For six months Jane concentrated all her passion on her little son. The
Brodricks, who had never been surprised at anything, owned that this was
certainly not what they had expected. Jane seemed created to confound
their judgments and overthrow their expectations. Neither Frances Heron
nor Sophy Levine was ever possessed by the ecstasy and martyrdom of
motherhood. They confessed as much. Frances looked at Sophy and said,
"Whoever would have thought that Jinny----?" And Sophy looked at Frances
and replied, "My dear, I didn't even think she could have had one. She's
a marvel and a mystery."
The baby was a link binding Jane to her husband's family. She was a
marvel and a mystery to them more than ever, but she was no longer an
alien. The tie of the flesh was strong. She was Hugh's wife, who had
gone near to death for him, and had returned in triumph. She was
glorified in their eyes by all the powers of life.
The baby himself had an irresistible attraction for them. From John's
house in Augustus Road, from Henry's house in Roehampton Lane, from the
house of the Levines in St. John's Wood, there was now an incessant
converging upon Brodrick's house. The women took an unwearying and
unwandering interest in Hugh's amazing son. (It was a girl they had
expected.) First thing in the morning, or at noon, or in the early
evening at his bed-time, John's wife, Mabel, came with her red-eyed,
sad-hearted worship. Winny Heron hung about him and Jane for ever. Jane
discovered in Sophy and in Frances an undercurrent of positive affection
that set from her child to her.
John Brodrick regarded her with solemn but tender approval, and Henry
(who might have owed her a grudge for upsetting his verdict), Henry
loved her even more than he approved. She had performed her part beyond
all hope; she linked the generations; she was wedded and made one with
the solidarity of the Brodricks.
Jane with a baby was a mystery and a marvel to herself. She spent days
in worshipping the small divinity of his person, and in the
contemplation of his heartrending human attributes. She doubted if there
were any delirium of the senses to compare with the touch of her hands
upon his body, or of his fingers on her breast. She fretted herself to
fever at his untimely weaning. She ached with longing for the work of
his hands upon her, for the wonder of his eyes, opening at her for a
moment, bright and small, over the white rim of her breast.
In his presence there perished in her all consciousness of time. Time
was nothing to him. He laid his diminutive hands upon the hours and
destroyed them for his play.
You would have said that time was no more to Jane than it was to the
baby. For six months she watched with indifference the slaughter and
ruin of the perfect hours. For six months she remained untormented by
the desire to write. Brodrick looked upon her as a woman made perfect,
wholly satisfied and appeased.
At the end of six months she was attacked by a mysterious restlessness
and fatigue. Brodrick, at Henry's suggestion, took her to the seaside.
They were away six weeks.
She came back declaring herself strong.
But there was something about her that Henry did not like. She was if
anything more restless; unnaturally (he said) abstracted when you spoke
to her; hardly aware of you at times. John had noticed that, too, and
had not liked it. They had all noticed it. They were afraid it must be
worrying Hugh. She seemed, Sophy said, to be letting things go all
round. Frances thought she was not nearly so much taken up with the
baby. When she mentioned it to Henry he replied gravely that it was
physical. It would pass.
And yet it did not pass.
The crisis came in May of nineteen-six, when the baby was seven months
old. It all turned on the baby.
Every morning about nine o'clock, now that summer was come, you found
him in the garden, in his perambulator, barefooted and bareheaded,
taking the air before the sun had power. Every morning his nurse brought
him to his mother to be made much of; at nine when he went out, and at
eleven when he came in, full of sleep. In and out he went through the
French window of Jane's study, which opened straight on to the garden.
He was wheeled processionally up and down, up and down the gravel walk
outside it, or had his divine seat under the lime-tree on the lawn.
Always he was within sight of Jane's windows.
One Sunday morning (it was early, and he had not been out for five
minutes, poor lamb) Jane called to the nurse to take him away out of her
sight.
"Take him away," she said. "Take him down to the bottom of the garden,
where I can't see him."
Brodrick heard her. He was standing on the gravel path, contemplating
his son. It was his great merit that at these moments, and in the
presence of other people, he betrayed no fatuous emotion. And now his
face, fixed on the adorable infant, was destitute of all expression. At
Jane's cry it flushed heavily.
