The Creators Part 81

She shrugged her thin shoulders. "There was nothing else," she said, "that I could do."

That night, while Prothero and Laura sat together holding each other's hands, Nina walked up and down outside on the Embankment, in the rain.

She had said that she was more like a man than a woman; and with her stride that gave her garments recklessly to the rain, with her impetuous poise, and hooded, hungry eyes, she had the look of some lean and vehement adolescent, driven there by his youth.

The next day, very early, she went down into Wales, a virgin to her mountains.

She had done all she could.

XL

Laura was staying at the Brodricks. She was to stay, Jane insisted on it, until she was married. She would have to stay for ever then, Laura said. Her marriage seemed so far-off, so unlikely, so impossible.

For Prothero had offended the powers that governed his material destiny, the editors and proprietors of the "Morning Telegraph." A man who, without a moment's notice, could fling up his appointment, an appointment, mind you, that he had obtained, not by any merit of his own, but through the grace and favour of an editor's wife, an appointment that he held precariously, almost on sufferance, by mercy extended to him day by day and hour by hour, what could he hope for from sane, responsible men like Brodrick and Levine? Did he imagine that appointments hung on lamp-posts ready to his hand? Or that they only waited for his appearance, to fall instantly upon his head? And that, if they did fall on his head, he could take them on and off like his hat?

And did he think that he could play the fool with a paper like the "Morning Telegraph"?

These questions Brodrick asked of Levine and Levine of Brodrick, before the unspeakably shocked, the unconditionally a.s.senting faces of John and Henry.

All the Brodricks disapproved of Prothero and were annoyed with him for flinging up his appointment. Jane pleaded that he had flung it up because he was fond of Laura and wanted to marry her; and she was told that that was all the more reason why he should have stuck to it. They were annoyed with him for keeping Laura hanging on when he knew he couldn't marry her; and they were annoyed with him for wanting to marry her at all. They admitted that it was very sad for Laura; they liked Laura; they approved of Laura; she had done her duty by all the family she had, and had nearly died of it. And when Jane suggested that all Prothero wanted was to do the same, they replied that Prothero had no business to think of having a family--they supposed that was what it would end in--a man who couldn't keep himself, much less a delicate wife and half-a-dozen children. There would be half-a-dozen; there always were in cases like Prothero's. And at that Jane smiled and said they would be darlings if they were at all like Laura.

They were annoyed with Jane for her champions.h.i.+p of Prothero. They were immeasurably annoyed with her when she, and Tanqueray, and Arnott Nicholson, and Nina published his poems--a second volume--by subscription. They subscribed generously, and grew more resentful on the strength of it. Jane pleaded, but Brodrick was inexorable. The more she pleaded the more inexorable he was. This time he put his foot down, and put it (as Jane bitterly remarked) on poor Owen Prothero's neck. It was a neck, a stiff and obstinate neck, that positively invited the foot of a stiff and obstinate man.

Jane hid these things from Laura, who thought, poor innocent, that it was only her luck. Marriage or no marriage, she was incredibly happy.

She even persuaded herself it was as well that she couldn't be married if that was to make her happier. She distrusted happiness carried to such a preposterous pitch.

She was sitting with Jane one evening, by the October firelight, in the room where her friend lay quietly.

"Do you remember, Jinny, how we were all in love with George, you and I and Nina and poor old Caro? Caro said it was our apprentices.h.i.+p to the master."

Jane remembered.

"He was training us; I really think he was," said Laura, still reminiscent. "Can't you hear him saying, 'Come on, come on, what the d.i.c.kens does it matter if I do see you? It's got to be somebody and it had much better be me. I shan't sn.i.g.g.e.r. But I'm going to make you squirm as much as you _can_ squirm. You've got to know what it feels like.' I think he was positively proud of us when we did come on. I can't imagine him taking any other view. And after all, you know, he didn't sn.i.g.g.e.r."

She pondered. "He's an abominable husband, but he's a glorious friend."

Jane a.s.sented. He was glorious and abominable.

Laura's face grew tender in meditation. She was no longer thinking of George Tanqueray.

"There's one awful fear I have with Owen. I shan't be ready in time when he's all nicely disembodied and on his way to heaven. I see him stopped at some uninteresting station, and sitting there waiting--patiently waiting--for me to disembody myself and come on. It'll take me ages."

