"I was not thinking of it, I assure you," said Frances. "I only wondered whether it were right." She elucidated her point. "For you, for your happiness, considering——"

"I'm not thinking of my own happiness, or I couldn't do it. No, I couldn't do it. I was thinking"—her voice sank and vibrated, and rose, exulting, to the stress—"of his."

Frances looked at her with gentle, questioning eyes. Hugh's happiness, no doubt, was the thing; but she wondered how Gertrude's presence was to secure it.

Slowly, bit by bit, with many meditative pauses, many sinkings of her thought into the depths, as if she sounded at each point her own sincerity, Gertrude made it out.

"Mrs. Brodrick is very sweet and very charming, and I know they are devoted. Still"—Gertrude's pause was poignant—"still—she is unusual."

"Well, yes," said Frances.

"And one sees that the situation is a little difficult."

Frances made no attempt to deny it.

"It always is," said Gertrude, "when the wife has an immense, absorbing interest apart. I can't help feeling that they've come, both of them, to a point—a turning point, where everything depends on saving her, as much as possible, all fret and worry. It's saving him. There are so many things she tries to do and can't do; and she puts them all on him."

"She certainly does," said Frances.

"If I'm there to do them, it will at least prevent this continual friction and strain."

"But you, my dear—you?"

"It doesn't matter about me." She was pensive over it. "If I solve his problem——"

"It will be very hard for you."

"I can bear anything if he's happy."

Frances smiled sadly. She had had worse things than that to bear.

"Of course," she said, "if you know—if you're sure that you care—in that way——"

"I didn't know until the other day, when I came back. It's only when you give up everything that you really know."

Frances was silent. If any woman knew, she knew. She had given up her husband to another woman. For his happiness she had given the woman her own name and her own place, when she might have shamed her by refusing the divorce he asked for.

"It wouldn't have been right for me to come back," said Gertrude, "if I hadn't been certain in my own heart that I can lift this feeling, and make it pure." Her voice thickened slightly. "It is pure. I think it always was. Why should I be ashamed of it? If there's anything spiritual in me, it's that."

Frances was not the woman to warn her of possible delusion; to hint at the risk run by the passion that disdains and disowns its kindred to the flesh.

She raised her eyes of tragedy, tender with unfallen tears.

"My dear," she said, "you're a very noble woman."

Across the narrow heath-path, with a lifted head, with flame in her heart and in her eyes, Gertrude made her way to Brodrick's house.

And once again, with immutable punctuality, the silver-chiming clock told out the hours; fair hours made perfect by the spirit of order moving in its round. It moved in the garden, and the lawn was clean and smooth; the roses rioted no longer; the borders and the paths were straight again. Indoors, all things on which Gertrude laid her hand slid sweetly and inaudibly into their place. The little squat god appeared again within his shrine; and a great peace came upon Brodrick and on Brodrick's house.

It came upon Jane. She sank into it and it closed over her, a marvellous, incredible peace. At the turning point when everything depended upon time, when time was all she wanted and was the one thing she could not get, suddenly time was made new and golden for her, it was given to her without measure, without break or stint.

Only once, and for a moment, Gertrude Collett intruded on her peace, looking in at Jane's study window as she passed on soft feet through the garden.

"Are you happy now?" she said.



XLIV

She moved with such soft feet, on so fine and light a wing that, but for the blessed effects of it, they were hardly aware of her presence in the house. Owing to her consummate genius for self-effacement, Brodrick remained peculiarly unaware. The bond of her secretaryship no longer held them. It had lapsed when Brodrick married, and Gertrude found herself superseded as the editor grew great.

For more than a year Brodrick's magazine had had a staff of its own, and its own office where Miss Addy Ranger sat in Gertrude's seat. Addy no longer railed at the impermanence and mutability of things. Having attained the extreme pitch of speed and competence, she was now established as Brodrick's secretary for good. She owed her position to Jane, a position from which, Addy exultantly declared, not even earthquakes could remove her.

You would have said nothing short of an earthquake could remove the "Monthly Review." It looked as if Brodrick's magazine, for all its dangerous splendour, had come to stay, as if Brodrick, by sheer fixity and the power he had of getting what he wanted, would yet force the world to accept his preposterous dream. He had gone straight on, deaf to his brother-in-law's warning and remonstrance; he had not checked for one moment the flight of his fantasy, nor changed by one nervous movement his high attitude. Month after month, the appearance of the magazine was punctual, inalterable as the courses of the moon.

Bold as Brodrick was, there was no vulgar audacity about his venture. The magazine was not hurled at people's heads; it was not thrust on them. It was barely offered. By the restraint and dignity of his advertisements the editor seemed to be saying to his public, "There it is. You take it or you leave it. In either case it is there; and it will remain there."

And strangely, inconceivably, it did remain. In nineteen-six Brodrick found himself planted with apparent security on the summit of his ambition. He had a unique position, a reputation for caring, caring with the candid purity of high passion, only for the best. He counted as a power unapproachable, implacable to mediocrity. Authors believed in him, adored, feared, detested him, according to their quality. Other editors admired him cautiously; they praised him to his face; in secret they judged him preposterous, but not absurd. They all prophesied his failure; they gave him a year, or at the most three years.

Some wondered that a man like Brodrick, solid, if you like, but after all, well, of no more than ordinary brilliance, should have gone so far. It was said among them that Jane Holland was the power behind Brodrick and his ordinary brilliance and his most extraordinary magazine. The imagination he displayed, the fine, the infallible discernment, the secret for the perfect thing, were hers, they could not by any possibility be Brodrick's.

Caro Bickersteth, who gathered these impressions in her continuous intercourse with the right people, met them with one invariable argument. If Brodrick wasn't fine, if he wasn't perceptive, if he hadn't got the scent, Caro challenged them, how on earth did he discern Jane Holland? His appreciation of her, Caro informed one or two eminent critics, had considerably forestalled their own. He was the first to see; he always was the first. He had taken up George Tanqueray when other editors wouldn't look at him, when he was absolutely unknown. And when Caro was reminded that there, at any rate, Jane Holland had been notoriously behind Brodrick's back, and that the editor was, notoriously again, in love with her, Caro made her point triumphantly, maintaining that to be in love with Jane Holland required some subtlety, if it came to that; and pray how, if Brodrick was devoid of it, did Jane Holland come to be in love with him?

It was generous of Caro, for even as sub-editor she was no longer Brodrick's right hand. To the right and to the left of him, at his back and perpetually before him, all round about him she saw Jane.

The wonder was that she saw her happy. It was Jane who observed to Caro how admirably they all of them, she, Addy Ranger, Gertrude, Brodrick, and those two queer women, Jane Brodrick and Jane Holland, were settled down into their right places, with everything about them incomparably ordered and adjusted.

