Chapter 20

He rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. He sat down again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there as an offering to the hat. Then, with an immense, sustained politeness, he began to talk.

Now that Hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition was almost satisfied.

It was so much so, Jane said, that she was tired of hearing about Hambleby. Whereupon Brodrick inquired with positively formidable politeness, how the new serial was getting on.

"Very well," said Jane. "How's the 'Monthly Review'?"

Brodrick intimated that the state of the "Monthly Review" was prosperity itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from Mr. Prothero?

Jane said that she had had a long letter from Mr. Prothero the other day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for Mr. Prothero at home. Brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not think of any appointment more suitable for Mr. Prothero than the one he had already got for him.

Then there was a silence, and when Jane with competitive urbanity inquired after Brodrick's sisters, Brodrick's manner gave her to understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and personal. And while she was wondering what she could say next Brodrick took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never hurried.

Jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place where his hat had been. And her heart drew its doors together and shut them against Brodrick.

She had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front door; and then, under her windows, his feet on the pavement of the Square. She went to the window, and stared at the weeping ash-trees in the garden and thought of how Brodrick had said that it was no wonder that they wept. And at the memory of his voice she felt a little pricking, wounding pain under her eyelids, the birth-pang of unwilling tears.

There were feet, hurrying feet on the pavement again, and again the bell cried out with its nervous electric scream. Her staircase door was opened quickly and shut again, but Jane heard nothing until Brodrick stood still in the room and spoke her name.

She turned, and he came forward, and she met him, holding her head high to keep back her tears. She came slowly, with shy feet and with fear in her eyes, and the desire of her heart on her lips, lifting them like wings.

He took her two hands, surrendered to his, and raised and kissed them. For a moment they stood so, held together, without any movement or any speech.

"Jinny," he said thickly, and she looked down and saw her own tears, dreadful drops, rolling off Brodrick's hands.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her hands struggled in his, and for pity he let them go.

"You can't be more surprised at me than I am myself," said she.

"But I'm not surprised," said Brodrick. "I never am."

And still she doubted.

"What did you come back for?"

"This, of course."

He had drawn her to the long seat by the fireplace.

"Why did you go away," she said, "and make me cry?"

"Because, for the first time in my life, I was uncertain."

"Of yourself?" Doubt, dying hard, stabbed her.

"I am never uncertain of myself," said Brodrick.

"Of what, then?"

"Of you."

"But you never told me."

"I've been trying to tell you the whole time."

Yet even in his arms her doubt stirred.

"What are you going to do now?" she whispered.

"_You're_ going to marry me," he said.

He had been certain of it the whole time.

"I thought," she said an hour later, "that you were going to marry Gertrude."

"Oh, so that was it, was it? You were afraid----"

"I wasn't afraid. I knew it was the best thing you could do."

"The best thing I could do? To marry Gertrude?"

"My dear--it would be far, far better than marrying me."

"But I don't want," said he, "to marry Gertrude."

"Of course, _she_ doesn't want to marry you."

"I never supposed for a moment that she did."

"All the same, I thought it was going to happen."

"If it was going to happen," he said, "it would have happened long ago."

She insisted. "It would have been nicer for you, dear, if it had."

"And when I'd met you afterwards--you think _that_ would have been nicer--for all three of us?"

His voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. But he could see things plainly. It was with the certainty, the terrible lucidity of passion that he saw himself. The vision was disastrous to all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long tradition of the Brodricks. But he saw true.

Jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him.

"And is it really," she said, "as bad as that?"

"It always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing you want. Luckily for me I've only really wanted one thing."

"One thing?"

"You--or a woman like you. Only there never was a woman like you."

"I see. _That's_ why you care for me?"

"Does it matter why?"

"Not a bit. I only wondered."

He looked at her almost as if he also wondered. Then they were silent. Jane was content to let her wonder die, but Brodrick's mind was still groping in obscurity. At last he seemed to have got hold of something, and he spoke.

"Of course, there's your genius, Jinny. If I don't say much about it, you mustn't think I don't care."

"Do you? There are moments when _I_ hate it."

Her face was set to the mood of hatred.

"Hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it."

"I wouldn't marry it, if I didn't think I could look after it."

"You needn't bother. It can look after itself."

She paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the pattern of the sofa-cover.

"Did you think I cared for it so frightfully?" she said.

"I know you did."

"I care for it still." She turned to him with her set face. "But I could kill it if it came between you and me."

XXXIV

Jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of her adoration.

For the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible, audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible on some verge between creation and oblivion. This withdrawal had once been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover it.

She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life. That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible, had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no longer moved her.

Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful, adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon, found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked tenderly in passing.

And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered, red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched in the poignant, tender light of it.

That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock. She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the quarters.

She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett. She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had listened humbly while Gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of the sacred Books. She had stood like a child, breathless with attention, when Gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed her the little squat god in his shrine.

She played with this house of Brodrick's like a child, making believe that she adored the little squat god and respected all the paraphernalia of his service. She knew that Gertrude doubted her seriousness and sincerity in relation to the god.

And all the time she was overcome by the pathos of Gertrude who had been so serious and so sincere, who was leaving these things for ever. But though she was sorry for Gertrude, her heart exulted and cried out in her, "Do you think He cares for the little squat god? He cares for nothing in the world but me!"

All would have been well if Brodrick had not committed the grave error of asking to look at the Books, just to see that she had got them all right. Like Gertrude he doubted.

