Nina kept her promise, although Prothero protested that he saw no reason
why he should be taken to see Laura Gunning. He was told that he need
not be afraid of Laura. She was too small, Nina said, to do him any
harm. Refusing to go and see Laura was like refusing to go and see a
sick child. Ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented.
Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in
Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and
space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of
Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as
Papa.
It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy;
for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and
now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but
Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her
diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation
in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the
least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were
things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand
facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to
the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty
pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.
And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she
drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would
turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had
not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They
were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.
It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty
had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test,
justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in
her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing.
For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to
her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not
have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden
Town.
It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still
more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity.
There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that
stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window.
There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of
the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's
writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the
fireplace. That was all.
Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly
ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.
Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an
atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or
spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold
self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four
walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret.
Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense
of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof,
drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to
cling.
Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments
of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the
old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and
then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching,
an immovable, perpetual fear.
Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy,
childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat,
slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment
before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.
He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she
gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the
fragile thing.
He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of
her, that she couldn't do him any harm.
He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad;
the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features
cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood,
their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw
all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it
slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead,
the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.
And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it
evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of
his fear.
She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own
folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She
might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in
her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing,
pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fierce
concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most
exquisite simplicity.
They had said nothing to each other. Laura, in the wonderful hour of his
coming, could find nothing to say to him. He noticed that she and Nina
talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the
old man might awake.
Then Laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her
fear.
"You'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said Prothero.
Laura let him.
Nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while Laura made the
tea. She saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that
they rested on her when she was not looking.
"You were hard at work when we came," he was saying.
Laura denied it.
"If I may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long."
"No. I'm never at it long enough. The bother is getting back to where
you were half-an-hour ago. It seems to take up most of the time."
"Then I oughtn't--ought I--to take up any of it?"
"Oh, please," said Laura, "take it. _I_ can't do anything with it."
She had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate.
"Time," she said, "is about all we've got here. At any rate there will
be time for tea." She examined the cupboard. "It looks as if time were
about all we were going to have for tea." She explored the ultimate
depth of the cupboard. "I wonder if I could find some jam. Do you like
jam?"
"I adore it."
That was all they said.
"Need you," said Nina to Prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?"
Even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading
it, would be left for the Kiddy's supper.
"He shall spread it," said the Kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he
likes."
They called Nina to the table. She ate and drank; but Laura's tea
scalded her; Laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it;
and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat.
And in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to
torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have to go.
"Do you think," said Laura, "I'd better wake Papa?"
That was a question which this decided little person had never been able
to decide for herself. It was too momentous.
"No," said Nina, "I think you'd better not."
It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and
staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him
dream dreams.
Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and
held his hands in hers and stroked them.
"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she
said, "he has such horrid ones."
Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his
dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak,
handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.
"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the
throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at
it. He was almost wide awake now.
"Is it Rose?" he said.
"No, Papa. It's Nina."
Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat
beside him and talked to him a little while.
He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of
Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who
saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from
him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything
he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in
his idea.
"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not
going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."
"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there
on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed.
She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.
Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his
long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed
his head over Laura's hand.
"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would
be very glad.
That was all.
Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.
"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart
wrung."
"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"
He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.
But she knew he saw.