Jane marvelled at the concessions that had been made to her, at the extent to which things were being done for her. Her hours were no longer confounded and consumed in supervising servants, interviewing tradespeople, and struggling with the demon of finance. They were all, Jane's hours, serenely and equitably disposed. She gave her mornings to her work, a portion of the afternoon to her son, and her evenings to her husband. Sometimes she sat up quite late with him, working on the magazine. Brodrick and the baby between them divided the three hours which were hers before dinner. The social round had ceased for Jane. Brodrick had freed her from the destroyers, from the pressure of the dreadful, clever little people. She was hardly yet aware of the more formidable impact of his family.

What impressed her was Brodrick's serene acceptance of her friends, his authors. He was wonderful in his brilliant, undismayed enthusiasm, as he followed the reckless charge, the shining onset of the talents. He accepted even Tanqueray's murderous, amazing ironies. If Brodrick's lifted eyebrows confessed that Tanqueray was amazing, they also intimated that Brodrick remained perpetually unamazed.

But, as an editor, he drew the line at Arnott Nicholson.

It was the sensitive Nicky who first perceived and pointed out a change in Jane. She moved among them abstractedly, with mute, half alienated eyes. She seemed to have suffered some spiritual disintegration that was pain. She gave herself to them no longer whole, but piecemeal. At times she seemed to hold out empty, supplicating hands, palms outward, showing that she could give no more. There was, she seemed to say, no more left of her.

Only Tanqueray knew how much was left; knew of her secret, imperishable resources, things that were hidden profoundly even from herself; so hidden that, even if she gave him nothing, it was always possible to him to help himself. To him she could not change. His creed had always been the unchangeableness, the indestructibility of Jinny.

Still, he assented, smiling, when little Laura confided to him that to see Jane Brodrick in Brodrick's house, among Brodricks, was not seeing Jinny. There was too much Brodrick. It would have been better, said Laura, if she had married Nicky.

He agreed. There would never have been too much of Nicky. But Laura shook her head.

"It isn't a question of proportion," she said. "It isn't that there's too much Brodrick and too little Jinny. It's simply that Jinny isn't there."

Jane knew how she struck them. There was sadness for her, not in their reproaches, for they had none, but in their recognition of the things that were impossible. They had always known how it would be if she married, if she was surrounded by a family circle.

There was no denying that she was surrounded, and that the circle was drawing rather tight. And she was planted there in the middle of it, more than ever under observation. She always had been; she had known it; only in the beginning it had not been quite so bad. Allowances had been made for her in the days when she did her best, when she was seen by all of them valiantly struggling, deplorably handicapped; in the days when, as Brodrick said, she was pathetic.

For the Brodricks as a family were chivalrous. Even Frances and Sophy were chivalrous; and it had touched them, that dismal spectacle of Jane doing her sad best. But now she was in the position of one to whom all things have been conceded. She was in for all the consequences of concession. Everything had been done for her that could be done. She was more than ever on her honour, more than ever pledged to do her part. If she failed Brodrick now at any point she was without excuse. Every nerve in her vibrated to the touch of honour.

Around her things went with the rhythm of faultless mechanism. There was no murmur, no perceptible vibration at the heart of the machine. You could not put your finger on it and say that it was Gertrude. Yet you knew it. Time itself and the awful punctuality of things were in Gertrude's hand. You would have known it even if, every morning at the same hour, you had not come upon Gertrude standing on a chair winding up the clock that Jane invariably forgot to wind. You felt that by no possibility could Gertrude forget to wind up anything. She herself was wound up every morning. She might have been a clock. She was wound up by Brodrick; otherwise she was self-regulating, provided with a compensation balance, and so long as Brodrick wound her, incapable of going wrong. Jane envied her her secure and secret mechanism, her automatic rhythm, the delicate precision of her ways. Compared with them her own performance was dangerous, fantastic, a dance on a tight-rope. She marvelled at her own preternatural poise.

She was steady; they could never say she was not steady. And they could never say it was not difficult. She had so many balls to keep going. There was her novel; and there was Brodrick, and the baby, and Brodrick's family, and her own friends. She couldn't drop one of them.

And at first there came on her an incredible, effortless dexterity. She was a fine juggler on her tight-rope, keeping in play her golden balls that multiplied till you could have sworn that she must miss one. And she never missed. She kept her head; she held it high; she fixed her eyes on the tossing balls, and simply trusted her feet not to swerve by a hair's-breadth. And she never swerved.

But now she was beginning to feel the trembling of the perfect balance. It was as if, in that marvellous adjustment of relations, she had arrived at the pitch where perfection topples over. She moved with tense nerves on the edge of peril.

How tense they were she hardly realized till Tanqueray warned her.

It was on Friday, that one day of the week when Brodrick was kept late at the office of the "Morning Telegraph." And it was August, two months after the coming of Gertrude Collett. Tanqueray, calling to see Jane, as he frequently did on a Friday, about five o'clock in the afternoon, found her in her study, playing with the baby.

She had the effrontery to hold the baby up, with his little naked legs kicking in Tanqueray's face. At ten months old he was a really charming baby, and very like Brodrick.

"Do you like him?" she said.

He stepped back and considered her. She had put her little son down on the floor, where, by an absurd rising and falling motion of his rosy hips, he contrived to travel across the room towards the fireplace.

Tanqueray said that he liked the effect of him.

"The general effect? It is heartrending."

"I mean his effect on you, Jinny. He makes you look like some nice, furry animal in a wood."

At that she snatched the child from his goal, the sharp curb of the hearthstone, and set him on her shoulder. Her face was turned up to him, his hands were in her hair. Mother and child they laughed together.

And Tanqueray looked at her, thinking how never before had he seen her just like that; never before with her body, tall for sheer slenderness, curved backwards, with her face so turned, and her mouth, fawn-like, tilting upwards, the lips half-mocking, half-maternal.

It was Jinny, shaped by the powers of life.

"Now," he said, "he makes you look like a young Maenad; mad, Jinny, drunk with life, and dangerous to life. What are you going to do with him?"

At that moment Gertrude Collett appeared in the doorway.

She returned Tanqueray's greeting as if she hardly saw him. Her face was set towards Jane Brodrick and the child.

"I am going," said Jane, "to give him to any one who wants him. I am going to give him to Miss Collett. There—you may keep him as long as you like."

Gertrude advanced, impassive, scarcely smiling. But as she took the child from Jane, Tanqueray saw how the fine lines of her lips tightened, relaxed, and tightened again, as if her tenderness were pain.

She laid the little thing across her shoulder and went from them without a word.

"He goes like a lamb," said Jane. "A month ago he'd have howled the house down."

"So that's how you've solved your problem?" said Tanqueray, as he closed the door behind Miss Collett.

"Yes. Isn't it simple?"

"Very. But you always were."

From his corner of the fireside lounge, where he seated himself beside her, his eyes regarded her with a grave and dark lucidity. The devil in them was quiet for a time.

"That's a wonderful woman, George," said she.

"Not half so wonderful as you," he murmured. (It was what Brodrick had once said.)

"She's been here exactly two months and—it's incredible—but I've begun another book. I'm almost half through."

His eyes lightened.

"So it's come back, Jinny?"

"You said it would."

"Yes. But I think I told you the condition. Do you remember?"

She lowered her eyes, remembering.

"What was it you said?"

