"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."

"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."

He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.

"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it.
Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own
things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in
having done them."

"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."

She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the
misery comes in."

"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery
didn't come in."

She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well
for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it.
Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"

"And if _you_'re being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection
that you're not aware of----?"

She shook her head again.

"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I
can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and
trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But--look at
Papa."

She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.

"If Papa had been one of its experiments--but he wasn't. It had got him
all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to
look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very
clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever
enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't
say them any more."

She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.

"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as
it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away--it
doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"

"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you,
what you see, that's being thrown away--broken up by some impatient,
impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its
instinct for perfection. Do you see?"

"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully
nice of you."

"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body.
To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is
simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual
energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease.
It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies.
It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases
which are most like death--the horrible diseases that tear down the body
from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and
leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of
the building up--why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful
than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to
the secret--the mystery--the romance of dissolution."

His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the
darkness that wrapped her.

"If you could see _through_ it you'd understand, you'd see that this
body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium,
transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to
the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual
germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any
of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside
what we give."

Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I
understand."

"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how
before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in
nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the
whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our
body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts,
infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to
minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable
forces, and that we--_we_--unmake the work of millions of Г¦ons in a
moment, that we charge it with _our_ will, _our_ instincts, _our_
memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by
spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ
of us--so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when
they scatter, is the seed of _our_ universe, flung heaven knows where."

For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know,"
she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of
intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and
I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to
know how you know about it."

A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and
incommunicable.

"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and
it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."

"What won't I tell you?"

"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"

"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."

"I can only see that they've gone."

"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely
than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."

"Ah----"

"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen
alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."

"How do you know?" she reiterated.

"I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at
it."

"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you
like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."

She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.

It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both
pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the
unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.

"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.

He ignored the valediction of her tone.

"And when am I to see you again?" he said.

This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.

He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were
standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted
his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him
and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no
expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep
could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never
looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look
forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that
might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.

He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He
turned.

"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"

They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm
holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she
would keep him from ever entering again.

"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"

"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."

She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from
him into the darkness of the room.




XXVI


It was the twenty-seventh of June, Laura's birthday. Tanqueray had
proposed that they should celebrate it by a day on Wendover Hill. For
the Kiddy's increasing pallor cried piteously for the open air.

Nina was to bring Owen Prothero; and Jane, in Prothero's interests, was
to bring Brodrick; and Tanqueray, Laura insisted, was to bring his wife.

Rose had counted the days, the very hours before Laura's birthday. She
had plenty to do for once on the morning of the twenty-seventh, making
rock cakes and cutting sandwiches and packing them beautifully in a
basket. Over-night she had washed and ironed the white blouse she was to
wear. The white blouse lay on her bed, wonderful as a thing seen in a
happy dream. Rose could hardly permit herself to believe that the dream
would come true, and that Tanqueray would really take her.

It all depended on whether Laura could get off. Getting Laura off was
the difficulty they encountered every time she had a birthday.

So uncertain was the event that Nina and Prothero called at the house in
Albert Street before going on to the station. They found Tanqueray, and
Rose in her white blouse, waiting outside on the pavement. They heard
that Jane Holland was in there with Laura, bringing pressure to bear on
the obstinate Kiddy who was bent on the renunciation of her day.

Jane's voice on the landing called to them to come up-stairs. Without
them it was impossible, she said, to get Laura off.

The whole house was helping, in a passionate publicity; for every one in
it loved Laura. Mr. Baxter, the landlord, was on the staircase, bringing
Laura's boots. The maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the
landing, brushing Laura's skirt. A tall girl was standing by the table
in the sitting-room. She had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue
eyes under masses of light hair. She was Addy Ranger, the type-writer on
the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she
could do. She was sewing buttons on Laura's blouse while Jane brought
pressure upon Laura. "Of course you're going," Jane was saying. "It's
not as if you had a birthday every day."

