"None of them matter except that," she said.
She left him with that, turning on the threshold to add, "Why bother,
then, about the other stupid things?"
It was as if she had said to him that since he owed that to her, a debt
so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in
one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a
fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the
one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly
abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down
and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As
for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and
knew that she had made it.
It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and
counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference
she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his
vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried
through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and
difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and
the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.
He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most
hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it
had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time
it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering
batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off
clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the
danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and
fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and
delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of
coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now
that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint
appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to
stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and
continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except
his fear.
He had tested it because of his fear. He had chosen his profession as
the extreme test, because of his fear. He had given up his profession,
again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's
way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being
caught and branded and tied down. He had thought that to be forced into
a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships
of God, to cut himself off for ever from his vision.
Looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his
fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. He had put
away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. He had tied himself to a
woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. He would have judged this
attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing
anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in.
And it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it
thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that
his vision had become secure. It really stayed. He could turn from it,
but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will.
She was right. If he could take that from her, if he was in for it to
that extent, why _did_ he bother about the other stupid things?
And yet he bothered. All that autumn he worked harder than ever at his
journalism. He seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going
on the "Morning Telegraph." He went the round of the theatres on first
nights, reporting for the "Morning Telegraph" on plays that were beneath
the notice of its official dramatic critic. He reviewed poetry and
_belles lettres_ for the "Morning Telegraph;" and he did a great deal of
work for it down in Fleet Street with a paste-pot and a pair of
scissors.
Prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last
poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit
invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura
said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing
with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his
heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted
himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His
spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the
grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he
piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a
pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it.
In December he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north
wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis.
And at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the
Consumption Hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the
house with the iron gate. And Laura at Owen's side lay awake in her
fear.