"That you'd have to pay the price."

"Not yet. Not yet. And perhaps, after all, I shan't have to. I mayn't be able to finish."

"What makes you think so?"

"Because I've been so happy over it."

Of a sudden there died out of her face the fawn-like, woodland look, the maternal wildness, the red-blooded joy. She was the harassed and unquiet Jinny whom he knew. It was so that her genius dealt with her. She had been swung high on a strong elastic, luminous wave; and now she was swept down into its trough.

He comforted her as he had comforted her before. It was, he assured her, what he was there for.

"We're all like that, Jinny, we're all like that. It's no worse than I feel a dozen times over one infernal book. It's no more than what you've felt about everything you've ever done—even Hambleby."

"Yes." She almost whispered it. "It is worse."

"How?"

"Well, I don't know whether it is that there isn't enough time—yet, or whether I've really not enough strength. Don't tell anybody I said so. Above all, don't tell Henry."

"I shouldn't dream of telling Henry."

"You see, sometimes I feel as if I was walking on a tight-rope of time, held for me, by somebody else, over an abyss; and that, if somebody else were suddenly to let go, there I should be—precipitated. And sometimes it's as if I were doing it all with one little, little brain-cell that might break any minute; or with one little tight nerve that might snap. It's the way Laura used to feel. I never knew what it was like till now. Poor little Laura, don't you remember how frightened we always were?"

He was frightened now. He suggested that she had better rest. He tried to force from her a promise that she would rest. He pointed out the absolute necessity of rest.

"That's it. I'm afraid to rest. Lest—later on—there shouldn't be any time at all."

"Why shouldn't there be?"

"Things," she said wildly and vaguely, "get hold of you. And yet, you'd have thought I'd cut myself loose from most."

"Cut yourself looser."

"But—from what?"

"Your relations."

"How can I. I wouldn't if I could."

"Your friends, then—Nina, Laura, Prothero, Nicky—me."

"You? I can't do without you."

He smiled. "No, Jinny. I told you long ago you couldn't."

He was moved, very strangely moved, by her admission. He had not had to help himself to that. She had given it to him, a gift from the unseen.

"Well," he said presently, "what are you going to do?"

"Oh—struggle along somehow."

"I wouldn't struggle too hard." He meditated. "Look here, our natural tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it's people that do all the mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. We'll believe anything rather than that. But we've got to recognize that it's capricious. It comes and goes."

"Still, people do count. My brother-in-law, John Brodrick, makes it go. Whereas you, Tanks, I own you make it come."

"Oh, I make it come, do I?"

He wondered, "What does Brodrick do?"

His smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder.

She turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face, thus estranged and averted. He thought he knew the source of it and its secret. It also was a gift from the unseen.

When he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal passion.

And Gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like Tanqueray, she thought she knew.



XLV

There were moments when she longed to be as Gertrude, a woman with one innocent, uncomplicated aim. She was no longer sorry for her. Gertrude's passion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly appeased. She bore within her no tyrannous divinity. She knew nothing of the consuming and avenging will.

Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it, past all bounds.

For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision. They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the grass was green under their feet. The things they touched were saturated with their presence. There was no sign of ardent life they had not.

And not only was she surrounded by their visible bodies, but their souls possessed her; she became the soul of each one of them in turn. It was the intimacy, the spiritual warmth of the possession that gave her her first sense of separation, of infidelity to Brodrick. The immaterial, consecrated places were invaded. It was as if she closed her heart to her husband and her child.

The mood continued as long as the vision kept its grip. She came out of it unnerved and exhausted, and terrified at herself. Bodily unfaithfulness seemed to her a lesser sin.

Brodrick was aware that she wandered. That was how he had always put it. He had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. It was the way of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that had attracted him. He understood that sort of thing. It was his own comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face of his family's tradition. No Brodrick had ever married a woman who wandered, who conceivably would want to wander.

And Jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances for. And with each wandering she became increasingly difficult to find.

Still, hitherto he had had his certainty. Her spirit might torment him with its disappearances; through her body, surrendered to his arms, he had had the assurance of ultimate possession. At night her genius had no power over her. Sleeping, she had deliverance in dreams. His passion moved in her darkness, sounded her depths; through all their veils of sleep she was aware of him, and at a touch she turned to him.

Now it was he who had no power over her.

One night, when he came to her, he found a creature that quivered at his touch and shrank from it, fatigued, averted; a creature pitifully supine, with arms too weary to enforce their own repulse. He took her in his arms and she gave a cry, little and low, like a child's whimper. It went to his heart and struck cold there. It was incredible that Jinny should have given such a cry.

He lay awake a long time. He wondered if she had ceased to care for him. He hardly dared own how it terrified him, this slackening of the physical tie.

He got up early and dressed and went out into the garden. At six o'clock he came back into her room. She was asleep, and he sat and watched her. She lay with one arm thrown up above her pillow, as the trouble of her sleep had tossed her. Her head was bowed upon her breast.



His watching face was lowered as he brooded over the marvel and the mystery of her. It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife, whose face had been so tender to him, whose body utterly tender, utterly compassionate. He tried to realize the marvel and mystery of her genius. He knew it to be an immortal thing, hidden behind the veil of mortal flesh that for the moment was so supremely dear to him. He wondered once whether she still cared for Tanqueray. But the thought passed from him; it could not endure beside the memory of her tenderness.

She woke and found his eyes fixed on her. They drew her from sleep, as they had so often drawn her from some dark corner where she had sat removed. She woke, as if at the urgence of a trouble that kept watch in her under her sleep. In a moment she was wide-eyed, alert; she gazed at him with a lucid comprehension of his state. She held out to him an arm drowsier than her thought.

"I'm a brute to you," she said, "but I can't help it."

She sat up and gathered together the strayed masses of her hair.

"Do you think," she said, "you could get me a cup of tea from the servant's breakfast?"

He brought the tea, and as they drank together their mutual memories revived.

"I have," said she, "the most awful recollection of having been a brute to you."

"Never mind, Jinny," he said, and flushed with the sting of it.

"I don't. That's the dreadful part of it. I can't feel sorry when I want to. I can't feel anything at all."

She closed her eyes helplessly against his.

"It isn't my fault. It isn't really me. It's It."

He smiled at this reference to the dreadful Power.

"The horrible and brutal thing about it is that it stops you feeling. It would, you know."

"Would it? I shouldn't have thought it would have made that difference."

"That's just the difference it does make."

He moved impatiently. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I wouldn't talk about it—only—it's much better that you should know what it is, than that you should think it's what it isn't."

She looked at him. His forehead still displayed a lowering incredulity.

"If you don't believe me, ask George Tanqueray."

"George Tanqueray?"

His nerves felt the shock of the thought that had come to him, just now when he watched her sleep. He had not expected to meet Tanqueray again so soon and in the open.

"How much do you think he cares for poor Rose when he's in the state I'm in?"

