There were moments when she longed to be as Gertrude, a woman with one
innocent, uncomplicated aim. She was no longer sorry for her. Gertrude's
passion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly
appeased. She bore within her no tyrannous divinity. She knew nothing of
the consuming and avenging will.
Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it
went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it,
past all bounds.
For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the
house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of
his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no
place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision.
They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were
solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the
light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the grass was
green under their feet. The things they touched were saturated with
their presence. There was no sign of ardent life they had not.
And not only was she surrounded by their visible bodies, but their souls
possessed her; she became the soul of each one of them in turn. It was
the intimacy, the spiritual warmth of the possession that gave her her
first sense of separation, of infidelity to Brodrick. The immaterial,
consecrated places were invaded. It was as if she closed her heart to
her husband and her child.
The mood continued as long as the vision kept its grip. She came out of
it unnerved and exhausted, and terrified at herself. Bodily
unfaithfulness seemed to her a lesser sin.
Brodrick was aware that she wandered. That was how he had always put it.
He had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. It was the way
of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that
had attracted him. He understood that sort of thing. It was his own
comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face
of his family's tradition. No Brodrick had ever married a woman who
wandered, who conceivably would want to wander.
And Jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances
for. And with each wandering she became increasingly difficult to find.
Still, hitherto he had had his certainty. Her spirit might torment him
with its disappearances; through her body, surrendered to his arms, he
had had the assurance of ultimate possession. At night her genius had no
power over her. Sleeping, she had deliverance in dreams. His passion
moved in her darkness, sounded her depths; through all their veils of
sleep she was aware of him, and at a touch she turned to him.
Now it was he who had no power over her.
One night, when he came to her, he found a creature that quivered at his
touch and shrank from it, fatigued, averted; a creature pitifully
supine, with arms too weary to enforce their own repulse. He took her in
his arms and she gave a cry, little and low, like a child's whimper. It
went to his heart and struck cold there. It was incredible that Jinny
should have given such a cry.
He lay awake a long time. He wondered if she had ceased to care for him.
He hardly dared own how it terrified him, this slackening of the
physical tie.
He got up early and dressed and went out into the garden. At six o'clock
he came back into her room. She was asleep, and he sat and watched her.
She lay with one arm thrown up above her pillow, as the trouble of her
sleep had tossed her. Her head was bowed upon her breast.
[Illustration: It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife]
His watching face was lowered as he brooded over the marvel and the
mystery of her. It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife, whose face
had been so tender to him, whose body utterly tender, utterly
compassionate. He tried to realize the marvel and mystery of her genius.
He knew it to be an immortal thing, hidden behind the veil of mortal
flesh that for the moment was so supremely dear to him. He wondered once
whether she still cared for Tanqueray. But the thought passed from him;
it could not endure beside the memory of her tenderness.
She woke and found his eyes fixed on her. They drew her from sleep, as
they had so often drawn her from some dark corner where she had sat
removed. She woke, as if at the urgence of a trouble that kept watch in
her under her sleep. In a moment she was wide-eyed, alert; she gazed at
him with a lucid comprehension of his state. She held out to him an arm
drowsier than her thought.
"I'm a brute to you," she said, "but I can't help it."
She sat up and gathered together the strayed masses of her hair.
"Do you think," she said, "you could get me a cup of tea from the
servant's breakfast?"
He brought the tea, and as they drank together their mutual memories
revived.
"I have," said she, "the most awful recollection of having been a brute
to you."
"Never mind, Jinny," he said, and flushed with the sting of it.
"I don't. That's the dreadful part of it. I can't feel sorry when I want
to. I can't feel anything at all."
She closed her eyes helplessly against his.
"It isn't my fault. It isn't really me. It's It."
He smiled at this reference to the dreadful Power.
"The horrible and brutal thing about it is that it stops you feeling. It
would, you know."
"Would it? I shouldn't have thought it would have made _that_
difference."
"That's just the difference it does make."