The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was,
indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their attitude. She could not
say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care
that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.
That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked
on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the
highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to
its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They
refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they
remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as
they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or
excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing
was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin
against the family, the race.
And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she
would have to pay for it.
But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that
they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the
expected, they said no more. They assumed no airs of successful
prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day
of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that
she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would
stand by her.
More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a
sheltering and protecting wall.
She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that
she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her
sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living
body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and
day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced
her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and
bloodless veins.
There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain,
was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and
subdued to suffering; she embraced passionately her pain. It appeased
her desire for expiation.
They needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. If she
could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. John Henry
Brodrick stood solid and sane, a Brodrick of the Brodricks, rosy and
round with nourishment, not a nerve, Henry said, in his composition, and
the stomach of a young ostrich. It was in little Hugh's little stomach
and his nerves that the mischief lay. The screaming, Henry told her, was
a nervous system. It was awful that a baby should have nerves.
Henry hardly thought that she would rear him. He didn't rub that in, he
was much too tender. He replied to her agonized questioning that, yes,
it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. With
incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. She had him night
and day. She washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him
with her own hands. It was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she
gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when
she slept. For she had bad nights with him because of the screaming.
Brodrick had had bad nights, too. It had got on his nerves, and his
digestion suffered. Jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of
the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. He went unwillingly, and
with a sense of cowardice and shame. He couldn't think how Jinny could
stand it with _her_ nerves.
She stood it somehow, in her passion for the child. It was her heart,
not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. Beyond her heavy-eyed
fatigue she showed no signs of strain. Henry acknowledged in her that
great quality of the nervous temperament, the power of rising
high-strung to an emergency. He intimated that he rejoiced to see her on
the right track, substituting for the unhealthy excesses of the brain
the normal, wholesome life of motherhood. He was not sure now that he
pitied her. He was sorrier, ten times sorrier, for his brother Hugh.
Gertrude Collett agreed with the Doctor. She insisted that it was
Brodrick and not Jane who suffered. Gertrude was in a position to know.
She hinted that nobody but she really did know. She saw more of him than
any of his family. She saw more of him than Jane. Brodrick's suffering
was Gertrude's opportunity, the open, consecrated door where she entered
soft-footed, angelic, with a barely perceptible motion of her ministrant
wings. Circumstances restored the old intimate relation. Brodrick was
worried about his digestion; he was afraid he was breaking up
altogether, and Gertrude's solicitude confirmed him in his fear. Under
its influence and Gertrude's the editor spent less and less of his time
in Fleet Street. He found, as he had found before, that a great part of
his work could be done more comfortably at home. He found, too, that he
required more than ever the co-operation of a secretary. The increased
efficiency of Addy Ranger made her permanent and invaluable in Fleet
Street. Jane's preoccupation had removed her altogether from the affairs
of the "Monthly Review." Inevitably Gertrude slid into her former place.
She had more of Brodrick now than she had ever had; she had more of the
best of him. She was associated with his ambition and his dream. Now
that Jane's hand was not there to support it, Brodrick's dream had begun
to sink a little, it was lowering itself almost to Gertrude's reach. She
could touch it on tiptoe, straining. She commiserated Jane on her
exclusion from the editor's adventures and excitements, his untiring
pursuit of the young talents (his scent for them was not quite so
infallible as it had been), his curious or glorious finds. Jane smiled
at her under her tired eyes. She was glad that he was not alone in his
dream, that he had some one, if it was only Gertrude.
For, by an irony that no Brodrick could possibly have foreseen, Jane's
child separated her from her husband more than her genius had ever done.
Her motherhood had the fierce ardour and concentration of the disastrous
power. It was as if her genius had changed its channel and direction,
and had its impulse bent on giving life to the half-living body. Nothing
else mattered. She could not have travelled farther from Brodrick in her
widest, wildest wanderings. The very hours conspired against them. Jane
had to sleep in the afternoon, to make up for bad nights. Brodrick was
apt to sleep in the evenings, after dinner, when Jane revived a little
and was free.
The year passed and she triumphed. The little half-living body had
quickened. The child, Henry said, would live; he might even be fairly
strong. His food nourished him. He was gaining weight and substance.
