The Creators Part 100

"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, crus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sing 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, r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 editors.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.set.

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 embarra.s.sment; 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."