if she
'ad a 'ouse and did the work in it. And 'E won't let 'er 'ave it. 'E
won't 'ear of 'er workin', 'E says."

"Well, naturally, he wouldn't like to see his wife working."

"Then, miss, 'E should 'ave married a lady 'as wouldn't want to work.
That's wot 'E should have done. We were always against it from the
first, 'er uncle and me was. But they was set, bein' young-like."

Mrs. Eldred's voice ceased suddenly as Tanqueray entered. Jane
abstained from all observation of their greeting. She was aware of an
unnatural suavity in Tanqueray's manner. He carried it so far as to
escort Mrs. Eldred all the way down to the ground-floor sitting-room
where Rose was.

He returned with considerable impetus to Jane.

"Well, Jinny, so you've seen my aunt-in-law?"

"I have," said Jinny contumaciously, "and I like her."

"What do you think? She's brought a dog on a chain and a beast of a cat
in a basket."

Jinny abstained from sympathy, and Tanqueray grew grave.

"I wish I knew what was the matter with Rose," he said. "She doesn't
seem to get much better. The doctor swears it's only liver; but he's a
silly ass."

"Tanks, there's nothing the matter really, except--the poor little bird
wants to build its nest. It wants sticks and straws and feathers and
things----"

"Do you mean I've got to go and find a beastly house?"

"Let her go and find it."

"I would in a minute--only I'm so hard up."

"Of course you'll be hard up if you go on living in rooms like this."

"That's what she says. But when she talks about a house she means that
she'll do all the work in it."

"Why not?" said Jane.

"Why not? I married her because I wasn't going to have her worked to
death in that damned lodging-house of her uncle's."

"You married her because you loved her," said Jane quietly.

"Well--of course. And I'm not going to let my wife cook my dinner and
make my bed and empty my slops. How can I?"

"She'll die if you don't, George."

"Die?"

"She'll get horribly ill. She's ill now because she can't run about and
sweep and dust and cook dinners. She's dying for love of all the
beautiful things you won't let her have--pots and pans and
carpet-sweepers and besoms. You don't want her to die of an unhappy
passion for a besom?"

"I don't want to see her with a besom."

Jane pleaded. "She'd look so pretty with it, George. Just think how
pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper."

"On her knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor----"

"You'd have a woman in to scrub."

"Carrying the coals?"

"_You'd_ carry the coals, George."

"By Jove, I never thought of that. I suppose I could." He pondered.

"You see," he said, "she wants to live at Hampstead."

"You can't cut her off from her own people."

"I'm not cutting her off. She goes to see them."

"She'll go to see them if you live at Hampstead. If you live here
they'll come and see you. For she'll be ill and they'll have to."

Tanqueray looked at her, not without admiration.

"Jinny, you're ten times cleverer than I."

"In some things, Tanks, I am. And so is that wife of yours."

"She's--very sensible. I suppose it's sensible to be in love with a
carpet-sweeper."

She shook her head at him.

"Much more sensible than being in love with _you_."

His eyes evaded her. She rose.

"Oh, Tanks, you goose. Can't you see that it's you she's in love
with--and that's why she _must_ have a carpet-sweeper?"

With that she left him.

He followed her to the doorstep where he turned abruptly from her
departure.

Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just
set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from
her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast,
scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other
hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the
saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient
to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face
as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and
gravity. A slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how Rose
had suffered from the sedentary life.

All this Tanqueray saw as he entered. It held him on the threshold,
unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog,
who resented his intrusion.

Rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face.

"Oh, George," she said, "don't make me send them away. Let me keep
them."

"I suppose you must keep them if you want them."

"I never said I wanted them. Aunt _would_ bring them. She thought they'd
be something to occupy my mind, like."

Tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of Rose
having a mind.

Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not
laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now.

"The doctor--'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now,
for Joey's sake."

"Poor Joey."

He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous
hind-legs, straining to lick his hand.

"His hair doesn't come on, Rose----"

"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air
backwards----"

"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right,
anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."

"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."