His face darkened as he considered her question. He knew all about poor Rose's trouble, how her tender flesh and blood had been made to pay for Tanqueray's outrageous genius. He and Henry had discussed it. Henry had his own theory of it. He offered it as one more instance of the physiological disabilities of genius. It was an extreme and curious instance, if you liked, Tanqueray himself being curious and extreme. But it had not occurred to Brodrick that Henry's theory of Tanqueray might be applied to Jane.

"What on earth do you know about George Tanqueray?" he said. "How could you know a thing like that?"

"I know because I'm like him."

"No, Jinny, it's not the same thing. You're a woman."

She smiled, remembering sadly how that was what George in a brutal moment had said she was not to be. It showed after all how well he knew her.

"I'm more like George Tanqueray," she said, "than I'm like Gertrude Collett."

He frowned, wondering what Gertrude Collett had to do with it.

"We're all the same," she said. "It takes us that way. You see, it tires us out."

He sighed, but his face lightened.

"If nothing's left of a big strong man like George Tanqueray, how much do you suppose is left of me? It's perfectly simple—simpler than you thought. But it has to be."

It was simpler than he had thought. He understood her to say that in its hour, by taking from her all passion, her genius was mindful of its own.

"I see," he said; "it's simply physical exhaustion."

She closed her eyes again.

He saw and rose against it, insanely revolted by the sacrifice of Jinny's womanhood.

"It shows, Jinny, that you can't stand the strain. Something will have to be done," he said.

"Oh, what?" Her eyes opened on him in terror.

His expression was utterly blank, utterly helpless. He really hadn't an idea.

"I don't know, Jinny."

He suggested that she should stay in bed for breakfast.

She stayed.

Down-stairs, over the breakfast-table, he presented to Gertrude Collett a face heavy with his suffering.

He was soothed by Gertrude's imperishable tact. She was glad to hear that Mrs. Brodrick had stayed in bed for breakfast. It would do her good.

At dinner-time they learned that it had done her good. Gertrude was glad again. She said that Mrs. Brodrick knew she had always wanted her to stay in bed for breakfast. She saw no reason why she should not stay in bed for breakfast every morning.

Henry was consulted. He said, "By all means. Capital idea." In a week's time, staying in bed for breakfast had made such a difference to Jane that Gertrude was held once more to have solved the problem. Brodrick even said that if Jane always did what Gertrude wanted she wouldn't go far wrong.

The Brodricks all knew that Jane was staying in bed for breakfast. The news went the round of the family in three days. It travelled from Henry to Frances, from Frances to Mabel, from Mabel to John, and from John to Levine and Sophy. They received it unsurprised, with melancholy comprehension, as if they had always known it. And they said it was very sad for Hugh.

Gertrude said it was very sad for everybody. She said it to Brodrick one Sunday morning, looking at him across the table, where she sat in Jane's place. At first he had not liked to see her there, but he was getting used to it. She soothed him with her stillness, her smile, and the soft deepening of her shallow eyes.

"It's very sad, isn't it," said she, "without Mrs. Brodrick?"

"Very," he said. He wondered ironically, brutally, what Gertrude would say if she really know how sad it was. There had been another night like that which had seemed to him the beginning of it all.

"May I give you some more tea?"

"No, thank you. I wonder," said he, "how long it's going to last."

"I suppose," said he, "it must run its course."

"You talk like my brother, as if it were an illness."

"Well—isn't it?"

"How should I know? I haven't got it."

He rose and went to the window that looked out on to the garden and the lawn and Jane's seat under the lime-tree. He remembered how one summer, three years ago, before he married her, she had lain there recovering from the malady of her genius. A passion of revolt surged up in him.

"I suppose, anyhow, it's incurable," he said, more to himself than to Gertrude.

She had risen from her place and followed him.

"Whatever it is," she said, "it's the thing we've got most to think of. It's the thing that means most to her."

"To her?" he repeated vaguely.

"To her," she insisted. "I didn't understand it at first; I can't say I understand it now; it's altogether beyond me. But I do say it's the great thing."

"Yes," he assented, "it's the great thing."

"The thing" (she pressed it) "for which sacrifices must be made."

Then, lest he should think that she pressed it too hard, that she rubbed it into him, the fact that stung, the fact that his wife's genius was his dangerous rival, standing between them, separating them, slackening the tie; lest he should know how much she knew; lest he should consider her obtuse, as if she thought that he grudged his sacrifices, she faced him with her supreme sincerity.

"You know that you are glad to make them."

She smiled, clear-eyed, shining with her own inspiration. She was the woman who was there to serve him, who knew his need. She came to him in his hour of danger, in his dark, sensual hour, and held his light for him. She held him to himself high.

He was so helpless that he turned to her as if she indeed knew.

"Do you think," he said, "it does mean most to her?"

"You know best," she said, "what it means."

It sank into him. And, as it sank, he said to himself that of course it was so; that he might have known it. Gertrude left it sinking.

He never for a moment suspected that she had rubbed it in.



XLVI

They were saying now that Jane left her husband too much to Gertrude Collett, and that it was hard on Hugh.

They supposed, in their unastonished acceptance of the facts, that things would have to go on like this indefinitely. It was partly Hugh's own fault. That was John Brodrick's view of it. Hugh had given her her head and she was off. And when Jane was off (Sophy declared) nothing could stop her.

And yet she was stopped.

Suddenly, in the full fury of it, she stopped dead.

She had given herself ten months. She had asked for ten months; not a day more. But she had not allowed for friction or disturbance from the outside. And the check—it was a clutch at the heart that brought her brain up staggering—came entirely from the outside, from the uttermost rim of her circle, from Mabel Brodrick.

In January, the last but three of the ten months, Mabel became ill. All autumn John Brodrick's wife had grown slenderer and redder-eyed, her little high-nosed, distinguished face thinned and drooped, till she was more than ever like a delicate bird.

Jane heard from Frances vague rumours of the source of Mabel's malady. The powers of life had been cruel to the lady whom John Brodrick had so indiscreetly married.

It was incredible to all of them that poor Mabel should have the power to stay Jinny in her course. But it was so. Mabel had became attached to Jinny. She clung, she adhered; she drew her life through Jinny. It was because she felt that Jane understood, that she was the only one of them who really knew. It was, she all but intimated, because Jane was not a Brodrick. When she was with the others, Mabel was reminded perpetually of her failure, of how horribly she had made John suffer. Not that they ever said a word about it, but they made her feel it; whereas Jinny had seen from the first that she suffered too; she recognized her perfect right to suffer. And when it all ended, as it was bound to end, in a bad illness, the only thing that did Mabel any good was seeing Jinny.

That was in January (they put it all down to the cold of January); and every day until the middle of February when Mabel was about again, Jane tramped across the Heath to Augustus Road, always in weather that did its worst for Mabel, always in wind or frost or rain. She never missed a day.

Sometimes Henry was with her. He made John's house the last point of his round that he might sit with Mabel. He had never sat with her before; he had never paid very much attention to her. It was the change in Henry that made Jane alive to the change in Mabel; for the long, lean, unhappy man, this man of obstinate distastes and disapprovals, had an extreme tenderness for all physical suffering.

