Chapter 31

"I know. He knows it. We'd rather have it this way. I oughtn't to talk as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. It's me it hurts, not him."

"It hurts me, too, Kiddy. I can't stand it when I see the filthy curs rushing at him. They've got to be kicked into a corner. I'm prepared for them, this time."

He rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which he gave to her.

"Just look through that and see if it's any good."

It was his vindication of Owen Prothero.

"Oh----"

She drew in her breath. "How you _have_ fought for him."

"I'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too."

He drew her attention to a passage where he called upon Heaven to forbid that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. He was only concerned with explaining why Prothero was and would remain unacceptable to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of Prothero as an indictment of his generation. She would see how he had rubbed it in.

She followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points he made. There, where he showed that there was no reason why this Celt should be an alien to the Saxon race. Because (her heart leaped as she followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. He was not the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a fantastic dreamer. He was a man of realities, the very type (Tanqueray had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed Englishmen adore, a surgeon, a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. He had never blinked a fact (Laura smiled as she remembered how Owen had said that that was what a Brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. But (Tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who saw _through_ the things that other men see. And to say that he saw, that he saw through things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and divine transparency. It was simple and self-evident to him that the world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. It was also clear as daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end communion between God and the soul. To him this communion was a fact, a fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. It was so natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets sing about their love and their mistresses. So simple and so self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems "Transparences."

"It sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees."

"I don't," said Tanqueray. "I only see _him_."

At that, all of a sudden, the clever imp broke down.

"George," she said, "I love you--I don't care if Rose _does_ hear--I love you for defending him."

"Love me for something else. He doesn't need defending."

"Not he! But all the same I love you."

It was as if she had drawn aside a fold of her pretty garment and shown him, where the scar had been, a jewel, a pearl with fire in the white of it.

LVII

They were right. Worse things were reserved for Prothero than had happened to him yet. Even Caro Bickersteth had turned. Caro had done her best to appreciate competently this creator adored by creators. Caro, nourished on her "Critique of Pure Reason," was trying hard to hold the balance of justice in the "Morning Telegraph"; and according to Caro there was a limit. She had edited Shelley and she knew. She was frankly, as she said, unable to follow Mr. Prothero in his latest flight. There was a limit even to the imagination of the mystic, and to the poet's vision of the Transcendent. There were, Caro said, regions of ether too subtle to sustain even so imponderable a poet as Mr. Prothero. So there wasn't much chance, Tanqueray remarked, of their sustaining Caro.

But the weight of Caro's utterances increased, as they circulated, formidably, among the right people. All the little men on papers declared that there was a limit, and that Prothero had passed it.

It was barely a year since the publication of his last volume, and they were annoyed with Prothero for daring to show his face again so soon in the absence of encouragement. It looked as if he didn't care whether they encouraged him or not. Such an attitude in a person standing on his trial amounted to contempt of court. When his case came up for judgment in the papers, the jury were reminded that the question before them was whether Mr. Prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with the title of "Transparences," and the sub-title of "Poems," was or was not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. And judgment in Prothero's case was given thus: Any writer who wilfully and deliberately takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet. He stands condemned in the interests of Reality.

Laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last touch kindled her to flame. It even drew fire from Owen.

"If I gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if I brought them the dead body of God with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call that poetry. I bring them the living body of God rejoicing in life, and they howl at me. What their own poets, their Wordsworths and Tennysons and Brownings showed them in fits and flashes, I show them in one continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. They might complain, the beggars, if I'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. But when I've let them off, Laura, with a few songs!"

They were alone in his big room. Nina and Tanqueray and Jane had come and praised him, and Laura had been very entertaining over Prothero's reviews. But, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand. Prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with Laura, turned over the pages of his poems. He was counting them, to prove the slenderness of his offence.

"Listen to this," he said. "They can't say it's _not_ a song."

He read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held him against the onslaught of the world.

Her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. She lay back, as it were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. It was the questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a net, to snare the wings of God. It was the song of her outcasting, of the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of her wantoning in the joy of the supernal, who forgot God in possessing him. It was the song of birth, of the soul's plunging into darkness and fire, of the weaving round her of the fleshy veils, the veils of separation, the veils of illusion; the song of her withdrawal into her dim house, of her binding and scourging, and of her ceaseless breaking on the wheel of time, till she renews her passion and the desire of her return. It was the song of the angels of mortal life, sounding its secrets; angels of terror and pain, carding the mortal stuff, spinning it out, finer and yet more fine, till every nerve becomes vibrant, a singing lyre of God; angels of the passions and the agonies, moving in the blood, ministers of the flame that subtilizes flesh to a transparent vehicle of God; strong angels of disease and dissolution, undermining, pulling down the house of pain.

He paused and she raised her head.

"Owen--that's what you once tried to make me see. Do you remember?"

"Yes, and you said that I was intoxicated and that it was all very dim and disagreeable and sad."

