Chapter 34

"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."

"Good God! So _that_ was your view of it? I was sacrificed to your invincible ignorance."

"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"

"Honourable?"

"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."

"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."

They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.

"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."

"_I_ couldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."

"I know. You were afraid then."

"Yes. I was mortally afraid."

Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.

"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of? What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us."

"You thought you saw that in me?"

"I don't see it now."

"Not now," he whispered.

They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood facing him as one who waits.

"Not now," he said aloud.

He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.

"If we could always be here, Jinny----"

She turned from him, afraid.

"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.

He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"

She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.

LXIII

That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.

In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.

She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was there also and she faced it.

She was down too late for any train that could take her away before noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.

She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an overcoat.

She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure. Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.

They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.

She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he _had_ written. There rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill, down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.

And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.

Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's, "With you--there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"

She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over the hours that she had still to spare.

Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.

But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George Tanqueray.

It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her certainty that he would come. And he was there in the doorway before her mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance.

She fell on him with Hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would have slain him with it.

He stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. As evidence supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the editor. He had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then. Jinny was being "had," he said.

He had not come there to talk about Brodrick, or to think about him. He was not going to let Jinny think about him either.

He had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be overtaken by the mood of the cool morning.

Jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now) in the leather case it travelled in. She had a hat with a long veil on. Tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of her departure.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said.

"I'm going back."

"Why?"

"Haven't I told you?"

Positively he had forgotten Brodrick.

He began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that her fear was folly.

She was grateful to him for that.

"All the same," she said, "I'm going. I wasn't going to stay here in any case."

"You were going?"

"Yes."

"And do you suppose I'm going to let you go? After last night?"

"After--last--night--I _must_ go. And I must go back."

"No. Remember what you said to me last night. We know ourselves and we know each other now as God knows us. We're not afraid of ourselves or of each other any more."

"No," she said. "I am not afraid."

"Well--you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage to go on?"

"You think I'm a coward still?"

"A coward." He paused. "I beg your pardon. I forgot that you had the courage to go back."

Her face hardened as they looked at each other.

"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand there staring at me and you don't care a damn."

"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."

"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two children."

"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.

"Jinny--_that_ ought never to have happened. You should have left that to the other women."

"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."

"You _are_----"

"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."

"My God. I don't care what you are."

He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in her supernatural self-possession.

"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."

"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way. This--this is different."

She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her--as by fire.

"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny--if I only wanted you for myself--but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you didn't suffer----"

"I'm not suffering."

"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all that."

"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."

"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."

"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not--not as you want me to."

He smiled. "How do you think I want you to?"

"Well--you know."

"I know that I care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or whether you care or not, so long as I can put a stop to that brutality."

"There isn't any brutality. I've got everything a woman can want."

"You've got everything any other woman can want."

She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."

"For heaven's sake be honest. What is the use of lying, to me of all people? Don't I know how happy you are?"

"But I am--I am, George. It's only this horrid, devilish thing that's been tacked on to me----"

"That beautiful, divine thing that God made part of you, the thing that you should have loved and made sacrifices to--if there were to have been sacrifices--the thing you've outraged and frustrated, and done your best to destroy, in your blind, senseless lust for what you call happiness. You've no right to make It suffer."

"They say suffering's the best thing that can happen to it."

"Not Its suffering. _Your_ suffering is--the pain that makes you alive, that stings and urges and keeps you going--going till you drop. To feel the pull of the bit when you swerve on the road--Its road--to have the lash laid about your shoulders when you jib--that's good. You women need the lash more than we because you're more given to swerving and jibbing. Look at Nina. _She_ was lashed into it if any woman ever was."

"She isn't the only one, George."

"I hope she isn't. God is good to the great artists sometimes, and he was good to her."

"Do you suppose Laura thinks so?"

"Laura's not a great artist."

"And do you suppose Owen was thinking of Nina's genius when he married Laura instead of her?"

"I don't think that Owen was thinking at all. It's not the thinkers who are tools in the hands of destiny, dear child."

His gaze fell on the manuscript she was packing.

"Jinny, you know--you've always known that you can't do anything without me."

"It seems as if I couldn't," she admitted.

"Well--be honest with me."

She looked at her watch. "There's not much time for me to be honest in, but I'll try."

She sat down. She meditated a moment, making it out.

"You're right. I can't do much without you. I'm not perfectly alive when you're not there. And I can't get away from you--as I can get away from Hugh. I believe I remember every single thing you ever said to me. I'm always wanting to talk to you. I don't want--always--to talk to Hugh. But--I think more of him."

It seemed to her that it was only now that she really made it out. Her fear had been no test, it threw no light on her, and it had passed. It was only now, with Tanqueray's passionately logical issue facing her, that she knew herself aright.

"There's another thing. I can't be sorry for you. I know I'm hurting you, and I don't seem to care a bit. You can't make me sorry for you. But I'm sorry for Hugh all the time."