Since Mabel's illness he had dropped his disapproving attitude to Jane. She could almost have believed that Henry liked her.

One day as they turned together into the deep avenue of Augustus Road, she saw kind grey eyes looking down at her from Henry's height.

"You're very good to poor Mabel, Jinny," he said.

"I can't do much."

"Do what you can. We shan't have her with us very long."

"Henry——"

"She doesn't know it. John doesn't know it. But I thought I'd tell you."

"I'm glad you've told me."

"It's a kindness," he went on, "to go and see her. It takes her mind off herself."

"She doesn't complain."

"No. She doesn't complain. But her mind turns in on itself. It preys on her. And of course it's terrible for John."

She agreed. "Of course, it's terrible—for John." But she was thinking how terrible it was for Mabel. She wondered, did they say of her and of her malady, how terrible it was for Hugh?

"This is a great interruption to your work," he said presently, with the peculiar solemnity he accorded to the obvious.

Her pace quickened. The frosty air stung her cheeks and the blood mounted there.

"It won't hurt you," he said. "You're better when you're not working."

"Am I?" said she in a voice that irritated Henry.



XLVII

In February the interruption ceased. Mabel was better. She was well enough for John to take her to the Riviera.

Jane was, as they said, "off" again. But not all at once; not without suffering, for the seventh time, the supreme agony of the creator—that going down into the void darkness, to recall the offended Power, to endure the tortures that propitiate the revolted Will.

Her book was finished in March and appeared in April. Her terror of the published thing was softened to her by the great apathy and fatigue which now came upon her; a fatigue and an apathy in which Henry recognized the beginning of the illness he had prophesied. He reminded her that he had prophesied it long ago; and he watched her, sad and unsurprised, but like the angel he invariably was in the presence of physical suffering.

She was thus spared the ordeal of the birthday celebration. It was understood that she would give audience in her study to her friends, to Arnott Nicholson, to the Protheros and Tanqueray. Instead of all going in at once, they were to take it in turns.

She lay there on her couch, waiting for Tanqueray to come and tell her whether this time it was life or death.

Nicky's turn came first. Nicky was unspeakably moved at the sight of her. He bent over her hand and kissed it; and her fear misread his mood.

"Dear Nicky," she said, "are you consoling me?"

He stood solemnly before her, inspired, positively flaming with annunciation.

"Wait—wait," he said, "till you've seen Him. I won't say a word."

Nicky had never made himself more beautiful; he had never yet, in all his high renouncing, so sunk, so hidden himself behind the splendour that was Tanqueray.

"And Prothero" (he laid beauty upon beauty), "he'll tell you himself. He's on his knees."

The moments passed. Nicky in his beauty and his pain wandered outside in the garden, leaving her to Prothero and Laura.

And in the drawing-room, where Tanqueray waited for his turn, Jane's family appraised her triumph. Henry, to Caro Bickersteth in a corner, was not sure that he did not, on the whole, regret it. These books wrecked her nerves. She was, Henry admitted, a great genius; but great genius, what was it, after all, but a great Neurosis?

Not far from them Louis Levine, for John's benefit, calculated the possible proceeds of the new book. Louis smiled his mobile smile as he caught the last words of Henry's diagnosis. Henry might say what he liked. Neurosis, to that extent, was a valuable asset. He could do, Louis said, with some of it himself.

Brodrick, as he surveyed with Tanqueray the immensity of his wife's achievement, wondered whether, for all that, she had not paid too high a price. And Sophy Levine, who overheard him, whispered to Frances that it was he, poor dear, who paid.

Tanqueray got up and left the room. He had heard through it all the signal that he waited for, the sound of the opening of Jane's door.

Her eyes searched his at the very doorway. "Is it all right, George?" she whispered. Her hand, her thin hand, held his until he answered.

"It's tremendous."

"Do you remember two years ago—when you wouldn't drink?"

"I drank this time. I'm drunk, Jinny, drunk as a lord."

"I swore I'd make you drink, this time; if I died for it."

She leaned back in the corner of her couch, looking at him.

"Thank heaven you've never lied to me; because now I know."

"I wonder if you do. It's alive, Jinny; it's organic; it's been conceived and born." He brought his chair close to the table that stood beside her couch, a barrier between them. "It's got what we're all praying for—that divine unity——"

"I didn't think it could have it. I'm torn in pieces."

"You? I knew you would be."

"It wasn't the book."

"What was it?" he said fiercely.

"It was chiefly, I think, Mabel Brodrick's illness."

"Whose illness?"

"John's wife's. You don't know what it means."

"I can see. You let that woman prey on you. She sucks your life. You're white; you're thin; you're ill, too."

She shook her head. "Only tired, George."

"Why do you do it? Why do you do it, Jinny?" he pleaded.

"Ah—I must."

He rose and walked up and down the room; and each time as he turned to face her he burst out into speech.

"What's Brodrick doing?"

She did not answer. He noticed that she never answered him when he spoke of Brodrick now. He paid no heed to the warning of her face.

"Why does he let his beastly relations worry you? You didn't undertake to marry the whole lot of them."

He turned from her with that, and she looked after him. The set of his shoulders was square with his defiance and his fury.

He faced her again.

"I suppose if he was ill you'd have to look after him. I don't see that you're bound to look after his sisters-in-law. Why can't the Brodricks look after her?"

"They do. But it's me she wants."

He softened, looking down at her. But she did not see his look.

"You think," said she, "that it's odd of her—the last thing anybody could want?"

His face changed suddenly as the blood surged in it. He sat down, and stretched his arms across the table that was the barrier between them. His head leaned towards her with its salient thrust, its poise of impetus and forward flight.

"If you knew," he said, "the things you say——"

His hands made a sudden movement, as if they would have taken hers that lay nerveless and helpless, almost within their grasp.

She drew her hands back.

"It's nearly ten o'clock," she said.

"Do you want me to go?"

She smiled. "No. Only—they'll say, if I sit up, that that's what tires me."

"And does it? Do I tire you?"

"You never tire me."

"At any rate I don't destroy you; I don't prey on you."

"We all prey on each other. I prey on you."

"You? Oh—Jinny!"

Again there was a movement of his hands, checked, this time, by his own will.

"Five minutes past ten, George. They'll come and carry me out if I don't go."

"Who will?"

"All of them, probably. They're all in there."

"It's preposterous. They don't care what they do to you themselves; they bore you brutally; they tire you till you're sick; they hand you on to each other, to be worried and torn to pieces; and they drag you from anybody who does you good. They don't let you have five minutes' pleasure, Jinny, or five minutes' peace. Good Lord, what a family!"

"Anyhow, it's my family."

"It isn't. You haven't got a family; you never had and you never will have. They don't belong to you, and you don't belong to any of them, and you know it——"

She rose. "All the same, I'm going to them," she said. "And that reminds me, how's Rose?"

"Perfectly well, I believe."

"It's ages since I saw Rose. Tell her—tell her that I'm coming to see her."

"When?" he said.

"Some day next week."

"Sunday?"

He knew, and she knew that he knew, that Sunday was Brodrick's day.

