Chapter 28

They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised and elaborated for her diversion.

Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer. He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would do her good. She had better take one.

"I wish you would," said Jane.

"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."

Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.

"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have convulsions."

"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude who had said he would.

A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance it might have had.

"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.) "I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."

"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."

"I meant--without him."

"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.

In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once, Jane turned to him.

"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"

"Unkind?"

"Well, was I kind enough?"

"You are always kind," he said.

"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"

"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."

"What things?"

He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth. So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.

"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off all maidenly reserve and make love to you."

She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity on his knees.

"The devil gets into me when I have to talk to Gertrude."

She put her arm lightly and shyly about him.

"Do you mind?" she said.

"No, Jinny, I rather like it."

Her arms tightened ever so little.

"It gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own fireside?"

She did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any Brodrick.

"Supposing," she said, "you repulse me? Could you repulse me?"

"No, Jinny; I don't think I ever could."

"What, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and rumpling your nice collar?"

She let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it. He drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently, while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses that lingered a moment in their flight.

"Do you like the way I make love?" she said. "And do you like my gown and the way I do my hair?"

His voice shook. "Jinny, why aren't you always like this? Why aren't you always adorable?"

"I can't be anything--always. Don't you adore me in my other moods?"

"Can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?"

"I never tease you when you're tired."

"No, but I'm sometimes tired when you tease me. You are, darling, just a little bit exhausting for one man."

"Yes," said Jinny complacently; "I can exhaust you. But you can never, never exhaust me. There's always more where I came from."

"The trouble is, Jinny, that I can't always make you out. I never know where I am with you."

"But, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom you _had_ made out. Think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it, and anticipating all her conversation!"

"Think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely whether she's your wife or not your wife."

"But it solves all the matrimonial problems--how to be the exemplary father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor again--how to break the seventh commandment----"

"Jinny!"

"The seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows--how to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. Why can't you look at it in that light?"

"Perhaps, Jinny, because I'm not polygamous."

"You never know what you are until you're tried. Supposing you'd married Gertrude--you'd have had Gertrude, all there is of Gertrude, always Gertrude, and nothing but Gertrude. Could you have stood it?"

"Probably."

"You couldn't. Before you'd been married to Gertrude six months you'd have gone, howling, to the devil. Whereas with me you've got your devil at home."

His smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. She had appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that marked his difference from his family.

She went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "I am really, though you mayn't know it, the thing you need."

He saw his advantage in her mood.

"And _you_, Jinny? Don't you know that you're happiest like this?"

"Yes. I know it."

"And that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the time?"

"In torture." She agreed.

"And don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of agony on your forehead, Jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes; and your mouth hardens."

"I know," she moaned. "I know it does. And you don't love me when I look like that?"

"I love you whatever you look like, and you know it. I love you even when you wander."

"Even? Do you mind so very much--my wandering?"

"Sometimes, perhaps, a little."

"You didn't mind at all before you married me."

"I didn't realize it then."

"Didn't realize what?"

"Your genius, Jinny, and the things it does to you."

"But you did--you did--you knew all about it."

"I knew what it meant to me."

"What _did_ it mean--to you?"

He appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her.

"To me it was simply _the_ supreme intellectual interest. It was the strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt. You'll never quite know what it meant to me."

"And it means nothing now--you don't like it--my poor genius? And they used to say you were in love with it."

"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."

"You were in love enough to marry it."

"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."

"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."

"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."

"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you like me better if I didn't?"

He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.

"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"

"Jinny--if Gertrude were to hear you!"

She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.

"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."

Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she divined, she felt the tide that drew them.

She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.

At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he rose also and followed her with shining eyes.

Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.

LII

Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the "Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition, the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have more and more children like the solid little son they had called John Henry Brodrick.

The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race there would be Jane to reckon with.

In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that.

Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the dreadful open door.

Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk more money on his unprofitable dream.

It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them; they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.

She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than sufficient to buy Louis out.

Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.

She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.

Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in his office.

Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.

Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight.

The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with the first effort.

There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could have objected to Jane's hair. But there was Jane's delicacy. An alarming tendency to waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system.

Jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick child and Mabel Brodrick.

For in this dreadful year Mabel had become worse. Her malady had declared itself. There were rumours and hushed hints of a possible operation. Henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive the shock. It was not to be thought of at present; not as long as things, he said, remained quiescent.

John Brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. The lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men and to his wife of all women. Poor Mabel who had never done anything----

That was the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming. She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was supreme by divine right of suffering.

Again, every day, Jane trod the path over the Heath to Wimbledon. And sometimes Henry found her at John's house and drove her back in his motor (he had a motor now). Once, boxed up with him in the closed car (it was March and the wind was cold over the Heath), she surprised him with a question.

"Henry, is it true that if Mabel had had children she'd have been all right?"

"Yes," he said curtly, wondering what on earth had made her ask him that.

"It's killing her then--not having them?"

"That," he said, "and the desire to have them."

"How cruel it is, how detestable--that she should have _this_----"

"It's Nature's revenge, Jane, on herself."

"And she was so sweet, she would have loved them----"

The Doctor brooded. He had a thing to say to her.

"Jinny, if you'd put it away--altogether--that writing of yours--you'd be a different woman."