Jane was to be congratulated on her work which was nothing short of a
miracle. _Her_ work; _her_ miracle; Henry admitted it was that. He had
had to stand by and do nothing. He couldn't work miracles. But if Jane
had relaxed her care for a moment there was no miracle that could have
saved the child.
To Jane it _was_ a miracle. It was as if her folding arms had been his
antenatal hiding-place; as if she had brought him forth with anguish a
second time.
She would not have admitted that she loved him more than his brother.
Jacky was as good as gold; but he was good with Gertrude and happy with
Gertrude. The baby was neither good nor happy with anybody but Jane.
Between her and the little twice-born son there was an unbreakable tie.
He attached himself to his mother with a painful, pitiful passion. Out
of her sight he languished. He had grown into her arms. Every time he
was taken from them it was a rending of flesh from tender flesh.
His attachment grew with his strength, and she was more captured and
more chained than ever. He "had" her, as Tanqueray would have said, at
every turn. Frances and Sophy, the wise maternal women, shook their
heads in their wisdom; and Jane smiled in hers. She was wiser than any
of them. She had become pure womanhood, she said, like Gertrude. She
defied Gertrude's womanhood to produce a superior purity.
Brodrick had accepted the fact without astonishment. The instinct of
paternity was strong in him. Once married to Jane her genius had become
of secondary importance. The important thing was that she was his wife;
and even that was not so important as it had been. Only last year he had
told her, jesting, that he never knew whether she was his wife or not.
He hardly knew now (they saw so little of each other); but he did know
that she was the mother of his children.
In the extremity of her anguish Jane had not observed this change in
Brodrick's attitude. But now she had leisure to observe. What struck her
first was the way Gertrude Collett had come out. It was in proportion as
she herself had become sunk in her maternal functions that Gertrude had
emerged. She was amazed at the extent to which a soft-feathered angel,
innocent, heaven knew, of the literary taint, could constitute herself a
great editor's intellectual companion. But Gertrude's intellect retained
the quality of Gertrude. In all its manifestations it was soothing and
serene. And there was not too much of it--never any more than a tired
and slightly deteriorated editor could stand.
Jane had observed (pitifully) the deterioration and the tiredness. A
falling off in the high fineness of the "Monthly Review" showed that
Brodrick was losing his perfect, his infallible scent. The tiredness she
judged to be the cause of the deterioration. Presently, when she was
free to take some of his work off his shoulders, he would revive.
Meanwhile she was glad that he could find refreshment in his increased
communion with Gertrude. She knew that he would sleep well after it. And
so long as he could sleep----
She said to herself that she had done Gertrude an injustice. She was
wrong in supposing that if Hugh had been married to their angel he would
have tired of her, or that he would ever have had too much of her. You
couldn't have too much of Gertrude, for there was, after all, so very
little to have. Or else she measured herself discreetly, never giving
him any more than he could stand.
But Gertrude's discretion could not disguise from Jane the fact of her
ascendency. She owed it to her very self-restraint, her amazing
moderation. And, after all, what was it but the power, developed with
opportunity, of doing for Brodrick whatever it was that Jane at the
moment could not do? When Jane shut her eyes and tried to imagine what
it would be like if Gertrude were not there, she found herself inquiring
with dismay why, whatever would he do without her? What would she do
herself? It was Gertrude who kept them all together. She ran the house
noiselessly on greased wheels, she smoothed all Brodrick's rose-leaves
as fast as Jane crumpled them. Without Gertrude there would be no peace.
Before long Jane had an opportunity of observing the fine height to
which Gertrude _could_ ascend. It was at a luncheon party that they
gave, by way of celebrating Jane's return to the social life. The Herons
were there, the young people, who had been asked without their mother,
to celebrate Winny's long skirts; they and the Protheros and Caro
Bickersteth. Jane was not sure that she wanted them to come. She was
afraid of any disturbance in the tranquil depths of her renunciation.
Laura said afterwards that she hardly knew how they had sat through that
luncheon. It was not that Jinny wasn't there and Brodrick was. The awful
thing was that both were so lamentably altered. Brodrick was no longer
the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of
the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of
business. It was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining
him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. Jinny sat
opposite him, a pale Mater Dolorosa. Her face, even when she talked to
you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were
listening for her child's cry. She was silent for the most part, passive
in Prothero's hands. She sat unnoticed and effaced; only from time to
time the young girl, Winny Heron, sent her a look from soft eyes that
adored her.