She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized
Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not
beautiful.

"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."

It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child
at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.

"I may keep him, too?"

At that he kissed her.

By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could
only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical
industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of
ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very
miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and
with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about
him like this and destroyed his peace.

It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house
indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was
everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and
pressure of life.

It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was
indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not
in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it
remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could
afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray,
could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was
suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat.

Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was
the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same
reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it
enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. It reproduced
reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's
place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things
that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room.

Yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. He
approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion,
but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own
violence. If he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had
on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his
mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn
him into it.

Rose had not drawn him in. She had done nothing assailing and
destructive. She was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man
bent on solitude could have selected. The little thing had never got in
his way. She was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to
the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of
his senses. Up till now he would hardly have known that he was married;
it had been so easy to ignore her.

But to-day she had been forced on his attention. The truth about Rose
had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by Prothero, by the
doctor, by Mrs. Eldred and by Jane. It was the same naked truth that in
his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness
to the British public. His genius knew no other law but truth to Nature,
trust in Nature, unbroken fidelity to Nature. And now it was Nature that
arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in Rose. His
genius had made Rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable
lust and impulse to create.

Eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. Through his window
he heard the front door open and Rose's little feet on the pavement, and
Rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "Puss--Puss--Puss.
Minny--Min--Min--Minny. Puss--Puss--Puss."

He sighed. He had realized for the first time that he was married.




XXIV


Nina kept her promise, although Prothero protested that he saw no reason
why he should be taken to see Laura Gunning. He was told that he need
not be afraid of Laura. She was too small, Nina said, to do him any
harm. Refusing to go and see Laura was like refusing to go and see a
sick child. Ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented.

Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in
Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and
space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of
Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as
Papa.

It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy;
for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and
now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but
Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her
diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation
in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the
least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were
things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand
facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to
the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty
pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.

And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she
drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would
turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had
not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They
were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.

It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty
had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test,
justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in
her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing.
For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to
her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not
have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden
Town.

It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still
more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity.
There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that
stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window.
There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of
the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's
writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the
fireplace. That was all.

Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly
ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.

Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an
atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or
spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold
self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four
walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret.
Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense
of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof,
drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to
cling.

Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments
of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the
old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and
then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching,
an immovable, perpetual fear.

Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy,
childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat,
slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment
before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.

He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she
gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the
fragile thing.

He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of
her, that she couldn't do him any harm.

He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad;
the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features
cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood,
their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw
all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it
slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead,
the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.

And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it
evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of
his fear.

She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own
folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She
might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in
her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing,
pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fierce
concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most
exquisite simplicity.

They had said nothing to each other. Laura, in the wonderful hour of his
coming, could find nothing to say to him. He noticed that she and Nina
talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the
old man might awake.

Then Laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her
fear.

"You'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said Prothero.

Laura let him.

Nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while Laura made the
tea. She saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that
they rested on her when she was not looking.

"You were hard at work when we came," he was saying.

Laura denied it.

"If I may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long."

"No. I'm never at it long enough. The bother is getting back to where
you were half-an-hour ago. It seems to take up most of the time."

"Then I oughtn't--ought I--to take up any of it?"

"Oh, please," said Laura, "take it. _I_ can't do anything with it."

She had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate.

"Time," she said, "is about all we've got here. At any rate there will
be time for tea." She examined the cupboard. "It looks as if time were
about all we were going to have for tea." She explored the ultimate
depth of the cupboard. "I wonder if I could find some jam. Do you like
jam?"

"I adore it."

That was all they said.

"Need you," said Nina to Prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?"
Even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading
it, would be left for the Kiddy's supper.

"He shall spread it," said the Kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he
likes."

They called Nina to the table. She ate and drank; but Laura's tea
scalded her; Laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it;
and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat.

And in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to
torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have to go.

"Do you think," said Laura, "I'd better wake Papa?"

That was a question which this decided little person had never been able
to decide for herself. It was too momentous.

"No," said Nina, "I think you'd better not."