The flush was the only sign he gave that he had heard her. Without a
word he turned and followed, thoughtfully, the windings of the exiled
perambulator. From her place at the writing-table where she sat
tormented, Jane watched them go.
Ten minutes later Brodrick appeared at the window. He was about to
enter.
"Oh, no, no!" she cried. "_Not_ you!"
He entered.
"Jinny," he said gently, "what's the matter with you?"
His voice made her weak and tender.
"I want to write a book," she said. "Such a pretty book."
"It's that, is it?"
He sighed and stood contemplating her in ponderous thought.
Jane took up some pens and played with them.
"I can't write if you look at me like that," she said.
"I won't look at you; but I'm going to talk to you."
He sat down. She saw with terror his hostility to the thing she was
about to do.
"Talking's no good," she said. "It's got to be done."
"I don't see the necessity."
"It's not one of those things that can be seen."
"No. But look here----" He was very gentle and forbearing. "Need you do
it quite so soon?"
"So soon? If I don't do it now, when _shall_ I do it?"
He did not answer her. He sat looking at her hands in their nervous,
restless play.
Her grave eyes, under their flattening brows, gazed thoughtfully at him.
The corners of her mouth lifted a little with their wing-like, quivering
motion. Two moods were in her; one had its home in her brooding, tragic
eyes, one in her mysterious, mocking lips.
"It's no use, dear," she said. "You'll never turn me into that sort of
woman."
"What sort of woman?"
"The sort of woman you like."
He waited in silence for what she would say next.
"It's not my fault, it's yours and Henry's. You shouldn't have made me
go away and get strong. The thing always comes back to me when I get
strong. It's _me_, you see."
"No, Jinny, the whole point is that you're not strong. You're not fit
for anything creative."
At that she laughed.
"You're not, really. Why, how old is that child?"
"Six months. No--seven."
"Well, Henry said it would take you a whole year to get over it."
"_I_ thought I should never get over it. We were both wrong."
"My child, it's palpable. You're nervy to the last degree. I never saw
you so horribly restless."
"Not more so than when I first knew Baby was coming."
"Well, quite as much."
She gave him a little look that he did not understand.
"Quite as much," she said. "And you were patient with me then."
He maintained a composure that invited her to observe how extremely
patient he was now.
"And do you remember--afterwards--before he came--how quiet I was and
how contented? I wasn't a bit nervy, or restless, or--or troublesome."
He smiled, remembering.
"Can't you see that anything creative--everything creative must be like
that?"
He became grave again, having failed to follow her.
"Presently, if this thing goes all right, I shall be quite, quite sane.
That's the way it takes you just at first. Then, when you feel it coming
to life and shaping itself, you settle down into a peace."
Now he understood.
"Yes," he said, "and you pay for it after."
"My dear, we pay for everything--after."
She leaned back in her chair. The movement withdrew her a little from
Brodrick's unremitting gaze.
"There are women--angels naturally--who become devils if they can't have
children. I'm an angel--you know I'm an angel--but I shall be a devil if
I can't have this. Can't you see that it's just as natural and
normal--for me?"
"It's pretty evident," he said, "that you can't have both. You weren't
built to stand the double strain----"
"And you mean--you mean----"
"I mean that it would be better for you if you could keep off it for a
while. At any rate while the child's young."
"But he'll be young, though, for ages. And if--if there are any more of
him, there'll be no end to the keeping off."
"You needn't think about that," he said.
"It would be all very well," she said, "if it were simpler; if either
you or I could deal with the thing, if we could just wring its neck and
destroy it. I would if it would make you any happier, but I can't. It's
stronger than I. I _can't_ keep off it."
He pondered. He was trying, painfully, to understand the nature of this
woman whom he thought he knew, whom, after all, it seemed, he did not
know.
"You used to understand," she said. "Why can't you now?"
Why couldn't he? He had reckoned with her genius when he married her. He
had honestly believed that he cared for it as he cared for her, that
Jinny was not to be thought of apart from her genius. He had found
Henry's opinion of it revolting, absurd, intolerable. And imperceptibly
his attitude had changed. In spite of himself he was coming round to
Henry's view, regarding genius as a malady, a thing abnormal,
disastrous, not of nature; or if normal and natural--for Jinny--a thing
altogether subordinate to Jinny's functions as a wife and mother. There
was no sane man who would not take that view, who would not feel that
nature was supreme. And Jinny had proved that left to nature, to her
womanhood, she was sound and perfect. Jinny's genius had had, as he put
it, pretty well its fling. It was nature's turn.