For Laura still sat at her writing-table, labouring over a paragraph,
white lipped and heavy eyed. Shuffling all over the room and round about
her was Mr. Gunning. He was pouring out the trouble that had oppressed
him for the last four years.

"She won't stop scribbling. It's scribble--scribble--scribble all day
long. If I didn't lie awake to stop her she'd be at it all night. I've
caught her--in her nightgown. She'll get out of her bed to do it."

"Papa, dear, you know Miss Lempriere and Mr. Prothero?"

His mind adjusted itself instantly to its vision of them. He bowed to
each. He was the soul of courtesy and hospitality, and they were his
guests; they had come to luncheon.

"Lolly, my dear, have you ordered luncheon?--You must tell Mrs. Baxter
to give us a salmon mayonnaise, and a salad and lamb cutlets in aspic.
And, Lolly! Tell her to put a bottle of champagne in ice."

For in his blessed state, among the fragments of old splendours that
still clung to him, Mr. Gunning had preserved indestructibly his sense
of power to offer his friends a bottle of champagne on a suitable
occasion, and every occasion now ranked with him as suitable.

"Yes, darling," said Laura, and dashed down a line of her paragraph.

He shuffled feebly toward the door. "I have to see to everything
myself," he said. "That child there has no more idea how to order a
luncheon than the cat. There should be," he reverted, "lamb cutlets in
aspic. I must see to it myself."

He wandered out of the room and in again, driven, by his dream.

"Oh," cried Laura, "somebody else must have my birthday. _I_ can't have
it. I must sit tight and finish my paragraph."

"You'll spoil it if you do," said Prothero.

"Besides spoiling everybody's day," said Jane judiciously.

That brought Laura round. She reflected that, if she sat tight from ten
that evening till two in the morning, she could save their day.

But first she had to finish her paragraph and then to hide it and lock
it up. Then she put the pens and ink on a high shelf out of Mr.
Gunning's reach. He had been known to make away with the materials of
Lolly's detestable occupation when he got the chance. He attributed to
it that mysterious, irritating semblance of poverty in which they moved.

He smiled at her, a happy, innocent smile.

"_That's_ right, _that's_ right. Put it away, my dear, put it away."

"Yes, Papa," said Laura. She took the blouse from Addy Ranger, and she
and Jane Holland disappeared with it into a small inner room. From the
voices that came to him Prothero gathered that Jane Holland was
"buttoning her up the back."

"Don't say," cried Laura, "that it won't meet!"

"Meet? It'll go twice round you. You don't eat enough."

Silence.

"It's no good," he heard Jane Holland say, "not eating. I've tried
both."

"I," said Laura in a voice that penetrated, "over-eat. Habitually."

"I must go," said Mr. Gunning, "and find my hat and stick." His idea now
was that Laura was going to take him for a walk.

Addy Ranger began to talk to Prothero. He liked Addy. She had an amusing
face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. She confided
to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding
anywhere a permanent job. Addy's dream was permanence.

Then they talked of Laura.

"Do you know what _her_ dream is?" said Addy. "To be able to afford
wine, and chicken, and game and things--for him."

"When you think of her work!" said Nina. "It's charming; it's finished,
to a point. How on earth does she do it?"

"She sits up half the night to do it," said Prothero; "when he isn't
there."

"And it's killing her," said Addy, who had her back to the door.

Mr. Gunning had come in again and he heard her. He gazed at them with a
vague sweetness, not understanding what he heard.

Then Laura ran in among them, in a tremendous hurry. She wasn't ready
yet. It was a maddening, protracted agony, getting Laura off. She had
forgotten to lock the cupboard where the whisky was (a shilling's worth
in a medicine bottle); and poor Papa might find it. Since he had had his
sunstroke you couldn't trust him with anything, not even with a jam-pot.
Then Addy, at Laura's request, rushed out of the room to find Laura's
hat and her handkerchief and her gloves--not the ones with the holes in
them. And then Laura looked at her hands.

