It seemed to have struck everybody all at once that Prothero was
impossible. That conviction was growing more and more upon his
publishers. His poems, they assured him, were no longer worth the paper
they were written on. As for his job on the "Morning Telegraph," he was
aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and
precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on
Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly
kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence,
implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as a continuous
idiot.
His impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of Laura's
marvellous achievement. Laura's luck persisted (she declared) because
she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture
to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn
into the columns of the "Morning Telegraph," became increasingly
obscure. It made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his
high place and his praise. Of course she knew that it was not _his_
place or _his_ praise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of
her appraisers set him high. Obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what
he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him.
She knew the uses of unpopularity. It kept him perfect; sacred in a way,
and uncontaminated. It preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his
vision. His genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. It swung in
ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon.
She would not have had it otherwise. It was through Owen's obscurity
that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the
unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who
could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her
fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as
much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or
Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt.
As for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked
him to have made it, if he could. An opulent poet was ridiculous, the
perversion of the sublime. If one of them was to be made absurd by the
possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it
should be she.
The size of Laura's income, contrasted, as Prothero persisted in
contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. Large and
comfortable as it appeared to Prothero, it was not yet so large nor was
it so comfortable that Laura could lie back and rest on it. She was
heartrending, irritating, maddening to Prothero in her refusals to lie
back on it and rest. She toiled prodigiously, incessantly,
indefatigably. She implored Prothero to admit that if she was prodigious
and incessant, she _was_ indefatigable, she never tired. There was
nothing wonderful in what she did. She had caught the silly trick of it.
It could be done, she assured him, standing on your head. She enjoyed
doing it. The wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her
enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. He argued
vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary
to set your teeth and go at it like that.
And the more he argued the more Laura laughed at him. "I can't help it,"
she said; "I've got the habit. You'll never break me of it, after all
these years."
For the Kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the
memory of her former poverty. She had no illusions. She had never had
them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. After all, looking
at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. And
it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. It
had no stability. It might at any moment cease. She might have an
illness, or Owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the
pace _he_ went at it. Or the "Morning Telegraph" might throw him over.
All sorts of things might happen. In her experience they generally did.
Of course, in a way Owen was right. They didn't want all the money. But
what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you
wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. And then, in the
first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. To begin with, she
had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. They were always
bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to Owen. And
she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give Owen's long legs
space to ramp up and down in. The den he had chosen had been too small
for him. He was better, she thought, since he had had his great room.
The house justified itself. It was reassuring to know that whatever
happened they would have a roof over their heads. But it could not be
denied that she had been extravagant.
And Owen had been the least shade extravagant too. He had found a poet
even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no
balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had
given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again.
And on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a
slum, and "advanced him," as the medical student put it, twenty pounds
to go to America with.
He had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had
confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had
done.
"It was a sudden impulse," he said. "I yielded to it."
"Oh, Owen dear, don't have another soon. These impulses are ruinous."
He sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to
Laura.
"Well," she said, "I suppose it was worth it. It must have given you an
exquisite pleasure."
"It did. That's where the iniquity comes in. It gave me an exquisite
pleasure at your expense."
"_You_ give me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do."
Her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at
her feet and took her hands in his. He bowed his head over them and
kissed them.
"Do you know what you are?" she said. "You're a divine prodigal."
"Yes," he said, kissing her, "I'm a prodigal, a dissolute,
good-for-noting wastrel. I adore you and your little holy hands; but I'm
not the least use to you. You ink your blessed little fingers to the
bone for me, and I take your earnings and fling them away--in--in----"
He grew incoherent with kissing.
"In one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with
her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him.
But Owen was not pleased in the very least.
"That," said he, "is precisely what I do."
He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening
eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to
support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small
woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and
here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was
incredible, abominable, but it was his.
She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in
her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung
away from his sunken waist.
"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that,
when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your
own savings that you flung. It _was_, dear," she insisted.
"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at
least. It all comes back to that."
"I wish _you_ wouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see,"
she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"
"If you only did!"
"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and
suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"
"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."
"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you _do_ have. You
think, and _I_ think, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow
that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why
make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it,
or who spends it?"
He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from
him.
"That's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites
that have ever been. All the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and
loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's
physical expense. The thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. Those
Brodricks are perfectly right."