"It always was difficult to get you off," Jane murmured.

"I know. And I shall feel as if I were keeping him back when he was trying to catch a train."

"I imagine he's pretty sure of his train."

"The truth is Owen doesn't really wait. He's always in his train and out of it, so to speak."

"And your disembodying yourself, darling, is only a question of time."

"And time," said Laura, "doesn't exist for Owen."

But time was beginning to exist for Owen. He felt the pressure of the heavy days that divided him from Laura. He revolted against this tyranny of time.

And Brodrick, the lord of time, remained inexorable for two months.

Long before they were ended, little Laura, with a determination as inexorable as Brodrick's, had left Brodrick's house. To the great disgust and scandal of the Brodricks she had gone back to her rooms in Camden Town, where Prothero was living in the next house with only a wall between them.

Then (it was in the middle of October, when Henry was telling them that Jane must on no account be agitated) Brodrick and Jane nearly quarrelled about Prothero. She said that he was cruel, and that if Owen went into a consumption and Laura died of hunger it would be all his fault. And when he tried to reason gently with her she went off into a violent fit of hysterics. The next day Brodrick had a son born to him, a whole month before Henry had expected anything of the kind.

At first Brodrick was more than ever enraged with Prothero for tampering with other people's families like that. Jane had to go very near to death before his will was broken. It broke, though, at the touch of her weak arms round his neck, at the sight of her tortured body, and at her voice, sounding from the doors of death and birth, imploring him to do something for Owen Prothero.

Jane had hardly had time to recover before Prothero got work again on Brodrick's paper. Laura said they owed that to Jinny's baby.

They were married in November before Jinny's baby could be christened.

It was a rather sad and strange little wedding, in the parish church of Camden Town, with Brodrick to give away the bride, and Caro Bickersteth for bridesmaid, and Tanqueray for best man. Nina was not there. She had sent Laura a cheque for two hundred pounds two months ago--the half of her savings--and told her to go and marry Owen with it at once, and she had torn it up in a fury when Laura sent it back. She could do all that; but she could not go and see Laura and Owen getting married.

The two had found a lodging in an old house in Hampstead, not far from the Consumption Hospital. Laura had objected to the hospital, but Owen refused to recognize it as a thing of fear. He had fallen in love with the house. It topped a rise, at the end of the precipitous lane that curls out of the great modern High Street. It stood back in its garden, its narrow, flat-eyed windows staring over the wall down the lane.

Laura wasn't sure that she quite liked it.

"What are you looking at?" she said, as he paused before this house.

"I'm looking at that," said Prothero.

He pointed to an old, disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed, in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. Insubstantial as lace-work against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust, consumed in a delicate decay. A stout iron railing guarded this miracle of art and time. Thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave to the place an air of almost unbearable mystery and isolation; it stirred the sense of mortality, of things that having pa.s.sed through that doorway would not return.

"That house looks and feels as if it had ghosts in it," she said.

"So it has. Not the ghosts of people who have died. The ghosts of people who have never been born. The people," he said, "who come through the iron gate."

And as she looked at it again and at the untrodden gra.s.s behind it, she felt that this masterpiece of iron tortured into beauty was an appropriate symbol of their life. Of Owen's, rather than of hers. Closed as it was to all corporeal creatures, there yet went through it presences, intelligences, the august procession of the dreams.

It was flanked by a postern door, a little humble door in the wall of the garden. That was the door, Laura said, through which her little humble dreams would go out into the world to make their living.

"Poor Owen," she said, "it's the door _you'll_ have to go through."

He smiled.

"And the other," he said, "is the door I shall come back through when I'm gone."

That was what she couldn't bear to think of, the necessity she laid on him of going, as it were, for ever through the postern door. He was after all such a supernatural, such a disembodied thing. He had at times the eyes of a young divinity innocent of creation, untouched by the shames and terrors of the apparent world. And she knew it was the desire they had for each other that had brought him back from his divine borders and that held him in her world. There were moments when she felt that he maintained his appearance there by an effort so intense that it must be torture.

And he would have to work for her, doing dreadful things down in Fleet Street. Every day she would see him go down the green walk, and out through the postern gate, into the alien and terrible places of the incarnate. She felt that she had brought mortality upon an immortal thing. She had bound this winged and radiant spirit with the weight of her sad star.