"Oh," she cried, "_look_ at my poor hands. I can't go like that. I
_hate_ an inky woman."

And she dashed out to wash the ink off.

And then the gloves found by Addy had all holes in them. And at that
Laura stamped her foot and said, "Damn!"

The odds against Laura's getting off were frightful.

But she was putting on her hat. She was really ready just as Tanqueray's
voice was heard calling on the stairs, "You must hurry up if you want to
catch that train." And now they had to deal seriously with Mr. Gunning,
who stood expectant, holding his hat and stick.

"Good-bye, Papa dear," said she.

"Am I not to come, too?" said Mr. Gunning.

"Not to-day, dear."

She was kissing him while Jane and Nina waited in the open doorway.
Their eyes signed to her to be brave and follow them. But Laura
lingered.

Prothero looked at Laura, and Mr. Gunning looked at Prothero. His
terrible idea had come back to him at the sight of the young man,
risen, and standing beside Laura for departure.

"Are you going to take my little girl away from me?" he said.

"Poor little Papa, of course he isn't. I'm going with Jane, and Nina.
You know Nina?"

"And who," he cried, "is going to take me for my walk?"

He had her there. She wavered.

"Addy's coming in to give you your tea. You like Addy." (He bowed to
Miss Ranger with a supreme courtesy.) "And I'll be back in time to see
you in your little bed."

She ran off. Addy Ranger took Mr. Gunning very tenderly by the arm and
led him to the stairs to see her go.

Outside on the pavement Tanqueray gave way to irritation.

"If," said he, "it would only please Heaven to take that old gentleman
to itself."

"It won't," said Nina.

"How she would hate us if she heard us," said Jane.

"There ought to be somebody to take care of 'im," said Rose, moved to
compassion. "'E might go off in a fit any day. She can't be easy when
'e's left."

"He _must_ be left," said Tanqueray with ferocity.

"Here she is," said Jane.

There she was; and there, too, was her family. For, at the sight of
Laura running down-stairs with Prothero after her, Mr. Gunning broke
loose from Addy's arm and followed her, perilously followed her. Addy
was only just in time to draw him back from the hall door as Prothero
closed it.

And then little Laura, outside, heard a cry as of a thing trapped, and
betrayed, and utterly abandoned.

"I can't go," she cried. "He thinks I'm leaving him--that I'm never
coming back. He always thinks it."

"You know," said Nina, "he never thinks anything for more than five
minutes."

"I know--but----"

Nina caught her by the shoulder. "You stupid Kiddy, you must forget him
when he isn't there."

"But he _is_ there," said Laura. "I can't leave him."

Between her eyes and Prothero's there passed a look of eternal patience
and despair. Rose saw it. She saw how it was with them, and she saw what
she could do. She turned back to the door.

"You go," she said. "I'll stay with him."

From the set of her little chin you saw that protest and argument were
useless.

"I can take care of him," she said. "I know how."

And as she said it there came into her face a soft flame of joy. For
Tanqueray was looking at her, and smiling as he used to smile in the
days when he adored her. He was thinking in this moment how adorable she
was.

"You may as well let her," he said. "She isn't happy if she can't take
care of somebody."

And, as they wondered at her, the door opened and closed again on Rose
and her white blouse.




XXVII


They found Brodrick waiting for them at the station. Imperturbable, on
the platform, he seemed to be holding in leash the Wendover train whose
engines were throbbing for flight.

Prothero suffered, painfully, the inevitable introduction. Tanqueray had
told him that if he still wanted work on the papers Brodrick was his
man. Brodrick had an idea. On the long hill-road going up from Wendover
station Prothero, at Tanqueray's suggestion, tried to make himself as
civil as possible to Miss Holland.

Tentatively and with infinite precautions Jane laid before him
Brodrick's idea. The War Correspondent of the "Morning Telegraph" was
coming home invalided from Manchuria. She understood that his place
would be offered to Mr. Prothero. Would he care to take it?

He did not answer.