She brought them to him; presenting first the Book marked "Household." He turned from the beginning of this Book to the end. The pages of Gertrude's housekeeping looked like what they were, a perfect and simple system of accounts. Jinny's pages looked like a wild, straggling lyric, flung off in a rapture and meticulously revised.

Brodrick smiled at it--at first.

"At any rate," said she, "it shows how hard I've tried."

For all answer he laid before her Gertrude's flawless work.

"Is it any use trying to bring it up to Gertrude's standard?" she said. "Wouldn't it be better just to accept the fact that she was wonderful?"

(He ignored the suggestion.)

"I suppose you never realized till now how wonderful that woman was?"

Brodrick said gravely he would have to go into it to see.

Brodrick, going in deeper, became very grave. It seemed that each week Jane's expenditure overlapped her allowance with appalling regularity. It was the only regularity she had.

"Have you any idea, Jinny, how it goes?"

She shook her head sadly.

"If it's gone, it's gone. Why should we _seek_ to know?"

"Just go into it with me," he said.

She went into it and emerged with an idea.

"It looks," said Jinny, "as if I ate more than Gertrude. Do I?"

Still abstracted, he suggested the advisability of saving.

"Can it be done?" said Jinny.

"It can," said Brodrick, "because Gertrude did it."

"Must I do it?"

"Not if it bothers you. I was only saying it can be done."

"And you'd like it?"

"Well--I should like to know where I am."

"But--darling--It's _so_ much better not to."

He sighed. So did Jinny.

"I can see," she said, "what I've done. I've crumpled _all_ the rose-leaves, and you'll never be able to lie on them any more."

Then she had another idea.

"Hugh! It's just occurred to me. Talk of saving! I've been saving all the time like fury. I save you Gertrude's salary."

At this Brodrick became angry, as Jane might have seen, only she was too entirely taken up with her discovery to look at him.

"Here I have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant, and thinking how incompetent I am and how much more advantageous it would have been for you to have married Gertrude. And I come lots cheaper. I really do. Wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it before?"

He was very angry, but he had to smile. Then by way of correction he reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. Didn't she think it was about time to haul them up?

She didn't. She didn't like the poor things to feel that they were driven. She liked to see happy faces all around her.

"But they're so unpunctual--those faces," Brodrick said. And while they _were_ on the subject there was the clock. The clock that Gertrude always used to wind, that Brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that Jinny never by any chance wound at all.

"I'm happier," said Jane, "when it's not wound."

"But why----" His face was one vast amazement.

"Because," she said, "it chimes. And it strikes the quarters."

He had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock.

She seemed incorrigible. Then, miraculously, for two months all went well, really well.

It was not for nothing that Hambleby sold and was selling. The weekly deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to Jane; but she made it up secretly. Secretly, she seemed to save.

But Brodrick found that out and stopped it. Jane was not allowed, and she knew it, to use her own income for the house or for anything else but herself and her people. It wasn't for that he had married her. Besides, he objected to her method. It was too expensive.

Jane was disposed to argue the matter.

"Don't you see, dear, that it's the price of peace? Peace is the most expensive thing on this earth--any stupid politician will tell you that. If you won't pay for peace, what will you pay for?"

"My dear child, there used to be more peace and considerable less pay when Miss Collett did things."

"Yes. But she was wonderful."

(Her lips lifted at the corners. There was a flash of irony in her tone, this time.)

"Not half so wonderful as you," he said.

"But--Hugh--angel--as long as it's _me_ who pays----"

"That's what I won't have--your paying."

"It's for _my_ peace," she said.

"It certainly isn't for mine," said Brodrick.

She considered him pensively. She knew that he didn't care a rap about the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness--in other people.

"Poor darling--how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves crumpled under him. Irritating him."

She came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled.

"I told you at the time you ought to have married Gertrude. What on earth possessed you to go and marry me?"

He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.

The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in triumph.

"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it shows that I _can_ save when I give my mind to it."

He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.

As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing, desperately, because of her divine folly.

In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be greater than Hambleby.

She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar, unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.

She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She spoke of it to Brodrick.

They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.

"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"

He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."

"Yes, all day long."

"It's not as if I bothered you--I say, _they_ don't bother you, do they?"

She understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent incursions of his family.

"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."

"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."

"What is it then?"

"Only that everything's different. I'm different."

He regarded her for a long time. She _was_ different. It was part of her queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life. It was his miracle on her.

He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.

"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once or twice since he had known her it had meant that.

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden towards the house.

Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.

XXXV

This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.

In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who watched him.

The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light; stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light, divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fashion and the colour of it, and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. She was writing, this solitary woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. Jane found herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger, admiring as she would have admired a stranger. The solitary woman knew nothing of Hugh Brodrick or of his house at Putney, and cared less; she had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. That seemed to Jane most curious.

Then suddenly she was aware that she, Jane Brodrick, and this woman, Jane Holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. For a moment her memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became strange to her and empty of all significance. As for her own presence in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious wonder at its reality. What she felt was a shock of surprise, of spiritual dislocation. She was positively asking herself, "What am I doing here?"

The wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain.

But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked about the genius of Jane Holland.

For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed to own.

She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal strength.

It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches," showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection; further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place; there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.

And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever made. It was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that this time she would achieve popularity. It was just the sort of terrible, ironic thing that happened. If it did happen she would not be able to look George Tanqueray in the face.