It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from
her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.
"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.
"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."
"As if I wasn't always by myself."
Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with
its involuntary surrender.
He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so
that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But
the pace he set was terrific.
"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."
"Not odder than you, do I? _You_ ought to be swinging up a
mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see
you."
"Do you remember?"
"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone
up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating
my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me,
hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper
ledge down on to the track. Your hair--you had lots of hair, all
tawny--some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over
your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there
were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the
mountain. I had found my wild cat."
"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."
"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the
terror of the mountains in them."
"And yours--yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a
human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd
forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."
"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."
"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press
on you and hurt you?"
They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses,
houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the
mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some
naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.
"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there--you and I could
go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would
simply disappear."
They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before
them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate
framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a
hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The
buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.
"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.
"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."
"Isn't it--horrible?"
"No," he said. "It isn't."
They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to
their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her
up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.
"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"
"It isn't late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.
He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders
against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her
that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence.
Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.
"You'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb
and dangerous mood.
He roused himself almost irritably.
"Thanks, no. Don't bother about it."
She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of
him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things
approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time
that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by
interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant
acts.
Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the
bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that
he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he
wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches,"
from its shelf and open it.
She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the
gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was
stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on
Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring
flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina
made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth,
motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.
He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast,
and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged
it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain
from her pain.
"Why didn't you call out?" he said.
"I didn't want you to know."
"You'd have been burnt sooner?"
He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her
shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and
her eyes met his.
"I'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than
hurt--your hands."
His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out
of her sight.
She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of
his recoil.
"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it
on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to
call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.
"There's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.
"No, Owen, nothing; except that I'm tired of it."
"The tiredness will pass. Is that burn hurting you?"
"Not yet. I don't mind it."
He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She
saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and
that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.
She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced
her.
"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't
written it, I should never have been here."
"That's why, then, isn't it?"
"I suppose so. You _had_ to write it, and I _had_ to come."
"Yes, Owen," she said gently.
"You brought me here," he said.
"I can't understand it."
"Can't understand what?"
"The fascination I had for you."
He closed the book and laid it down.
"You were my youth, Nina."
He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now
withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that
forbade her to touch him.
"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for
it."
"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."
"No. They _are_ me. They are what I was. Your people are not people,
they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."
"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.
"You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you.
You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were."
He paused.
"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it
rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like
an unhappy ghost."
It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not
gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.
Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.
She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.
He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got
to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.
She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow.
Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.
He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to
between them.
She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her
feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself
down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of
circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were
gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.
At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched
out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut
their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the
burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily
distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen
laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be
wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all
passion of flesh and blood.
In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the
skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze
and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated;
eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had
carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a
lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was
incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant
energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She
lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable,
not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing
was accomplished.
Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came
to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.
"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."
She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was
sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice
between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago
when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his
desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura
Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself;
behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.
She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that
had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she
had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her
nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual
appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its
own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration,
sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt
that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of
her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to
him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any
one of them would kill her.
She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her
experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray
had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality
of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the
nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the
unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.
Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with
it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this
terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day
it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she
preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work
of her.
As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the
throat of the beast.
She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had
endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was
inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her
flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside
her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his
service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised
her courage.
"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But
when it hurts most it's healing."
That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she
could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back,
above hers.
Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of
his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street.
The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.
The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated
Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and
virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast,
though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that
other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known
Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued
Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it
back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity
of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's
little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed,
unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.
The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She
sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with
him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses
streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She
had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging,
rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow,
lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the
troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her,
like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.
It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.
She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door,
and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of
fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.
His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He
stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut
her in.
"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad
perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or
surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.
"You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you."
"I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door."
He shut it.
"Won't you sit down?"
She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself.
Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with
his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.
Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of
the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of
surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled
from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at
her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he
had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few
new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed
beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her
hand and felt the stuff.
"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.
He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing
ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.
"You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"
"Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do."
"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will
be my doing."
"Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be
responsible--if I die?"
"I set them on to you."
"Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man
for the job."
"The best man--to die?"
"War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that
intention."
"You _will_ die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."
"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"
"I care--because they die."
Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having
uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.
"Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That
ends it."
She rose.
"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come
and tell a man she cares for him."
"Why not?" he said simply.
"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more
like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why
shouldn't I tell you? You know it--as God knows it."
"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."
"Owen--shall I ever be where you are now?"
"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what
you cared for."
It was not. Yet she yearned for it--his youth that was made to love her,
his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still.
"No," she said, "it isn't only that."
She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau.
With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new
suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the
door he was about to open.
"Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out,
too, and look after you?"
He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said.
"Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if
it comes to that."