She merely laid the idea before him to look at. He must weigh, she said,
the dangers and the risks. From the expression of his face she gathered
that these were the last things he would weigh.

And yet he hesitated. She looked at him. His eyes were following the
movements of Laura Gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous
Kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and
plunged and leaped into the hedges.

Jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. The war, she
said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead
almost certainly to a regular job on the "Telegraph" at home.

He saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. His eyes, as
they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. Then they
wandered from her.

He asked if he might think it over and let her know.

"When," she said, "can you let me know?"

"I think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day."

The day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided.
Brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of Jane, and Prothero,
with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting Laura.

Tanqueray, thus left behind with Nina, watched him as he went.

"He's off, Nina. Bolted." His eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating,
delighted eyes and recklessly observant.

"So has Jane," said Nina, with her dangerous irony.

Apart from them and from their irony, Prothero was at last alone with
Laura on the top of Wendover Hill. She had ceased to dart and to plunge.

He found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and
there he stretched himself at her side.

"Do you know," he said, "this is the first time I've seen you out of
doors."

"So it is," said she in a strange, even voice.

She drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she
were bathing them in the pure air. Her face was turned from him and
lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved;
she drank the air like water. To his eyes she was the white image of
mortal thirst.

"Is it absolutely necessary for you to live in Camden Town?" he said.

She sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she
faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity.

"It is. Absolutely." She explained that Baxter, her landlord, had been
an old servant of Papa's, and that _the_ important thing was to be with
people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways.

He sighed.

"Do you know what I should do with you if I could have my way? I should
turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning
till nine at night. I should make you walk a mile with me twice a
day--not too fast. All the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on
a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your
feet. I should bring you something nice to eat every two hours."

"And how much work do you suppose I should get through?"

"Work? You wouldn't do _any_ work for a year at least--if I had my way."

"It's a beautiful dream," said she. She closed her eyes, but whether to
shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say.

"I don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with
roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if I were dead. You don't
know how tre--_mend_--ously alive I am."

"I know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if I had my way--if
you were happy."

She was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in
front of her at nothing.

"You don't know what it's like," she said; "the unbearable pathos of
Papa."

"It's your pathos that's unbearable."

"Oh don't! Don't be nice to me. I shall hate you if you're nice to me."
She paused, staring. "I was unkind to him yesterday. I see how pathetic
he is, and yet I'm unkind. I snap like a little devil. You don't know
what a devil, what a detestable little devil I can be."

She turned to him, sparing herself no pain in her confession.

"I was cruel to him. It's horrible, like being cruel to a child." The
horror of it was in her stare.

"It's your nerves," he said; "it's because you're always frightened." He
seemed to meditate before he spoke again. "How are you going on?"

"You see how."

"I do indeed. It's unbearable to think of your having to endure these
things. And I have to stand by and see you at the end of your tether,
hurt and frightened, and to know that I can do nothing for you. If I
could have my way you would never be hurt or frightened any more."

As he spoke something gave way in her. It felt like a sudden weakening
and collapse of her will, drawing her heart with it.

"But," he went on, "as I can't have my way, the next best thing is--to
stand by you."

She struggled as against physical faintness, struggled successfully.

"Since I can't take you out of it," he said, "I shall come and live in
Camden Town too."

"You couldn't live in Camden Town."

"I can live anywhere I choose. I shouldn't _see_ Camden Town."

"You couldn't," she insisted. "And if you could I wouldn't let you."

"Why not?"

"Be_cause_--it wouldn't do."

He smiled.

"It would be all right. I should get a room near you and look after your
father."

"It wouldn't do," she said again. "I couldn't let you."

"I can do anything I choose. Your little hands can't stop me."

She looked at him gravely. "Why do you choose it?"

"Because I can choose nothing else."

"Ah, why are you so good to me?"

"Be_cause_"--he mocked her absurd intonation.

"Don't tell me. It's because you _are_ good. You can't help it."

"No; I can't help it."