"No, Monday. Monday, about four."



XLVIII

Tanqueray was realizing more and more that he was married, and that his marriage had been made in that heaven where the spirit of creative comedy abides. In spite of the superb sincerity of his indifference, he found it increasingly difficult to ignore his wife. It had, in fact, become impossible now that people no longer ignored him. Rose, as the wife of an obscurity, could very easily be kept obscure. But, by a peculiar irony, as Tanqueray's genius became recognized, Rose, though not exactly recognized in any social sense, undoubtedly tended to appear. Tanqueray might dine "out" without her (he frequently did), but when it came to asking people back again she was bound to be in evidence. Not that he allowed himself to tread the ruinous round. He still kept people at arm's length. Only people were more agreeably disposed towards George Tanqueray recognized than they had been towards George Tanqueray obscure, and he in consequence was more agreeably disposed towards them. Having made it clearly understood that he would not receive people, that he barred himself against all intrusions and approaches, occasionally, at the length of his arm, he did receive them. And they immediately became aware of Rose.

That did not matter, considering how little they mattered. The nuisance of it was that he thus became aware of her himself. Rose at the head of his table, so conspicuously and yet so fortuitously his wife, emphasizing her position by her struggles to sustain it, Rose with her embarrassments and solecisms, with her lost innocence in the matter of her aspirates, agonized now by their terrified flight and by her own fluttering efforts at recapture, Rose was not a person that anybody could ignore, least of all her husband.

As long as she had remained a servant in his house he had been unaware of her, or aware of her only as a presence beneficent, invisible, inaudible. Here again his celebrity, such as it was, had cursed him. The increase in Tanqueray's income, by enabling them to keep a servant, had the effect of throwing Rose adrift about the house. As the mistress of it, with a maid under her, she was not quite so invisible, nor yet so inaudible as she had been.

It seemed to Tanqueray that his acuter consciousness dated from the arrival of that maid. Rose, too, had developed nerves. The maid irritated Rose. She put her back up and rubbed her the wrong way in all the places where she was sorest. For Rose's weakness was that she couldn't tolerate any competition in her own line. She couldn't, as she said, abide sitting still and seeing the work taken out of her hands, seeing another woman clean her house, and cook her husband's dinner, and she knowing that she could do both ten times as well herself. She appealed to Tanqueray to know how he'd like it if she was to get a man in to write his books for him. She was always appealing to Tanqueray. When George wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with Susan, and declared that Susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, Rose said that was the worst of it. Susan was much too superior for her. She could see well enough, she said, that Susan knew that she was not a lady, and she could see that George knew that she knew. Else why did he say that Susan was superior? And sometimes George would be beside himself with fury and would roar, "Damn Susan!" And sometimes, but not often, he would be a torment and a tease. He would tell Rose that he loved Susan, that he adored Susan, that he couldn't live without her. He might part with Rose, but he couldn't possibly part with Susan. Susan was the symbol of his prosperity. Without Susan he would not feel celebrated any more.

And sometimes Rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled her with Susan. And Tanqueray cursed Susan in his heart, as the cause of Rose's increasing tendency to conversation.

It was there that she encroached. She invaded more and more the guarded territory of silence. She annexed outlying pieces of Tanqueray's sacred time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to.

He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the habit.

And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in. Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful.

Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury on Tanqueray's part and on Rose's a long period of dumbness.

He was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing Jane Brodrick. From every meeting with Jane he came to her gloomy and depressed and irritable. And the meetings were growing more frequent. He saw Jane now at less and less intervals. He couldn't go on without seeing her. A fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. He had a sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that passed between the night (it was a Thursday) when he had dined at Putney and Monday afternoon when Jane had promised that she would come to Hampstead.

On Monday a telegram arrived for Tanqueray. The brisk director of a great publishing firm in New York desired (at the last moment before his departure) an appointment with the novelist for that afternoon. The affair was of extreme importance. The American meant business. It would be madness not to see him, even though he should miss Jinny.

All morning Tanqueray sulked because of that American.

Rose was cowed by his mood. At luncheon she prepared herself to sit dumb lest she should irritate him. She had soft movements that would have conciliated a worse ruffian than Tanqueray in his mood. She rebuked the importunities of Joey in asides so tender that they couldn't have irritated anybody. But Tanqueray remained irritated. He couldn't eat his luncheon, and said so.

And then Rose said something, out loud. That wasn't her fault, she said. And Tanqueray told her that he hadn't said it was. Then, maddened by her thought, she (as she put it to herself afterwards) fair burst with it.

"I wish I'd never set eyes on that Susan!" said she.

Tanqueray at the moment was trying to make notes in his memorandum-book. He might be able to cut short that interview if he started with all his points clear.

"Oh—hold your tongue," said Tanqueray.

"I am 'oldin' it," said Rose.

He smiled at that in spite of himself. He was softened by its reminder of her submissive dumbness, by its implication that there were, after all, so many things she might have said and hadn't.

Having impressed upon her that she was on no account to let Mrs. Brodrick go till he came back, he rushed for his appointment.

By rushing away from it, cutting it very short indeed, he contrived to be back again at half-past four. Susan informed him that Mrs. Brodrick had come. She had arrived at four with the baby and the nurse. She was in there with the baby.

"The baby?"

Sounds of laughter came from the dining-room, rendering it unnecessary for Susan to repeat her statement. She smiled sidelong at the door, as much as to say she had put her master on to a good thing. He would appreciate what he found in there.

In there he found Jinny crouching on a footstool; facing her, Rose knelt upon the floor. In the space between them, running incessantly to and fro on his unsteady feet, was Brodrick's little son. When he got to Jinny he flung his arms around her neck and kissed her twice, and then Rose said, "Oh, kiss poor Rose"; and when he got to Rose he flung his arms around her neck, too, and kissed her, once only. That was the distinction that he made. And as he ran he laughed, he laughed as if love were the biggest joke in all the world.

Tanqueray stood still in the doorway and watched, as he had stood once in the doorway of the house in Bloomsbury, watching Rose. Now he was watching Jinny. He thought he had never seen her look so divinely happy. He watched Brodrick's son and thought distastefully that when Brodrick was a baby he must have looked just like that.

And the little Brodrick ran to and fro, from Jinny to Rose and from Rose to Jinny, passionately, monotonously busy, with always the same rapturous embrace from Brodrick's wife and always the same cry from Tanqueray's, "Kiss poor Rose!"

When Jane turned to greet Tanqueray, the baby clung to her gown. His mouth drooped as he realized that it was no longer possible to reach her face. Identifying Tanqueray as the cause of her remoteness, he stamped a baby foot at him; he distorted his features and set up a riotous howl. Rose reiterated her sad cry as a charm to distract him. She pretended to cry too, because the baby wouldn't look at her. He wouldn't look at anybody till his mother took him in her arms and kissed him. Then, with his round face still flushing under his tears, he smiled at Tanqueray, a smile of superhuman forgiveness and reconciliation.

Rose gazed at them in a rapture.

