Chapter 25

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 Mænad; 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?