"But--" she objected, "I'm so horrid. I don't believe in God and I say
damn when I'm angry."

"I heard you."

"You said yourself I wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften
me--you think I'm so bitter and so hard."

"You know what I think of you. And you know," he said, "that I love
you."

"You mustn't," she whispered. "It's no good."

He seemed not to have heard her. "And some day," he said, "I shall marry
you. I'd marry you to-morrow if I'd enough money to buy a hat with."

"It's no use loving me. You can't marry me."

"I know I can't. But it makes no difference."

"No difference?"

"Not to me."

"If you could," she said, "I wouldn't let you. It would only be one
misery more."

"How do you know what it would be?"

"I won't even let you love me. That's misery too."

"You don't know what it is."

"I do know, and I don't want any more of it. I've been hurt with it."

With a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to
him.

She writhed and struggled in his clasp. "Don't," she cried, "don't touch
me. Let me alone. I can't bear it."

He turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "And yet," he
said, "you love me."

"No, no. It's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. I won't have it. I
won't let you love me."

"You can't stop me."

"I can stop you torturing me!"

She was freed from his arms now. She sat up. Her small face was sullen
and defiant in its expression of indomitable will.

"Of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. But it makes no
difference. I shall go on caring for you. It's no use struggling and
crying against that."

"I shall go on struggling."

"Go on as long as you like. It doesn't matter. I can wait."

She rose. "Come," she said. "It's time to be going back."

He obeyed her. When they reached the rise on the station road they
turned and waited for the others to come up with them. They looked back.
Their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey
with mist. They stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and
sudden beauty. Then with the others they swung down the road to the
station.

Before the end of the day Brodrick heard that his offer was accepted.




XXVIII


It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from
her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.

"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.

"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."

"As if I wasn't always by myself."

Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with
its involuntary surrender.

He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so
that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But
the pace he set was terrific.

"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."

"Not odder than you, do I? _You_ ought to be swinging up a
mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see
you."

"Do you remember?"

"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone
up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating
my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me,
hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper
ledge down on to the track. Your hair--you had lots of hair, all
tawny--some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over
your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there
were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the
mountain. I had found my wild cat."

"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."

"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the
terror of the mountains in them."

"And yours--yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a
human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd
forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."

"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."

"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press
on you and hurt you?"

They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses,
houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the
mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some
naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.

"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there--you and I could
go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would
simply disappear."

They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before
them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate
framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a
hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The
buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.

"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.

"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."

"Isn't it--horrible?"

"No," he said. "It isn't."

They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to
their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her
up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.

"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"

"It isn't late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.

He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders
against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her
that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence.
Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.

"You'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb
and dangerous mood.

He roused himself almost irritably.

"Thanks, no. Don't bother about it."

She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of
him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things
approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time
that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by
interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant
acts.

Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the
bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that
he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he
wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches,"
from its shelf and open it.

She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the
gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was
stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on
Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring
flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina
made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth,
motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.

He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast,
and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged
it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain
from her pain.

"Why didn't you call out?" he said.

"I didn't want you to know."

"You'd have been burnt sooner?"

He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her
shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and
her eyes met his.

"I'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than
hurt--your hands."

His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out
of her sight.

She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of
his recoil.

"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it
on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to
call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.

"There's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.

"No, Owen, nothing; except that I'm tired of it."

"The tiredness will pass. Is that burn hurting you?"

"Not yet. I don't mind it."

He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She
saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and
that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.

She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced
her.

"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't
written it, I should never have been here."

"That's why, then, isn't it?"

"I suppose so. You _had_ to write it, and I _had_ to come."

"Yes, Owen," she said gently.

"You brought me here," he said.

"I can't understand it."

"Can't understand what?"

"The fascination I had for you."

He closed the book and laid it down.

"You were my youth, Nina."

He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now
withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that
forbade her to touch him.

"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for
it."

"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."

"No. They _are_ me. They are what I was. Your people are not people,
they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."

"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.