It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and
staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him
dream dreams.

Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and
held his hands in hers and stroked them.

"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she
said, "he has such horrid ones."

Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his
dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak,
handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.

"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the
throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at
it. He was almost wide awake now.

"Is it Rose?" he said.

"No, Papa. It's Nina."

Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat
beside him and talked to him a little while.

He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of
Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who
saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from
him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything
he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in
his idea.

"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not
going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."

"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there
on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed.
She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.

Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his
long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed
his head over Laura's hand.

"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would
be very glad.

That was all.

Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.

"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart
wrung."

"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"

He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.

But she knew he saw.




XXV


Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He
had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a
book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be
passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him
that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught
Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph
for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.

His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could
not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs),
but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would
have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took
a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to
say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you,
with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for
you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he
showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times
running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had
discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if
you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to
sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.

And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he
liked.

From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a
side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her
work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat
coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From
time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile
back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.

And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."

It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing
was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over
the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see
Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head
thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of
continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had
happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and
vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of
opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura.
They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and
Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their
way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of
brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with
cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. They stayed for a short
time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room,
they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his
dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know
these people.

But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour
and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long
time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and
made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers,
the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to
Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his
formidable idea.

Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to
the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she
sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it
would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his
intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go
away and never have anything to do with them again.

Prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what
he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to Laura.
There had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession
of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw Laura out; but Laura was not to
be drawn. She had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him
backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but
backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. He felt that there were
things behind her that forbade him to pursue.

Of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said
a word. When it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret
understanding and consent. They were both aware of his genius as a thing
that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but
incommunicable, the very heart of their silence.

One evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. She told
him that Papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "It is very good of
you," she said, "to come and sit with him."

Prothero smiled quietly. "May I sit with _you_ now?"

"Please do."

They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A
few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had
raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.

Papa, she explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His
illness came from a sunstroke.

He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.

"Then, do you think----"

She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional
opinion.

"Do I think? What do I think?"

"That he'll get better?"

He was silent a long time.

"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."

"I _am_ afraid. I'm afraid all the time."

"What of?"

"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face
it."

"You've nerve enough for anything."

"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially
the thing I'm afraid of."

"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost
whispered.

"I'm afraid of his having a fit--epilepsy. He _might_ have it."

"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."

"I'm always thinking of it. And the most--the most awful thing is
that--I'm afraid of _seeing_ it."

She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to
an unpardonable shame.

"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of
something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."

"You?"

"I."

"Oh--but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."

"Wouldn't I?"

"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did
you?"

"_Because_ I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way.
My father was a country doctor--a surgeon. One day he sent me into his
surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek
cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--I was a boy
about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop
the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"

"You fainted?--You were ill on the spot?"

"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."

A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for
the vibration of some spiritual recoil.

"What do you say to that?"

"I don't say anything."

"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a
hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."

"They might have known," she said.

"They might have known what?"

"That you were different."

"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept
rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put
it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a
skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd
got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all."

"Well--you proved it."

"If I did my father never knew it."

"And your mother?" she said softly.

"I believe she knew."

"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"

"I never let her know, really, how different I was."

"You kept it to yourself?"

"It was the only way to keep it."

"Your genius?"

"If you choose to call it that."

"The thing," she said, "that made you different."

"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was
most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."

"You couldn't lose it."

"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my
medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge
of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to
do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a
better berth in Bombay; and it went again."

She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of
something more than it.

"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months
and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and
there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting
back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of
it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling
them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where
you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else
matters. Nothing else is."

She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.

"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the
other part remains where it got to."

"I see."

Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he
spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid
of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as
he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had
to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into
life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He
knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it
wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he
would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit
surer than she was now.

No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself
that he put to the test.

And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to
face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them,
he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him
exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it
all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his
soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.

"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm _still_
afraid of the sight of blood."

"So I suppose _I_ shall go on being afraid."

"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should. _You_ never
ran away."

"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on
inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries.
Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be
alone."