Under all his arguments there lurked, unrecognized and unsuspected, the
natural man's fear of the thing not of nature, of its dominion, coming
between him and her, slackening, perhaps sundering the tie of flesh.
Through the tie of flesh, insensibly, he had come to look on Jinny as
his possession.
"What would you do," he said, "if the little chap were to get ill?"
She turned as if he had struck her.
"Ill? Why couldn't you _tell_ me he was ill?"
"But he isn't. I was only----"
"Does Henry say he's ill?"
"Henry? Oh Lord, no."
"You're lying. I'll go to him and see----"
She made a rush for the window. He sprang after her and caught her. She
struggled in his arms.
"Jinny, you little fool. There's nothing--nothing----He's bursting with
health."
"What did you mean, then?"
"I meant--supposing he were ill----"
"You meant to frighten me?"
She sat down and he saw her fighting for her breath. He knelt beside her
and took her in his arms, murmuring inarticulate things in his terror.
At his touch she turned to him and kissed him.
"Hugh, dear," she said, "don't frighten me again. It's not necessary."
All that week, and for many weeks, she busied herself with the child and
with the house. It was as if she were trying, passionately, to make up
for some brief disloyalty, some lapse of tenderness.
Then, all of a sudden she flagged; she was overcome by an intolerable
fatigue and depression. Brodrick was worried, but he kept his anxiety to
himself. He was afraid now of doing or saying the wrong thing.
One Saturday evening Jinny came to him in his study. She carried the
dreadfully familiar pile of bills and tradesmen's books.
"Is it those horrible accounts?" he said.
She was so sick, so white and harassed, so piteously humble, that he
knew. She had got them all wrong again.
"I did _try_ to keep them," she said.
"Don't try. Leave the damned things alone."
"I _have_ left them," she wailed. "And look at them."
He looked. A child, he thought, could have kept them straight. They were
absurdly simple. But out of their simplicity, their limpid, facile,
elementary innocence, Jinny had wrought fantasies, marvels of confusion,
of intricate complexity.
That was bad enough. But it was nothing to the disorder of what Jinny
called her own little affairs. There seemed at first to be no relation
between Jinny's proved takings and the sums that Jinny was aware of as
having passed into her hands. And then Brodrick found the cheques at the
back of a drawer, where they had lain for many months; forgotten,
Brodrick said, as if they had never been.
"I'm dreadful," said Jinny.
"You are. What on earth did you do before you married me?"
"George Tanqueray helped me."
He frowned.
"Well, you can leave it to me now," he said.
"It takes it out of me more than all the books I ever wrote."
That touched him, and he smiled in spite of himself.
"If," said she, "we only had a housekeeper."
"A housekeeper?"
"It's a housekeeper you want."
She put her face to his, brushing his cheek with a shy and fugitive
caress.
"You really ought," she said, "to have married Gertrude."
"You've told me that several times already."
"_She_ wouldn't have plagued you night and day."
He owned it.
"Isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?"
"Why, what else could the poor woman do?"
"Stay, of course."
He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked,
have judged it unthinkable.
"Supposing," said Jinny, "you asked her, very nicely, to come
back--don't you think that would save us?"
No; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it
that way, as saving them, saving Jinny, that was to say; well, he owned,
wouldn't it?
"I say, but wouldn't you mind?" he said at last.
"Why should I?" said she.
In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared
at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was
staying there with her cousin.
She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her
uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in
surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.
He laid the situation before her, curtly.
"If you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems."
She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything
that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her
problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful
solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way
that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he
cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to
preserve it in its purity and its perfection.
Putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable.
There was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such
light as comes only from the deeps. Her upper lip quivered with a
movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either.
"Are you sure," she said, "that Mrs. Brodrick wouldn't mind?"
"Jinny? Oh dear me, no. It was her idea."
Her face changed again. The light and flush of life withdrew. Her
sallowness returned. She had the fixed look of one who watches the
perishing under her eyes of a beloved dream.
"And you," she said, as if she read him, "are not quite sure whether you
really want me?"