"God forbid that you should be sorry for me, then."

"God does forbid it. It's not that Hugh _makes_ me sorry for him; he never lets me know; but I do know. When his little finger aches I know it, and I ache all over--I think it's aching a bit now; that's what makes me want to go back to him."

"I see--Pity," said the psychologist.

"No. Not pity. It's simply that I know he needs me more than you do. That's why I need him more than I need you."

"Pity," he reiterated, with a more insistent stress.

"No."

"Never mind what it is, if it's something that you haven't got for me."

"It is something that I haven't got for you. There isn't time," she said, "to go into all that."

As she spoke he heard wheels grinding the stones in the upper lane, the shriek of the brake grinding the wheel, and the shuffling of men's feet on the flagged yard outside.

He shut the door and faced her, making his last stand.

"You know what you're going back to."

"I know."

"To suffer," he said, "and to cause suffering--to one--two--three--innocent people."

"No. Things will be different."

"They won't. _We_ shall be the same."

She shook her head a little helplessly.

"At any rate," he said, "_you_ won't be different."

"If I could--if I only could be----"

"But you can't. You know you can't."

"I can--if I give it up--once for all."

"What? Your divine genius?"

"Whatever it is. When I've killed that part of me I shall be all right. I mean--_they_'ll be all right."

"You can't kill it. You can starve it, drug it, paralyze it, but you can't kill it. It's stronger than you. You'll go through hell--I know it, I've been there--you'll be like a drunkard trying to break himself of the drink habit."

"Yes. But some day I shall break myself, or be broken; and there'll be peace."

"_Will_ there!"

"There'll be something."

She rose. The wheels sounded nearer, and stopped. The gate of the farmyard opened. The feet of the men were at the door.

LXIV

Whatever Tanqueray thought of Brodrick's chill, it and the fear it inspired in Gertrude had been grave enough to keep him in the house. For three days (the last of September) he had not been in Fleet Street, in his office.

There was agitation there, and agitation in the mind of the editor and of his secretary. Tanqueray's serial was running its devastating course through the magazine, and the last instalment of the manuscript was overdue (Tanqueray was always a little late with his instalments). Brodrick was worried, and Gertrude, at work with him in his study, tried to soothe him. They telephoned to the office for the manuscript. The manuscript was not there. The clerk suggested that it was probably still with the type-writer, Miss Ranger. They telephoned to Miss Ranger, who replied that the manuscript had been typed and sent to the author three weeks ago for revision.

Brodrick sent a messenger to Tanqueray's house for the manuscript. He returned towards evening with a message that Mrs. Tanqueray was out, Mr. Tanqueray was in the country and the servant did not know his address.

They telegraphed to Addy Ranger's rooms for his address. The reply came, "Post Office, Okehampton, Devon."

Brodrick repeated it with satisfaction as he wrote it down: "Post Office, Okehampton, Devon."

Gertrude was silent.

"He's got friends somewhere in Devonshire," Brodrick said.

"At the Post Office?" she murmured.

"Of course--if they're motoring."

Gertrude was again silent (she achieved her effects mainly by silences).

"We'd better send the wire there," said Brodrick.

They sent it there first thing in the morning.

Before noon a message came from Mrs. Tanqueray: "Address, 'The Manor, Wilbury, Wilts.' Have sent your message there."

Admirable Mrs. Tanqueray!

"We've sent _our_ wire to the wrong address," said Brodrick.

"It's the right one, I fancy, if Miss Ranger has it."

"Mrs. Tanqueray's got the wrong one, then?"

They looked at each other. Gertrude's face was smooth and still, but her eyes searched him, asking what his thoughts were.

They sent a wire to Wilbury.

Three days passed. No answer to their wires and no manuscript.

"He's left Okehampton, I suppose," said Brodrick.

"Or has he left Wilbury?"

"We'll send another wire there, to make sure."

She wrote out the form obediently. Then she spoke again.

"Of course he's at Okehampton." Her voice had an accent of joyous certainty.

"Why 'of course'?"

"Because he went to Wilbury first. Mrs. Tanqueray said she sent our message there--the one we sent three days ago. So he's left Wilbury and he's staying in Okehampton."

"It looks like it."

"And yet--you'd have thought he'd have let his wife know if he was staying."

"He probably isn't."

"He must be. The manuscript went there."

"Let's hope so, then we may get it to-morrow."

It was as if he desired to impress upon her that the manuscript was the important thing.

It came as he had anticipated the next day. Miss Ranger sent it up by special messenger.

"Good!" said Brodrick.

He undid the parcel hurriedly. The inner cover was addressed to Miss Ranger in Tanqueray's handwriting. It bore the post-mark, Chagford.

"He's been at Chagford all the time!" said Gertrude.

(She had picked up the wrapper which Brodrick had thrown upon the floor.)

