Chapter 17

"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He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn.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.

"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.

How grave it was, Jane, who had gone into it so lightly, was only just aware. This family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was awful, as Eddy had observed, for not liking people. It was bound, in its formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. She had felt that she had disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her.

She had not been a week in Dr. Brodrick's house before she discovered that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. They were sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and no family visible about her. They refused to regard Nina and Laura as a family, or the flat in Kensington Square as in any reasonable sense a home. Jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the things that she had missed.

And in being sorry for Jane Holland they had lost sight of her celebrity. They had not referred to it since the day, three months ago, when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. They were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it was as an alien that she moved among them still.

It was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really sorry for her. They seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. They were anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them her personal charm. They betrayed their opinion that her charm existed in spite rather than because of it.

Thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, Jane in the houses of the Brodricks had found peace. She was secure from all the destroyers, from the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the dreadful literary taint. Brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the literary taint. The worst that could be said of Brodrick was that he would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was clean.

It was in Hugh Brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most profound. Hugh was not gregarious. Tanqueray could not have more abhorred the social round. He had come near it, he had told her, in his anxiety to know _her_, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped out of it.

She knew where she was with him. In their long, subdued confidences he had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the most important fact in his social life. And that, again, not because of her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic moral quality in her. He did not intimate that he found her charming. Jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and Brodrick's monstrous sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. She would not have had him different. It was because of _his_ moral quality, his sincerity, that she had liked him from the first.

Most certainly she liked him. If she had not liked him she would not have come out so often to Roehampton and Wimbledon and Putney. She could not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done for him, but for her own sake. That was what she had wanted, to be liked for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman.

Unlike Tanqueray, Brodrick not only allowed her, he positively encouraged her to be a woman. Evidently, in Brodrick's opinion she was just like any other woman. He could see no difference between her and, well, Gertrude Collett. Gertrude, Jane was sure, stood to Brodrick for all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. Why he required so much of Jane's presence when he could have Gertrude Collett's was more than Jane could understand. She was still inclined to her conjecture that he was using her to draw Miss Collett, playing her off against Miss Collett, stinging Miss Collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. That was why Jane felt so safe with him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with her. He was not in love with her. He was not even, like Tanqueray, in love with her genius.

If she had had the slightest doubt about his attitude, his behaviour on the day of her arrival had made it stand out sharp and clear. She had dined at Moor Grange, and Caro Bickersteth had been there. Caro had insisted on dragging Jane's genius from its temporary oblivion, and Brodrick had turned silent and sulky, positively sulky then.

And in that mood he had remained for the two weeks that she had stayed at Roehampton. He had betrayed none of the concern so evidently felt for her by Eddy and Winny and Gertrude Collett and Mrs. Heron and the doctor. They had all contended with each other in taking care of her, in waiting on her hand and foot. But Brodrick, after bringing her there; after, as she said, dumping her down, suddenly and heavily, on his family, Brodrick had refused to compete; he had hung back; he had withdrawn himself from the scene, maintaining his singular sulkiness and silence.