Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him
the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of
fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the
intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the
"Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no
longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition,
the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of
race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have
more and more children like the solid little son they had called John
Henry Brodrick.
The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in
him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and
more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to
think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding
him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race
there would be Jane to reckon with.
In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born.
A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had
contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a
terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of
degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the
cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that.
Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but
Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the
dreadful open door.
Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly
out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly
Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last
eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out
of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling
he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he
couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk
more money on his unprofitable dream.
It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She
saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by
the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He
had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review
itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed
editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had
been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in
his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them;
they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with
the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements
that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his
dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had
all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted
George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.
She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't
for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't
for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these
years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married
her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some
advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances
of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than
sufficient to buy Louis out.
Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.
She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.
Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in
his office.
Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of
his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this
thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for
a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his
losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only
wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.
Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering
from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined
under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he
wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for
his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the
glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when
she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as
impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was
flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it
was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the
transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not
sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight.
The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a
natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a
book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with
the first effort.
There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a
Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a
darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could have objected to
Jane's hair. But there was Jane's delicacy. An alarming tendency to
waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him
her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system.
Jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick
child and Mabel Brodrick.
For in this dreadful year Mabel had become worse. Her malady had
declared itself. There were rumours and hushed hints of a possible
operation. Henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive
the shock. It was not to be thought of at present; not as long as
things, he said, remained quiescent.
John Brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and
less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. The
lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of
wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men
and to his wife of all women. Poor Mabel who had never done anything----
That was the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming.
She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch
in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered
her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was
supreme by divine right of suffering.
Again, every day, Jane trod the path over the Heath to Wimbledon. And
sometimes Henry found her at John's house and drove her back in his
motor (he had a motor now). Once, boxed up with him in the closed car
(it was March and the wind was cold over the Heath), she surprised him
with a question.
"Henry, is it true that if Mabel had had children she'd have been all
right?"
"Yes," he said curtly, wondering what on earth had made her ask him
that.
"It's killing her then--not having them?"
"That," he said, "and the desire to have them."
"How cruel it is, how detestable--that she should have _this_----"
"It's Nature's revenge, Jane, on herself."
"And she was so sweet, she would have loved them----"
The Doctor brooded. He had a thing to say to her.
"Jinny, if you'd put it away--altogether--that writing of yours--you'd
be a different woman."
"Different?"
"You'd be happier. And, what's more, you'd be well, too. Perfectly
well."
"This is not the advice I should give you," he went on, addressing her
silence, "if you were an unmarried woman. I urge my unmarried patients
to work--to use their brains all they can--and married ones, too, when
they've no children. If poor Mabel had done _something_ it would have
been far better. But in your case it's disastrous."
Jane remained silent. She herself had a premonition of disaster. Her
restlessness was on her. Her nerves and blood were troubled again by the
ungovernable, tyrannous impulse of her power. It was not the year she
should have chosen, but because she had no choice she was working
through everything, secretly, in defiance of Henry's orders. She
wondered if he knew. He was looking at her keenly, as if he had at any
rate a shrewd suspicion.
"I hardly think," he said, "it's fair to Hugh."
Henry was sure of his facts, and her silence made him surer. She _was_
at it again, and the question was how to stop her?
The question was laid that night before the family committee. It met in
the library at Moor Grange almost by Brodrick's invitation. Brodrick was
worried. He had gone so far as to confess that he was worried about
Jane. She wanted to write another book, he said, and he didn't know
whether she was fit.
"Of course she isn't fit," said the Doctor. "It must be stopped. She
must be made to give it up--altogether."
Brodrick inquired who was to make her? and was told that _he_ was. He
must put his foot down. He should have put it down before.
But Brodrick, being a Brodrick, took an unexpected line.
"I don't know," he said slowly, "that we've any right to dictate to her.
It's a big question, and I think she ought to be allowed to decide it
for herself."
"She isn't fit," said Henry, "to decide anything for herself."
Brodrick sent a level look at him.
"You talk," said he, "as if she wasn't responsible."
"I should be very sorry to say who is and who isn't. Responsibility is a
question of degree. I say Jane is not at the present moment in a state
to decide."
"It sounds," said Brodrick, laughing in his bitterness, "very much as if
you thought she wasn't sane. Of course I know she'd put a cheque for a
hundred pounds into a drawer and forget all about it. But it would be
more proof of insanity in Jinny if she remembered it was there."
"It would indeed," said Sophy.
"We're not discussing Jinny's talent for finance," said Henry.
"I suppose," said Brodrick, "what we _are_ discussing is her genius?"
"I'm not saying anything at all about her genius. We've every reason to
recognize her genius and be proud of it. It's not a question of her
mind. It's a question of a definite bodily condition, and as you can't
separate mind from body" (he shrugged his shoulders), "well--there you
are. I won't say don't let her work; it's better for her to use her
brain than to let it rust. But let her use it in moderation.
Moder--ation. Not those tremendous books that take it out of her."
"Are you sure they do take it out of her? Tanqueray says she'll be ill
if she doesn't write 'em."
"Tanqueray? What does he know about it?"
"More than we do, I suspect. He says the normal, healthy thing for her
is to write, to write tremendous books, and she'll suffer if we thwart
her. He says we don't understand her."
"Does he suggest that _you_ don't understand her?" asked Sophy.