"Different?"

"You'd be happier. And, what's more, you'd be well, too. Perfectly well."

"This is not the advice I should give you," he went on, addressing her silence, "if you were an unmarried woman. I urge my unmarried patients to work--to use their brains all they can--and married ones, too, when they've no children. If poor Mabel had done _something_ it would have been far better. But in your case it's disastrous."

Jane remained silent. She herself had a premonition of disaster. Her restlessness was on her. Her nerves and blood were troubled again by the ungovernable, tyrannous impulse of her power. It was not the year she should have chosen, but because she had no choice she was working through everything, secretly, in defiance of Henry's orders. She wondered if he knew. He was looking at her keenly, as if he had at any rate a shrewd suspicion.

"I hardly think," he said, "it's fair to Hugh."

Henry was sure of his facts, and her silence made him surer. She _was_ at it again, and the question was how to stop her?

The question was laid that night before the family committee. It met in the library at Moor Grange almost by Brodrick's invitation. Brodrick was worried. He had gone so far as to confess that he was worried about Jane. She wanted to write another book, he said, and he didn't know whether she was fit.

"Of course she isn't fit," said the Doctor. "It must be stopped. She must be made to give it up--altogether."

Brodrick inquired who was to make her? and was told that _he_ was. He must put his foot down. He should have put it down before.

But Brodrick, being a Brodrick, took an unexpected line.

"I don't know," he said slowly, "that we've any right to dictate to her. It's a big question, and I think she ought to be allowed to decide it for herself."

"She isn't fit," said Henry, "to decide anything for herself."

Brodrick sent a level look at him.

"You talk," said he, "as if she wasn't responsible."

"I should be very sorry to say who is and who isn't. Responsibility is a question of degree. I say Jane is not at the present moment in a state to decide."

"It sounds," said Brodrick, laughing in his bitterness, "very much as if you thought she wasn't sane. Of course I know she'd put a cheque for a hundred pounds into a drawer and forget all about it. But it would be more proof of insanity in Jinny if she remembered it was there."

"It would indeed," said Sophy.

"We're not discussing Jinny's talent for finance," said Henry.

"I suppose," said Brodrick, "what we _are_ discussing is her genius?"

"I'm not saying anything at all about her genius. We've every reason to recognize her genius and be proud of it. It's not a question of her mind. It's a question of a definite bodily condition, and as you can't separate mind from body" (he shrugged his shoulders), "well--there you are. I won't say don't let her work; it's better for her to use her brain than to let it rust. But let her use it in moderation. Moder--ation. Not those tremendous books that take it out of her."

"Are you sure they do take it out of her? Tanqueray says she'll be ill if she doesn't write 'em."

"Tanqueray? What does he know about it?"

"More than we do, I suspect. He says the normal, healthy thing for her is to write, to write tremendous books, and she'll suffer if we thwart her. He says we don't understand her."

"Does he suggest that _you_ don't understand her?" asked Sophy.

Brodrick smiled. "I think he was referring more particularly to Henry."

Henry tried to smile. "He's not a very good instance of his own theory. Look at his wife."

"That only proves that Tanqueray's books aren't good for his wife. Not that they aren't good for Tanqueray. Besides, Prothero says the same thing."

"Prothero!"

"He ought to know. He's a doctor."

Henry dismissed Prothero with a gesture.

"Look here, Hugh. It simply comes to this. Either there must be no more books or there must be no more children. You can't have both."

"There shall be no more children."

"As you like it. I don't advise it. Those books take it out of her more."

He lowered his voice.

"I consider her last book responsible for that child's delicacy."

Brodrick flinched visibly at that.

"I don't care," the Doctor went on, "what Prothero and Tanqueray say. They can't know. They don't see her. No more do you. You're out all day. I shouldn't know myself if Gertrude Collett hadn't told me."

"Oh--Gertrude Collett."

"Nobody more likely to know. She's on the spot, watching her from hour to hour."

"What did she tell you?"

"Why--that she works up-stairs, in her room--for hours--when she's supposed to be lying down. She's doing it now probably."

"Gertrude knows that for a fact?"

"A fact. And she knows it was done last year too, before the baby was born."

"And _I_ know," said Brodrick fiercely, "it was not."

"Have her in," said Sophy, "and ask her."

Brodrick had her in and asked her. Gertrude gave her evidence with a gentle air of surprise that there could be any doubt as to what Mrs. Brodrick had been up to--this year, at any rate. She flushed when Brodrick confronted her with his certainty as to last year. She could not, in the face of Brodrick's certainty, speak positively as to last year.

She withdrew herself hastily, as from an unpleasant position, and was followed by Sophy Levine.

"There's nothing for it," said Henry, "but to tell her."

"About the child?"

"About the child."

There was a terrible pause.

"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?"

"I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up."

Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw the look that passed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear. The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held for her.

Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face averted.

It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her.

"Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew."

"I might have known," she answered.

She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay--that there'd be no end to my paying."

LIII

The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was, indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.

That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the family, the race.

And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she would have to pay for it.

But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would stand by her.

More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a sheltering and protecting wall.

She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and bloodless veins.

There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain, was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. It appeased her desire for expiation.