"I didn't understand it then," she said.

"You don't understand it now. You feel it."

"Why didn't I feel it then? When you said it?"

"I didn't say it. How could I? There's no other way of saying it but this. It isn't a theory or a creed; if it were it could be stated in a thousand different ways. It's the supreme personal experience, and this is the only form in which it could possibly be conveyed. These words were brought together from all eternity to say this thing."

"I'm not sure that I'm convinced of the truth of it, even now. I only feel the passion of it. It's the passion of it, Owen, that'll make it live."

"The truth and the passion of it are the same thing," he said.

He went on chanting. The music gathered and rose and broke over her in the last verse, in the song of consummation, of the soul's passion, jubilant, transcendent, where, of the veils of earth and heaven, the veils of separation and illusion, she weaves the veil of the last bridal, the fine veil of immortality.

In the silence Laura stirred at his side. She had possessed herself of his hand again and held it firmly, as if she were afraid that he might be taken from her in his ecstasy.

She was thinking: He used that theme before, in the first poem of his I ever heard. He was mistaken. There was more than one way of saying the same thing. She reminded him of this earlier poem. Surely, she said, it was the same thing, the same vision, the same ecstasy, or, if he liked, the same experience?

He did not answer all at once; he seemed to be considering her objection, as if he owned that it might have weight.

No, he said presently, it was not the same thing. Each experience was solitary, unique, it had its own incommunicable quality. He rose and found the earlier poem, and brought it to her that she might see the difference.

She shook her head; but she had to own that the difference was immense. It was the difference (so she made it out) between a vision that you were sure of, and a vision of which you were not so sure. And--yes--it was more than that; it was as if his genius had suffered incarnation, and its flame were intenser for having passed through flesh and blood. It was the incorruptible spirit that cried aloud; but there was no shrill tenuity in its cry. The thrill it gave her was unlike the shock that she remembered receiving from the poem of his youth, the shiver they had all felt, as at the passing by of the supersensual. Her husband's genius commanded all the splendours, all the tumultuous energies of sense. His verse rose, and its wings shed the colours of flame, blue, purple, red, and gold that kindled into white; it dropped and ran, striking earth with untiring, impetuous feet, it slackened; and still it throbbed with the heat of a heart driving vehement blood. But, she insisted, it was the same vision. How could she forget it? Did he suppose that she had forgotten the moment, four years ago, when Tanqueray had read the poem to them, and it had flashed on her----?

"Oh yes," he said; "it flashed all right. It flashed on me. But it did no more. There was always the fear of losing it. The difference is that--now--there isn't any fear."

She said, "Ah, I remember how afraid you were."

"I was afraid," he said, "of you."

She rose and lifted her arms to him and laid her hand on his shoulders. He had to stoop to let her do it. So held, he couldn't hope to escape from her candid, searching eyes.

"You aren't afraid of me now? I haven't made it go? You haven't lost it through me?"

"You've made it stay."

"Have I? Have I done that for you?"

He drew in his breath with a sob of passion. "Ah--the things you do!"

"None of them matter except that," she said.

She left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "Why bother, then, about the other stupid things?"

It was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and knew that she had made it.

It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.

He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except his fear.

He had tested it because of his fear. He had chosen his profession as the extreme test, because of his fear. He had given up his profession, again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being caught and branded and tied down. He had thought that to be forced into a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships of God, to cut himself off for ever from his vision.

Looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. He had put away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. He had tied himself to a woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. He would have judged this attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in. And it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that his vision had become secure. It really stayed. He could turn from it, but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will.

She was right. If he could take that from her, if he was in for it to that extent, why _did_ he bother about the other stupid things?

And yet he bothered. All that autumn he worked harder than ever at his journalism. He seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going on the "Morning Telegraph." He went the round of the theatres on first nights, reporting for the "Morning Telegraph" on plays that were beneath the notice of its official dramatic critic. He reviewed poetry and _belles lettres_ for the "Morning Telegraph;" and he did a great deal of work for it down in Fleet Street with a paste-pot and a pair of scissors.

Prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it.

In December he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis.

And at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the Consumption Hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the house with the iron gate. And Laura at Owen's side lay awake in her fear.

LVIII

There was one thing that Prothero, in his journalism, drew the line at. He would not, if they paid him more than they had ever paid him, more than they had ever dreamed of paying anybody, he would not review another poet's work. For some day, he said, Nicky will bring out a volume of his poems, and in that day he will infallibly turn to me. If, in that day, I can lay my hand upon my heart and swear that I never review poetry, that I never have reviewed it and never shall, I can look Nicky in his innocent face with a clean soul.

But when Nicky actually did it (in the spring of nineteen-nine) Prothero applied to Brodrick for a holiday. He wanted badly to get out of town. He could not--when it came to the agonizing point--he could not face Nicky.