On the background of Jane's silence and effacement nothing stood out
except Gertrude Collett.
Prothero, who had his hostess on his right hand, had inquired as to the
ultimate fate of the "Monthly Review." Jane referred him to Miss Collett
on his left. Miss Collett knew more about the Review than she did.
Gertrude flushed through all her faded fairness at Prothero's appeal.
"Don't you know," said she, "that it's in Mr. Brodrick's hands entirely
now?"
Prothero did know. That was why he asked. He turned to Jane again. He
was afraid, he said, that the Review, in Brodrick's hands, would be too
good to live.
"_Is_ it too good to live, Gertrude?" said she.
Gertrude looked at Brodrick as if she thought that _he_ was.
"I don't think Mr. Brodrick will let it die," she said. "If he takes a
thing up you can trust him to carry it through. He can fight for his
own. He's a born fighter."
Down at her end of the table beside Brodrick, Laura listened.
"It has been a bit of a struggle, I imagine, up till now," said Prothero
to Jane.
"Up till now" (it was Gertrude who answered) "his hands have been tied.
But now it's absolutely his own thing. He has realized his dream."
If she had seen Prothero's eyes she would have been reminded that
Brodrick's dream had been realized for him by his wife. She saw nothing
but Brodrick. For Gertrude the "Monthly Review" _was_ Brodrick.
She drew him for Prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of
literature. She framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel
wreath.
Eddy Heron cried, "Hear, hear!" and "Go it, Gertrude!" and Winny wanted
to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. She was told that an
editor's ears were past tingling. But he flushed slightly when Gertrude
crowned herself and him. They were all listening to her now.
"I assure you," she was saying, "_we_ are not afraid."
She was one with Brodrick, his interests and his dream.
She was congratulated (by Jane) on her championship of the champion, and
Brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be
frightened; they were safe enough.
It struck Laura that Brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man
who has realized his dream.
"All the same," said Prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems I
sent you."
"Dear Owen," said Jane, "do you think they'll sink him?"
"As far as that goes," Brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of
George Tanqueray's. That'll show you what we can afford."
"Or what George can afford," said Jane. It was the first spark she had
emitted. But it consumed the heavy subject.
"By the way," said Caro Bickersteth, "where _is_ George Tanqueray?"
Laura said that he was somewhere in the country. He was always in the
country now.
"Without his wife," said Caro, and nobody contradicted her. She went on.
"You great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. The law
ought to provide for it. Genius, in either party, if you can establish
the fact, should annul the contract, like--like any other crucial
disability."
"Or," Jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal
act, like suicide? You can always acquit them afterwards on the ground
of temporary insanity."
"How would you deal," said Brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?"
"Mixed----?" Caro feigned bewilderment.
"When a norm--an ordinary--person marries a genius? It's a racial
difference."
("Distinctly," Caro murmured.)
"And wouldn't it be hard to say which side the lunacy was on?"
Laura would have suspected him of a bitter personal intention had it not
been so clear that Jinny's genius was no longer in question, that her
flame was quenched.
It was Caro who asked (in the drawing-room, afterwards) if they might
see the children.
Gertrude went up-stairs to fetch them. Eddy Heron watched her softly
retreating figure, and smiled and spoke.
"I say, Gee-Gee's going strong, isn't she?"
Everybody affected not to hear him, and the youth went on smiling to his
unappreciated self.
Gertrude appeared again presently, bringing the children. On the very
threshold little Hugh struggled in her arms and tried to hurl himself on
his mother. His object attained, he turned his back on everybody and
hung his head over Jane's shoulder.
But little John Henry was admirably behaved. He wandered from guest to
guest, shaking hands, in his solemn urbanity, with each. He looked
already absurdly unastonished and important. He was not so much his
father's son as the son of all the Brodricks. As for little Hugh, it was
easy enough, Prothero said, to see whose son _he_ was. And Winny Heron
cried out in an ecstasy that he was going to be a genius, she was sure
of it.
"Heaven forbid," said Brodrick. Everybody heard him.
