It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds,
and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense
odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in
the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and
branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the
birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green
veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the
suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.
Brodrick was coming back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday.
He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been
kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more
than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights
and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying
himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end
of a fortnight he had sent Jane a telegram to say that he was coming
back.
She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for
him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring
made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April
evenings met her on her Dorset moors.
She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable
passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half
divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the
immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and
air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the
veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths
were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.
It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at
his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the
swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a
bride.
Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at
her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the
kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.
They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why
the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.
They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised
and elaborated for her diversion.
Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his
brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had
evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a
little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer.
He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would
do her good. She had better take one.
"I wish you would," said Jane.
"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."
Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better
without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.
"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have
convulsions."
"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude
who had said he would.
A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance
it might have had.
"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.)
"I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."
"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."
"I meant--without him."
"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.
In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once,
Jane turned to him.
"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"
"Unkind?"
"Well, was I kind enough?"
"You are always kind," he said.
"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"
"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."
"What things?"
He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth.
So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile
of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.
"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off
all maidenly reserve and make love to you."
She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity
on his knees.
"The devil gets into me when I have to talk to Gertrude."
She put her arm lightly and shyly about him.
"Do you mind?" she said.
"No, Jinny, I rather like it."
Her arms tightened ever so little.
"It gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own
fireside?"
She did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any
Brodrick.
"Supposing," she said, "you repulse me? Could you repulse me?"
"No, Jinny; I don't think I ever could."
"What, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and
rumpling your nice collar?"
She let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it.
He drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently,
while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses
that lingered a moment in their flight.
"Do you like the way I make love?" she said. "And do you like my gown
and the way I do my hair?"
His voice shook. "Jinny, why aren't you always like this? Why aren't you
always adorable?"
"I can't be anything--always. Don't you adore me in my other moods?"
"Can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?"
"I never tease you when you're tired."
"No, but I'm sometimes tired when you tease me. You are, darling, just a
little bit exhausting for one man."
"Yes," said Jinny complacently; "I can exhaust you. But you can never,
never exhaust me. There's always more where I came from."
"The trouble is, Jinny, that I can't always make you out. I never know
where I am with you."
"But, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom you _had_ made
out. Think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it,
and anticipating all her conversation!"
"Think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely
whether she's your wife or not your wife."
"But it solves all the matrimonial problems--how to be the exemplary
father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor
again--how to break the seventh commandment----"
"Jinny!"
"The seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows--how
to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce
court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. Why can't you
look at it in that light?"
"Perhaps, Jinny, because I'm not polygamous."
"You never know what you are until you're tried. Supposing you'd married
Gertrude--you'd have had Gertrude, all there is of Gertrude, always
Gertrude, and nothing but Gertrude. Could you have stood it?"
"Probably."
"You couldn't. Before you'd been married to Gertrude six months you'd
have gone, howling, to the devil. Whereas with me you've got your devil
at home."
His smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. She had
appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that
marked his difference from his family.
She went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "I am really,
though you mayn't know it, the thing you need."
He saw his advantage in her mood.
"And _you_, Jinny? Don't you know that you're happiest like this?"
"Yes. I know it."
"And that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the
time?"
"In torture." She agreed.
"And don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of
agony on your forehead, Jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes;
and your mouth hardens."
"I know," she moaned. "I know it does. And you don't love me when I look
like that?"
"I love you whatever you look like, and you know it. I love you even
when you wander."
"Even? Do you mind so very much--my wandering?"
"Sometimes, perhaps, a little."
"You didn't mind at all before you married me."
"I didn't realize it then."
"Didn't realize what?"
"Your genius, Jinny, and the things it does to you."
"But you did--you did--you knew all about it."
"I knew what it meant to me."
"What _did_ it mean--to you?"
He appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her.
"To me it was simply _the_ supreme intellectual interest. It was the
strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt.
You'll never quite know what it meant to me."
"And it means nothing now--you don't like it--my poor genius? And they
used to say you were in love with it."
"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."
"You were in love enough to marry it."
"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."
"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."
"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."
"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you
like me better if I didn't?"
He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.
"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on
her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"
"Jinny--if Gertrude were to hear you!"
She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.
"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me
straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."
Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who
suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of
the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of
conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she
divined, she felt the tide that drew them.
She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed
from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the
blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion
that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.
At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was
saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he
rose also and followed her with shining eyes.
Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.