"Should I ask you if I didn't want you? My only doubt was whether you
would care to come. Will you?"
He looked at her with his intent look. It bore some faint resemblance to
the look he had for Jane. Her light rose. She met his gaze with a flame
of the sacrificial fire.
"I'll do whatever you want," she said.
That was how Gertrude came back to Brodrick's house.
"And now," Jane wrote to Sophy Levine, "we're all happy."
But Sophy in her wisdom wondered. As soon as she heard of Gertrude's
installation she rushed over to Putney at the highest speed of her
motor-car.
She found Jane on the lawn, lying back in her long chair. An expression
of great peace was on her face.
She had been writing. Some sheets of manuscript lay under the chair
where she had thrust them out of Sophy's sight. She had heard the
imperious trump of the motor-car, sounding her doom as it swung on to
the Heath.
Sophy looked at her sister-in-law and said to herself that, really,
Henry did exaggerate. She could see nothing in the least abnormal about
Jane. Jane, when you took her the right way, was just like anybody else.
Gertrude was out. She had gone over to Roehampton to see Frances. Sophy
judged the hour propitious.
"It works," said Jane in answer to her question; "it works beautifully.
You don't know, Sophy, what a hand that woman has. Just go indoors and
look about you. You can see it working."
"I couldn't stand another woman's hand in my house," said Sophy,
"however beautifully it worked."
"Is it my house? In a sense it's hers. There's no doubt that she made it
about as perfect as a house could be. It was like a beautiful machine
that she had invented and kept going. Nobody but Gertrude could have
kept it going like that. It was her thing and she loved it."
Sophy's face betrayed her demure understanding of Gertrude's love.
"Gertrude," said Jane, "couldn't do my work, and it's been demonstrated
that I can't do hers. I don't believe in turning people out of their
heaven-appointed places and setting them down to each other's jobs."
"If you could convince me that Gertrude's heaven-appointed place is in
your husband's house----"
"She's proved it."
"He wasn't your husband then."
"Don't you see that his being my husband robs the situation of its
charm, the vagueness that might have been its danger?"
"Jinny--it never answers--a double arrangement."
"Why not? Why not a quadruple arrangement if necessary?"
"That would be safe. It's the double thing that isn't. You've got to
think of Hugh."
"Poor darling, as if I didn't."
"I mean--of him and her."
"Together? Is that your----Oh, I can't. It's unthinkable."
"You might have thought of her, then."
"I did. I did think of her."
"My dear--you know what's the matter with her?"
"That," said Jane slowly, "is what I thought of. She might have been
happy if it hadn't been for me."
"That was out of the question," said Sophy, with some asperity.
"Was it? Well, anyhow, she's happy now."
"Jinny, you're beyond anything. Do you mean to tell me that was what you
did it for?"
"Partly. I had to have some one. But, yes, that's why I had Gertrude."
"Well, if you did it for Gertrude it was cruel kindness. Encouraging her
in her preposterous----"
"Don't, Sophy. There couldn't be anything more innocent on earth."
"Oh, innocent, I dare say. But I've no patience with the folly of it."
"I have. It might so easily have been me."
"You? I don't see you making a fool of yourself."
"I do. I can see myself making an eternal fool. _You_ wouldn't, Sophy,
you haven't got it in you. But I could cry when I look at Gertrude. We
oughtn't to be talking about it. It's awful of us. We've no right even
to know."
"My dear, when it's so apparent! What does Hugh think of it?"
"Do you suppose I've given her away to him?"
"I imagine he knows."
"If he does, he wouldn't give her away to me."
"I'm afraid, dear, she gave herself away."
"Don't you see that that makes it all the worse for her? It makes it
horrible. Think how she must have suffered before she _could_. The only
chance for her now is to have her back, to face the thing, and let it
take its poor innocent place, and make it beautiful for her, so that she
can endure it and get all the happiness she can out of it. It's so
little she can get, and I owe it to her. I made her suffer."
Sophy became thoughtful.
"After all, Jinny," she said, "you _are_ rather a dear. All the same, if
Gertrude wasn't a good woman----"
"But she _is_ a good woman. That's why she's happy now."
Sophy arranged her motor-veil, very thoughtfully, over and around a
smile.
This conversation had thrown light on Jinny, a light that to Sophy's
sense was beautiful but perilous, hardly of the earth.