"You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you.
You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were."

He paused.

"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it
rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like
an unhappy ghost."

It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not
gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.

Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.

She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.

He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got
to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.

She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow.
Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.

He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to
between them.

She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her
feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself
down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of
circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were
gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.

At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched
out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut
their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the
burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily
distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen
laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be
wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all
passion of flesh and blood.

In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the
skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze
and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated;
eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had
carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a
lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was
incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant
energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She
lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable,
not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing
was accomplished.

Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came
to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.

"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."

She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was
sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice
between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago
when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his
desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura
Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself;
behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.

She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that
had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she
had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her
nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual
appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its
own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration,
sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt
that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of
her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to
him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any
one of them would kill her.

She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her
experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray
had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality
of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the
nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the
unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.

Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with
it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this
terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day
it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she
preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work
of her.

As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the
throat of the beast.

She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had
endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was
inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her
flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside
her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his
service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised
her courage.

"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But
when it hurts most it's healing."

That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she
could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back,
above hers.

Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of
his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street.
The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.

The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated
Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and
virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast,
though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that
other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known
Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued
Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it
back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity
of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's
little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed,
unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.

The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She
sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with
him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses
streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She
had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging,
rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow,
lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the
troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her,
like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.

It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.

She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door,
and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of
fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.

His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He
stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut
her in.

"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad
perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or
surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.

"You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you."

"I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door."

He shut it.

"Won't you sit down?"

She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself.
Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with
his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.

Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of
the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of
surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled
from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at
her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he
had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few
new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed
beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her
hand and felt the stuff.

"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.

He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing
ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.

"You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"

"Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do."

"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will
be my doing."

"Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be
responsible--if I die?"

"I set them on to you."

"Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man
for the job."

"The best man--to die?"

"War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that
intention."

"You _will_ die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."

"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"

"I care--because they die."

Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having
uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.

"Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That
ends it."

She rose.

"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come
and tell a man she cares for him."

"Why not?" he said simply.

"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more
like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why
shouldn't I tell you? You know it--as God knows it."

"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."

"Owen--shall I ever be where you are now?"

"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what
you cared for."

It was not. Yet she yearned for it--his youth that was made to love her,
his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still.

"No," she said, "it isn't only that."

She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau.
With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new
suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the
door he was about to open.

"Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out,
too, and look after you?"

He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said.

"Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if
it comes to that."

He smiled. "If you were like me, you'd stay at home."

"What should I stay for?"

"To look after Laura Gunning. That's what you'd want to do, if you
were--I. And," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do."

She rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on
her.

[Illustration: She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he
had come to her to say]

"How do you know? And why should I?"

"Because there's nothing else that you can do for me."

She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to
her to say.




XXIX


That was a solid, practical idea of Brodrick's. All that he had heard of
Owen Prothero connected him securely with foreign countries. By the fact
that he had served in South Africa, to say nothing of his years in the
Indian Medical Service, he was pointed out as the right man to send to
the Russian army in Manchuria; add to this the gift of writing and your
War Correspondent was complete. It was further obvious that Prothero
could not possibly exist in England on his poems.

At the same time Brodrick was aware that he had reasons for desiring to
get the long, ugly poet out of England as soon as possible. His length
and his ugliness had not deterred Jane Holland from taking a
considerable interest in him. Brodrick's reasons made him feel extremely
uncomfortable in offering such a dangerous post as War Correspondent to
young Prothero. Therefore when it came to Prothero's accepting it, he
did his best to withdraw the offer. It wasn't exactly an offer. He had
merely mentioned it as a possible opening, a suggestion in the last
resort. He pointed out to Prothero the dangers and the risks, among them
damage to his trade as a poet. Poets were too precious. There were, he
said, heaps of other men.

But Prothero had leaped at it; he had implored Brodrick not to put
another man in; and the more he leaped and implored the more Brodrick
tried to keep him off it.