At least that was the account of the matter which Tanqueray gave to Brodrick when the question of Prothero's impossibility came up again at Moor Grange. Brodrick was indignant at Prothero's wanting a holiday, and a month's holiday. It was preposterous. But Jane had implored him to let him have it.

Jinny would give a good deal, Tanqueray imagined, to get out of town too. It was more terrible for her to face Nicky than for any of them. Tanqueray himself was hiding from him at that moment in Brodrick's study. But Jinny, with that superb and incomprehensible courage that women have, was facing him down there in the drawing-room.

It was in the drawing-room, later on in the afternoon, that Brodrick found his wife, shrunk into a corner of the sofa and mopping her face with a pocket-handkerchief. Tanqueray had one knee on the sofa and one arm flung tenderly round Jinny's shoulder. He met, smiling, the husband's standstill of imperturbable inquiry.

"It's all right, Brodrick," he said. "I've revived her. I've been talking to her like a father."

He stood looking down at her, and commented--

"Nicky brought a book of poems out and Jinny cried."

"It was th--th--the last straw," sobbed Jinny.

Brodrick left them together, just to show how imperturbable he was.

"George," she said, "it was horrible. Poor Nicky stood there where you are, waiting for me to say things. And I couldn't, I couldn't, and he saw it. He saw it and turned white----"

"He _is_ white," said Tanqueray.

"He turned whiter. And he burst out into a dreadful perspiration. And then--oh, don't laugh--it was so awful--he took my hand and wrung it, and walked out of the room, very dignified and stiff."

"My dear child, he only thought you were speechless with emotion."

But Jane was putting on her hat and coat which lay beside her.

"Let's get out somewhere," she said, "anywhere away from this intolerable scene. Let's tear over the Heath."

She tore and he followed. Gertrude saw them go.

She turned midway between Putney and Wimbledon. "Oh, how my heart aches for that poor lamb."

"It needn't. The poor lamb's heart doesn't ache for itself."

"It does. I stabbed it."

"Not you!"

"But, George--they were dedicated to me. Could my cup of agony be fuller?"

"I admit it's full."

"And how about Nicky's?"

"Look here, Jinny. If you or I or Prothero had written those poems we should be drinking cups of agony. But there is _no_ cup of agony for Nicky. He believes that those poems are immortal, and that none of us can rob them of their immortality."

"But if he's slaughtered--and he will be--if they fall on him and tear him limb from limb, poor innocent lamb!"

"He isn't innocent, your lamb. He deserves it. So he won't get it. It's only poets like Prothero who are torn limb from limb."

"I don't know. There are people who'd stick a knife into him as soon as look at him."

"If there are he'll be happy. He'll believe that there's a plot against him to write him down. He'll believe that he's Keats. He'll believe anything. You needn't be sorry for him. If only you or I had Nicky's hope of immortality--if we only had the joy he has even now, in the horrible act of creation. Why, he's never tired. He can go on for ever without turning a hair, whereas look at _our_ hair after a morning's work. Think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour."

Their wild pace slackened.

"It's a dog's life, yours and mine, Jinny. Upon my soul, for mere sensation, if I could choose I'd rather be Nicky."

He paused.

"And then--when you think of his supreme illusion----"

"Has he another?"

"You know he has. If all of us could believe that when the woman we love refuses us she only does it because of her career----"

"If he _did_ believe that----"

"Believe it? He believes now that she didn't even refuse him. He thinks he renounced her--for the sake of her career. It's quite possible he thinks she loves him; and really, considering her absurd behaviour----"

"Oh, I don't mind," she moaned, "he can believe anything he likes if it makes him happier."

"He _is_ happy," said George tempestuously. "If I were to be born again, I'd pray to the high gods, the cruel gods, Jinny, to make me mad--like Nicky--to give me the gift of indestructible illusion. Then, perhaps, I might know what it was to live."

She had seen him once, and only once, in this mood, the night he had dined with her in Kensington Square six weeks before he married Rose.

"But you and I have been faithful to reality--true, as they say, to life. If the idiots who fling that phrase about only knew what it meant! You've been more faithful than I. You've taken such awful risks. You fling your heart down, Jinny, every time."

"Do you never take risks? Do you never fling your heart down?"

He looked at her. "Not your way. Not unless I _know_ that I'll get what I want."

"And haven't you got it?"

"I've got most of it, but not all--yet."

His tone might or might not imply that getting it was only a question of time.

"I say, where are you going?"

She was heading rapidly for Augustus Road. She wanted to get away from George.

"Not there," he protested, perceiving her intention.

"I must."

He followed her down the long road where the trees drooped darkly, and he stood with her by the gate.

"How long will you be?" he said.

"I can't say. Half-an-hour--three-quarters--ever so long."

He waited for an hour, walking up and down, up and down the long road under the trees. She reappeared as he was turning at the far end of it. He had to run to overtake her.

Her face had on it the agony of unborn tears.

"What is it, Jinny?" he said.

"Mabel Brodrick."

She hardly saw his gesture of exasperation.