"Well," said she, "how you can keep orf kissin' 'im——"

"I can keep off kissing anything," said he.

Jane asked if he would ring for the nurse to take the baby.

Tanqueray was glad when he went. It had just dawned on him that he didn't like to see Jinny with a baby; he didn't like to see her preoccupied with Brodrick's son, adoring, positively adoring, and caressing Brodrick's son.

At the same time it struck him that it was a pity that Rose had never had a baby; but he didn't carry the thought far enough to reflect that Rose's baby would be his son. He wondered if he could persuade Jinny to send the baby home and stay for dinner.

He apologized for not having been there to receive her. Jane replied that Rose had entertained her.

"You mean that you were entertaining Rose?"

"We were entertaining each other."

"And now you've got to entertain me."

She was going to when Rose interrupted (her mind was still running on the baby).

"If I was you," said she, "I shouldn't leave 'im much to that Gertrude."

"What?" (It was Tanqueray who exclaimed.) "Not to the angel in the house?"

"I don't know about angels, but if it was me I wouldn't leave 'im, or she'll get a hold on 'im."

"Isn't he," said Tanqueray, "a little young?"

But Rose was very serious.

"It's when 'e's young she'll do the mischief."

"My dear Rose," said Jane, "whatever do you think she'll do?"

"She'll estrange 'im, if you don't take care."

"She couldn't."

"Couldn't? She'll get a 'old before you know where you are."

"But," said Jane quietly, "I do know where I am."

"Not," Rose insisted, "when you're away, writin'."

Tanqueray saw Jane's face flush and whiten. He looked at Rose.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said, with anger under his breath.

Jane seemed not to know that he was there. She addressed herself exclusively to Rose.

"What do you suppose happens when I'm—away?"

"You forget."

"Never!" said Jane. The passion of her inflection was lost on Rose who brooded.

"You forget," she repeated. "And she doesn't."

Involuntarily Tanqueray looked at Jane and Jane at Tanqueray. There were moments when his wife's penetration was terrible.

Rose was brooding so profoundly that she failed to see the passing of that look.

"If it was me," she murmured in a thick voice, a voice soft as her dream, "if it was my child——"

Tanqueray's nerves gave way. "But it isn't." He positively roared at her. "And it never will be."

Rose shrank back as if he had struck her. Jane's heart leaped to her help.

"If it was," she said, "it would have the dearest, sweetest little mother."

At that, at the sudden tenderness of it coming after Tanqueray's blow, Rose gave a half-audible moan and got up quickly and left the room. They heard her faltering steps up-stairs in the room above them.

It was then that Tanqueray asked Jane if she would stay and dine with them. She could send a note to Brodrick by the nurse.

She stayed. She felt that if she did not Tanqueray would bully Rose.

Rose was glad she stayed. She was afraid to be left alone that evening with George. She was dumb before him, and her dumbness cut Jane to the heart. Jane tried to make her talk a little during dinner. They talked about the Protheros when Susan was in the room, and when she was out of it they talked about Susan.

This was not wise of Jane, for it exasperated Tanqueray. He wanted to talk to Jane, and he wanted to be alone with her to talk.

After dinner they went up to his study to look at some books he had bought. The best of selling your own books, he said, was that you could buy as many as you wanted of other people's. He had now got as many as he wanted. They were more than the room would hold. All that he could not get on to the shelves were stacked about the floor. He stood among them smiling.

Rose did not smile. The care of Tanqueray's study was her religion.

"How am I to get round them 'eaps to dust?" said she.

"You don't get round them, and you don't dust," said Tanqueray imperturbably.

"Then—them books'll breed a fever."

"They will. But you won't catch it."

Rose lingered, and he suggested that it would be as well if she went down-stairs and made the coffee. She needn't send it up till nine, he said. It was now five minutes past eight.

She went obediently.

"She knows she isn't allowed into this room," said Tanqueray to Jane.

"You speak of her as if she was a dog," said she. She added that she would have to go at half-past eight. There was a train at nine that she positively must catch.

He had to go down and ask Rose to come back with the coffee soon. Jane was glad that she had forced on him that act of humility.

For the moments that she remained alone with him she wandered among his books. There were some that she would like to borrow. She talked about them deliberately while Tanqueray maddened.

He walked with her to the station.

She turned on him as they dipped down the lane out of sight and hearing.

"George," she said, "I'll never come and see you again if you bully that dear little wife of yours."

"I?—Bully her?"

"Yes. You bully her, you torture her, you terrify her till she doesn't know what she's doing."

"I'm sorry, Jinny."

"Sorry? Of course you're sorry. She slaves for you from morning till night."

"That's not my fault. I stopped her slaving and she got ill. Why, it was you—you—who made me turn her on to it again."

"Of course I did. She loves slaving for you. She'd cut herself in little pieces. She'd cook herself—deliciously—and serve herself up for your dinner if she thought you'd fancy her."

"You're right, Jinny. I never ought to have married her."

"I didn't say you never ought to have married her. I say you ought to be on your knees now you have married her. She's ten thousand times too good for you."

"You're right, Jinny. You always were right, you always will be damnably right."

"And you always will be—oh dear me—so rude."

He looked in her face like a whipped dog trying to reinstate himself in favour, as far as Tanqueray could look like a whipped dog.

"Let me carry those books for you," he said.

"You may carry the books, but I don't like you, Tanks."

His devil, the old devil that used to be in him, looked at her then.

"You used to like me," he said.

But Jinny was beyond its torment. "Of course I liked you. I liked you awfully. You were another person then."

He said nothing to that.

"Forgive me, George," she said presently. "You see, I love your little wife."

"I love you for loving her," he said.

"You may go on loving me for that. But you needn't come any further with me. I know my way."

"But I want to come with you."

"And I, unfortunately, want to be alone."

"You shall. I'll walk behind you—as many yards as you like behind you. I've got to carry the books."

"Bother the books. I'll carry them."

"You'll do nothing of the sort."

They walked together in silence till the station doors were in sight. He meant to go with her all the way to Putney, carrying the books.

"I wish," he said, "I knew what would really please you."

"You do know," she said.

A moment passed. Tanqueray stopped his stride.

"I'll go back and beg her pardon—now."

She gave him her hand. He went back; and between them they forgot the books.

Though it was not yet ten the light was low in Rose's bedroom. Rose had gone to bed. He went up to her room. He raised the light a little, quietly, and stood by her bedside. She lay there, all huddled, her body rounded, her knees drawn up as if she had curled into herself in her misery. One arm was flung out on the bed-clothes, the hand hung cramped over a fold of blanket; sleep only had slackened its convulsive grip. Her lips were parted, her soft face was relaxed, blurred, stained in scarlet patches. She had cried herself to sleep.

And as he looked at her he remembered how happy she had been playing with Jinny's baby; and how his brutal words had struck her in the hurt place where she was always tender.

His heart smote him. He undressed quietly and lay down beside her.

She stirred; and, finding him there, gave a little cry and put her arms about him.

And then he asked her to forgive him, and she said there was nothing to forgive.