"Oh, Uncle Hughy, if he was like Jin-Jin!" Allurement and tender
reproach mingled in Winny's tone.
She turned to Jane with eyes that adored and loved and defended her. "I
wish you'd have dozens of babies--darlings--like yourself."
"And I wish," said Eddy, "she'd have dozens of books like her last one."
Eddy was standing, very straight and tall, on his uncle's hearth. His
chin, which was nothing if not determined, was thrust upwards and
outwards over his irreproachable high collar. Everybody looked at Eddy
as he spoke.
"What I want to know is why she doesn't have them? What have you all
been doing to her? What have _you_ been doing to her, Uncle Hughy?"
He looked round on all of them with the challenge of his young eyes.
"It's all very well, you know, but I agree with Miss Bickersteth. If
you're a genius you've no business to marry--I mean nobody's any
business to marry you."
"Mine," said Caro suavely, "was a purely abstract proposition."
But the terrible youth went on. "Mine isn't. Uncle Hugh's done a good
thing for himself, I know. But it would have been a jolly sight better
thing for literature if he'd married Gee-Gee, or somebody like that."
For there was nothing that young Eddy did not permit himself to say.
Little Hugh had begun to cry bitterly, as if he had understood that
there had been some reflection on his mother. And from crying he went on
to screaming, and Gertrude carried him, struggling violently, from the
room.
The screams continued in the nursery overhead. Jane sat for a moment in
agony, listening, and then rushed up-stairs.
Gertrude appeared, serene and apologetic.
"Can't anything be done," Brodrick said irritably, "to stop that
screaming?"
"It's stopped now," said Winny.
"You've only got to give him what he wants," said Gertrude.
"Yes, and he knows he's only got to scream for it."
Gertrude's eyebrows, raised helplessly, were a note on the folly and
infatuation of the child's mother.
Caro Bickersteth and Laura left, hopeless of Jane's return to them.
Prothero stayed on, conferring with the editor. Later, he found himself
alone in the garden with Jane. He asked then (what they were all longing
to know) when she was going to give them another book?
"Never again, Owen, never again."
He reproached her.
"Ah--you don't know what it's been, this last year," she said. "George
told me I should have to pay for it. So did Nina. And you see how I've
paid."
His eyes questioned her.
"Through my child."
He turned to her. His eyes were pitiful but incredulous.
"Owen--Nina said there'd be no end to my paying. But there shall be an
end to it. For a year it's been one long fight for his little life, and
I've won; but he'll never be strong; never, I'm afraid, like other
children. He'll always remind me----"
"_Remind_ you?"
"Yes. They say I'm responsible for him. It's the hard work I've done.
It's my temperament--my nerves."
"_Your_ nerves?"
"Yes. I'm supposed to be hopelessly neurotic."
"But you're not. Your nerves are very highly-strung--they're bound to
be, or they wouldn't respond as perfectly as they do--but they're the
_soundest_ nerves I know. I should say you were sound all over."
"_Should_ you?"
"Certainly."
"Then" (she almost cried it) "why should he suffer?"
"Do you mean to say you don't know what's the matter with him?"
"Owen----"
"He's a Brodrick. He's got their nerves."
"_Their_ nerves? I didn't know they had any."
"They've all got them except Mrs. Levine. It's the family trouble. Weak
nerves and weak stomachs."
"But Henry----"
"_He_ has to take no end of care of himself."
"How do you know?"
"It's my business," he said, "to know."
"I keep on forgetting that you're a doctor too." She meditated. "But
Sophy's children are all strong."
"No, they're not. Levine told me the other day that they were very
anxious about one of them."
"Is it--the same thing that my child has?"
"Precisely the same."
"And it comes," she said, "from them. And they never told me."
"They must have thought you knew."
"I didn't. They made me think it was my fault. They let me go through
all that agony and terror. I can't forgive them."
"They couldn't have known."
"There was Henry. He must have known. And yet he made me think it. He
made me give up writing because of that."
"You needn't think it any more. Jacky gets his constitution from you,
and it was you who saved the little one."
"He made me think I'd killed him. It's just as well," she said, "that I
should have thought it. If I hadn't I mightn't have fought so hard to
make him live. I might have been tormented with another book. It was the
only thing that could have stopped me."