Silence.

"T-t-t. It would have saved a day," she said, "if he'd sent this direct to you instead of to Miss Ranger. Why couldn't he when he knew we were so rushed?"

"Why, indeed?" he thought.

"There must have been more corrections," he said.

"She can't have typed them in the time," said Gertrude. She was examining the inner cover. "Besides, she has sent it on unopened."

"Excellent Miss Ranger!"

He said it with a certain levity. But even as he said it his brain accepted the inference she forced on it. If Tanqueray had not sent his manuscript to Camden Town for corrections, he had sent it there for another reason. The parcel was registered. There was no letter inside it.

Brodrick's hand trembled as he turned over the pages of the manuscript. Gertrude's eyes were fixed upon its trembling.

A few savage ink-scratches in Tanqueray's handwriting told where Miss Ranger had blundered; otherwise the manuscript was clean. Tanqueray had at last satisfied his passion for perfection.

All this Brodrick's brain took in while his eyes, feverish and intent, searched the blank spaces of the manuscript. He knew what he was looking for. It would be there, on the wide margin left for her, that he would find the evidence that his wife and Tanqueray were together. He knew the signs of her. Not a manuscript of Tanqueray's, not one of his last great books, but bore them, the queer, delicate, nervous pencil-markings that Tanqueray, with all his furious erasures, left untouched. Sometimes (Brodrick had noticed) he would enclose them in a sort of holy circle of red ink, to show that they were not for incorporation in the text. But it was not in him to destroy a word that she had written.

But he could find no trace of her. He merely made out some humble queryings of Miss Ranger, automatically erased.

The manuscript was in three Parts. As he laid down each, Gertrude put forth a quiet hand and drew it to herself. He was too much preoccupied to notice how minutely and with what intent and passionate anxiety she examined it.

He was arranging the manuscript in order. Gertrude was absorbed in Part Three. He had reached out for it when he remembered that the original draft of Part Two had contained a passage as to which he had endeavoured to exercise an ancient editorial right. He looked to see whether Tanqueray had removed it.

He had not. The passage stood, naked and immense, tremendous as some monument of primeval nature, alone in literature, simple, superb, immortal; irremovable by any prayer. Brodrick looked at it now with a clearer vision. He acknowledged its grandeur and bowed his head to the power that was Tanqueray. Had he not been first to recognize it? It was as if his suspicion of the man urged him to a larger justice towards the writer.

He turned to Gertrude. "There are no alterations to be made, thank heaven----"

"How about this?"

She slid the manuscript under his arm; her finger pointed to the margin. He saw nothing.

"What?" He spoke with some irritation.

"This."

She turned up the lamp so that the light fell full upon the page. He bent closer. On the margin, so blurred as to be almost indecipherable, he saw his wife's sign, a square of delicate script. To a careless reader it might have seemed to have been written with a light pencil and to have been meant to stand. Examined closely it revealed the firm strokes of a heavy lead obliterated with india-rubber. Gertrude's finger slid away and left him free to turn the pages. There were several of these marks in the same handwriting, each one deliberately erased. The manuscript had been in his wife's hand within the last three days; for three days certainly Tanqueray had been in Chagford, and for three weeks for all Brodrick knew.

There was no reason why he should not be there, no reason why they should not be together. Then why these pitiable attempts at concealment, at the covering of the tracks?

And yet, after all, they had not covered them. They had only betrayed the fact that they had tried. Had they? And which of them? Tanqueray in the matter of obliteration would at any rate have been aware of the utter inadequacy of india-rubber. To dash at a thing like india-rubber was more the sudden, futile inspiration of a woman made frantic by her terror of detection.

It was clear that Jane had not wanted him to know that Tanqueray was at Chagford. She had not told him. Why had she not told him? She knew of the plight they were in at the office, of the hue and cry after the unappearing manuscript.

So his brain worked, with a savage independence. He seemed to himself two men, a man with a brain that worked, following a lucid argument to an obscure conclusion, and a man who looked on and watched its working without attaching the least importance to it. It was as if _this_ man knew all the time what the other did not know. He had his own light, his own secret. He had never thought about it before (his secret), still less had he talked about it. Thinking about it was a kind of profanity; talking would have been inconceivable sacrilege. It was self-evident as the existence of God to the soul that loves him; a secret only in that it was profounder than appearances, in that it stood by the denial of appearances, so that, if appearances were against it, what of that?

He was thinking about it now, obscurely, without images, barely with words, as if it had been indeed a thing occult and metaphysical.

Thinking about it--that meant, of course, that he had for a moment doubted it? It was coming back to him now, clothed with the mortal pathos of its imperfection. She was dearer to him--unspeakably dearer, for his doubt.

The man with the brain approached slowly and unwillingly the conclusion that now emerged, monstrous and abominable, from the obscurity. If that be so, he said, she is deliberately deceiving me.