She added with her seeming irrelevance, "You didn't go all the way to Putney then?"

She knew he had meant to go. She knew, too, that he had been sent back.



XLIX

On her return Jane went at once to Brodrick in his study. The editor was gloomy and perturbed. He made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her excuse that Tanqueray had kept her. Presently, after some moments of heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his gloom. He was worried about the magazine. Levine was pestering him. When she reminded him that Louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal Jews behind him, and they were running the concern. You could buy him out, you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if you hadn't, where were you? It had been stipulated that the editor was to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its way, his hand had been pretty free. But it wasn't paying; and Levine was insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit.

He did not tell her that Levine's point was that they had not bargained for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. If they were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends; which, Levine said, was about what it amounted to.

That was what was bothering Brodrick; for it was Jane's hand, in its freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. It had helped him to realize his expensive dream. The trouble, this time, he told her, was a tale of Nina Lempriere's.

Jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her friend's name.

"What, Nina? Has she——?"

Brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. And Levine had put his silly foot down. He had complained that the tale was gruesome (they had set it up; it was quite a short thing); Nina's tales usually were gruesome; and Nina's price was stiff. He didn't know about the price; perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the tale——! Brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with him of profound excitement—the tale was a corker. He didn't care if it was gruesome. It was magnificent.

"More so than her last?" Jane murmured.

"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He'd be eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.

She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had said. Nina had more than found herself.

"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."

"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his beastly Jews—with a chance like that. I don't care if the price is stiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he funks it."

He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing like this."

Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.

They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.

She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.

Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane. She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it. Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only save herself by keeping clear of her.

"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough—after that last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."

"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if I never could keep up."

"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."

"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."

"My handicap?"

"Well—a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me."

"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you thought it?"

Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.

"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any handicap. That's why I want to win."

Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions. She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.

But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own. She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art was a handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.

The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.

"Does it seem to you, then, that I've defeated my end?" Nina pressed her point home implacably.

Jane strung herself to the pain of it.

"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."

She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.

Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.

It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own. And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she, Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of Jinny. That was how she measured her.

It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had swept on, reckless, regardless.

It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the idea of rivalry was absurd.

Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.

She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane's book, because Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision of her own.

If the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her friends were bent on frustrating them. Within five minutes after Jane Brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, Nina received a telegram from Owen Prothero. He was coming to see her at five o'clock. It was now half-past four.

This was what she had dreaded more than anything. Her fear of it had kept her out of London for two years.

Owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. It suggested that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while it warned her not to miss him if she did. She debated the point for the half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him.

Prothero arrived punctually to his hour. She found no change in his aspect or his manner. If he looked happy, he looked it in his own supersensual way. Marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness, nor touched his incorruptible refinement.

He considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. Her mountains, he said, evidently agreed with her.

She inquired after Laura, and was told that she would not know her. The Kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. She was almost plump; she had almost a colour.

"She wants to see you," he said. "She told me I was to bring you back with me."

Ages passed before she answered. "I don't think, really, Owen, that I can come."

"Why not?" he said.

She would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge that with Owen lying was no good. She resented his asking her why not, when he knew perfectly well why.

"Why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?"

She smiled. "You seem determined to get everything you want."

She had a good mind to tell him straight out, there and then, that he couldn't have everything he wanted, not with her, at any rate. He couldn't have it both ways. But you do not say these things; and if she could judge by the expression of his face what she had said had hit him hard enough.

He sheltered himself behind a semblance of irrelevance. "Laura is very fond of you."

The significance of the statement lay in its implication that he was very fond of Laura. Taken that way it was fuel heaped on to Nina's malignant fire. Under it she smouldered darkly.

"She's getting unhappy about you," he went on. "You don't want to make her unhappy, do you?"

"Did I ever want to make her unhappy?" she answered, with a flash. "And if it comes to that, why should it?"

"The Kiddy has a very tender conscience."

She saw what he meant now. He was imploring her not to put it into Laura's head that she had come between them. That would hurt Laura. His wife was never to suspect that her friend had suffered. Nina, he seemed secretly to intimate, was behaving in a manner likely to give rise to that suspicion. He must have been aware that she did it to save herself more suffering; but his point was that it didn't matter how much she suffered, provided they saved Laura. There must be no flaw in that perfect happiness.

"You mean," she said, "she won't understand it if I don't come?"

"I'm afraid I mean she will understand it if you keep on not coming. But of course you'll come. You're coming with me now."

It was the same voice that had told her three years ago that she was not coming with him, that she was going to stay and take care of Laura, because that was all that she could do for him. And as she had stayed then she went with him now, and for the same reason.

She felt, miserably, that her reluctance damned her; it proved her coarse, or at any rate not fine enough for the communion he had offered her, the fineness of which she had once accepted as the sanction of their fellowship. She must seem to him preposterous in her anxiety to break with him, to make an end of what had never been. All the same, what he was forcing on her now was the fact of separation. As they approached the house where he and Laura lived she had an increasing sense of estrangement from him and of distance.

He drew her attention to the iron gate that guarded their sanctuary, and the untrodden grass behind it. His dreams came in by that gate, and all other things by the postern door, which, he said, was the way he and she must go.

Nina paused by the gate. "It won't open, Owen."

"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."

"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."

"It will last my time," he said.



L

Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between them.

It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or conscience in the matter.

It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray, of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.

It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove her on.

Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.

And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she had stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand. But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster. She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw her doing it now.

"I like your face," was her comment.

"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."

She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.

At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence, was babbling about Owen.

"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look there!"

She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.

"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?"

Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone shabby.

"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every evening."

"Put it on now," said Nina.

"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."

"You must," said Nina.

Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for Nina to "fasten her up the back."

Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long deft hands trembling as he performed this office.

The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful gown.

"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it! How he knew one gown from another—how he knew the shops—what hand guided him—I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."

"Or yours."

"Yes—when you think of the horrors he might have got."

Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. As she did this she looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. Nina saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its perfection. Her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them.

Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch. There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man, since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a mouse-coloured velvet gown.

The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. She turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."



Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could I?"

How could she?

She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero. To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self. She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture. It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast, but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and licked them.

For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to suffer more.

Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered, could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.

And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?

She remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never at any time admitted that she was dreadful. He had spoken rather as if, seeing through her, he had seen things she could not see, fine things which he declared to be the innermost truth of her.

He must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she could bring herself to see Laura.

She saw through him now. That was why he had insisted on her coming. It was as if he had said to her, "I'm not thinking so tremendously of her. What I mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust yourself to me; if you'll only come." He seemed to say frankly, "That beast of yours is really dreadful. It must be a great affliction to have to carry it about with you. I'll show you how to get rid of it altogether. You've only got to see her, Nina, in her heartrending innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet gown."

That night Laura stood silent and thoughtful while Prothero's hands fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown. She let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to her feet.

"I wish," she said, "I hadn't put it on."

He stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from her white neck.

"Does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor Nina with its beauty?"

She shook her head. She would not tell him what she thought. But the tears in her eyes betrayed her.



LI

It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds, and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.