Jane assented. 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 passed 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 grass 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.
But there came to her a wonderful day when he brought her home, through
the little humble door in the wall of the garden; when, shut in their
room, he took her to himself. He laid his hands on her shoulders, and
she closed her eyes. He bowed his head over her and his breath was on
her mouth and she gave her face to him. His hands trembled holding her,
and she felt upon her their power and their passion.
And she knew that it was not her body alone that he sought for and held,
but the soul that was her womanhood. It stood before him, a new-born
Eve, naked and unafraid on the green plots of Eden. It looked at him,
and its eyes were tender with desire and pity. It was tremulous as a
body inhabited by leaping light and flame.
She knew that in them both the flame burned singly.