But you couldn't keep him off. He was mad, apparently, with the sheer
lust of danger. He _would_ go. "If you do," Brodrick had said finally,
"you go at your own risk."

And he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. Brodrick,
in these days, found himself reiterating, "He _would_ go, he _would_
go." And all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his
death, because of Jane Holland.

He saw a great deal of Jane Holland in the weeks that followed
Prothero's departure.

They had reached the first month of autumn, and Jane was sitting out on
the lawn in Brodrick's garden. The slender, new-born body of Prothero's
Poems lay in her lap. Eddy Heron stretched himself at her feet. Winny
hung over her shoulder. Every now and then the child swept back her long
hair that brushed Jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see
what, as she phrased it, Mr. Prothero had done. Opposite them Mrs. Heron
and Gertrude Collett sat quietly sewing.

Eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about Jane as if she
wasn't there.

"I say, Mummy, don't you like her awfully?"

"Of course I like her," said Mrs. Heron, smiling at her son.

"Why do you like me?" said Jane, whose vision of Owen Prothero was again
obscured by Winny's hair.

"Why do we like anybody?" said Mrs. Heron, with her inassailable
reserve.

"You can't get out of it that way, Mum. You don't just go liking
anybody. You like jolly few. We're an awful family for not liking
people. Aren't we, Gee-Gee?"

"I didn't know it," said Miss Collett.

"Oh, but Gee-Gee's thinking of Uncle Hugh," said Winny.

Miss Collett's face stiffened. She _was_ thinking of him.

"Uncle Hugh? Why, he's worse than any of us. With
women--ladies--anyhow."

"Eddy, dear!" said Eddy's mother.

"Well, have you ever seen a lady Uncle Hugh could really stand--except
Miss Holland?"

Gertrude bent so low over her work that her face was hidden.

"I say! look at that kid. Can't you take your hair out of Miss Holland's
face? She doesn't want your horrid hair."

"Yes, I do," said Jane. She was grateful for the veil of Winny's hair.

They had not arrived suddenly, the five of them, at this intimacy. It
had developed during the last fortnight, which Jane, fulfilling a
promise, had spent with Dr. Brodrick and Mrs. Heron.

Jane had been ill, and Brodrick had brought her to his brother's house
to recover. Dr. Henry had been profoundly interested in her case. So had
his sister, Mrs. Heron, and Mr. John Brodrick and Mrs. John, and Sophy
Levine and Gertrude Collett, and Winny and Eddy Heron.

Since the day when they had first received her, the Brodricks had
established a regular cult of Jane Holland. It had become the prescribed
event for Jane to spend every possible Sunday at Putney Heath with the
editor of the "Monthly Review." Her friendship with his family had
advanced from Sunday to Sunday by slow, well-ordered steps. Jane had no
illusions as to its foundation. She knew that Brodrick's family had
begun by regarding her as part of Brodrick's property, the most
eligible, the most valuable part. It was interested in contemporary
talent merely as a thing in which Brodrick had a stake. It had hardly
been aware of Jane Holland previous to her appearance in the "Monthly
Review." After that it had been obliged to recognize her as a power
propitious to the editor's ambition and his dream. For though his family
regarded the editor of the "Monthly Review" as a dreamer, a fantastic
dreamer, it was glad to think that a Brodrick should have ambition,
still more to think that it could afford a dream. They had always
insisted upon that, there being no end to the things a Brodrick could
afford. They had identified Jane Holland with his dream and his
ambition, and were glad again to think that he could afford her. As for
her dreadful, her conspicuous celebrity, the uncomfortably staring fact
that she was Jane Holland, Jane was aware that it struck them chiefly as
reflecting splendour upon Brodrick. But she was aware that her unique
merit, her supreme claim, was that she had done a great thing for
Brodrick. On that account, if she had been the most obscure, the most
unremarkable Jane Holland, they would have felt it incumbent on them to
cherish her. They had incurred a grave personal obligation, and could
only meet it by that grave personal thing, friendship.