Dr. Brodrick had declared for the seventh time that Prothero was
impossible.
His disease was advancing. Both lungs were attacked now. There was, as
he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the
upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he
knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody
could be more aware than Prothero of the gravity of these signs. Up till
now, he, Brodrick, had been making a record case of him. The man had a
fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was
resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. He had one chance, a fighting
chance. His life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest.
And there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in
bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on _that_.
Scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of
excitement that his temperature had risen. He displayed, Brodrick said,
an increasing nervous instability. When Brodrick told him that (if he
wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months,
and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his
case, Prothero said that his critics had always told him that. The worst
symptom in his case, _he_ declared, was that he couldn't laugh without
coughing. When Brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he
laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. For he had (Brodrick
had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. You had to inject
morphia after every haemorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation.
All this the Doctor recounted to Laura, alone with her in her forlorn
little drawing-room down-stairs. He unveiled for her intelligence the
whole pathology of the case. It brought him back to what he had started
with, Prothero's impossibility.
"What does he do for it?" he repeated. "He knows the consequences as
well as I do."
Laura said she didn't think that Owen ever had considered consequences.
"But he _must_ consider them. What's a set of verses compared with his
health?"
Laura answered quietly, "Owen would say what was his health compared
with a set of verses? If he knew they'd be the greatest poem of his
life."
"His life? My dear child----"
The pause was terrible.
"I wish," he said, "we could get him out of this."
"He doesn't want to go. You said yourself it wasn't the great thing."
He admitted it. The great thing, he reiterated, was rest. It was his one
chance. He explained carefully again how good a chance it was. He dwelt
on the things Prothero might yet do if he gave himself a chance. And
when he had done talking Laura remarked that it was all very well, but
he was reckoning without Owen's genius.
"Genius?" He shrugged his shoulders. He smiled (as if they weren't
always reckoning with it at Putney!). "What is it? For medicine it's
simply and solely an abnormal activity of the brain. And it must stop."
He stood over her impressively, marking his words with clenched fist on
open palm.
"He must choose between his genius and his life."
She winced. "I don't believe he _can_ choose," she murmured. "It _is_
his life."
He straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from
her contradiction.
"I have known many men of genius," he said.
"His genius is different," said she.
He hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that Prothero's
genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did
not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death.
For he was angry now. He could not help being moved by professional
animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work
to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and
destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice.
He was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for
the Protheros. Secretly, he was very fond of Owen, though the poet _was_
impossible; he was even more fond of little Laura. He did not want to
see her made a widow because Prothero refused to control his vice. For
the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. The
Doctor had no patience with it. A man was not, after all, a slave to his
unwholesome inspiration (it had dawned on him by this time that Prothero
had made a joke about it). Prothero could stop it if he liked.
"I've told him plainly," he said, "that what it means to him is death.
If you want to keep him, you must stop it."
"How can I?" she moaned.
"Don't encourage him. Don't let him talk about it. Don't let his mind
dwell on it. Turn the conversation. Take his pens and paper from him and
don't let him see them again till he is well."
When the Doctor left her she went up-stairs to Owen.
He was still sitting up writing, dashing down lines with a speed that
told her what race he ran.
"Owen," she said, "you know. He told you----"
He waved her away with a gesture that would have been violent if it
could.
She tried to take his pen and paper from him, and he laid his thin hands
out over the sheets. The sweat stood in big drops between the veins of
his hands; it streamed from his forehead.
"Wait just a little longer, till you're well," she pleaded.
"For God's sake, darling," he whispered hoarsely, "leave me, go away."
She went. In her own room her work stood unfinished on the table where
she had left it, months ago. She pushed it away in anger. She hated the
sight of it. She sat watching the clock for the moments when she would
have to go to him with his medicine.
She thought how right they had been after all. Nina and Jane and
Tanqueray, when they spoke of the cruelty of genius. It had no mercy and
no pity. It had taken its toll from all of them. It was taking its toll
from Owen now, to the last drop of his blood, to the last torturing
breath. His life was nothing to it.
She went to him silently every hour to give him food or medicine or to
take his temperature. She recorded on her chart heat mounting to fever,
and a pulse staggering in its awful haste. He was submissive as long as
she was silent, but at a word his thin hand waved in its agonized
gesture.
Once he kissed her hands that gave him his drink.
"Poor little thing," he said, "it's so frightened--always was. Never
mind--It'll soon be over--only--don't come again" (he had to whisper
it), "if you don't mind--till I ring."
She sat listening then for his bell.
Rose came and stayed with her a little while. She wanted to know what
the Doctor had said to-day.
"He says he must choose between his genius and his life. And it's I who
have to choose. If he goes on he'll kill himself. If I stop him I shall
kill him. What am I to do?"
Rose had her own opinion of the dilemma, and no great opinion of the
Doctor.
"Do nothin'," she said, and pondered on it. "Look at it sensible. You
may depend upon it 'e's found somethin' 'e's got to do. 'E's set 'is
'eart on finishin' it. Don't you cross 'im. I don't believe in crossin'
them when they're set."
"And if he dies, Rose? If he dies?"
"'E dies 'is way--not yours."
It was the wisdom of renunciation and repression; but Laura felt that it
was right.
Her hour struck and she went up to Owen. He was lying back now with his
eyes closed and his lips parted. Because of its peace his face was like
the face of the dead. But his lips were hot under hers and his cheek was
fire to her touch. She put her finger on his pulse and he opened his
eyes and smiled at her.
"It's finished," he said. "You can take it away now."
She gathered up the loose sheets and laid them in a drawer in his desk.
The poem once finished he was indifferent to its disposal. His eyes
followed her, they rested on her without noting her movements. They drew
her as she came towards him again.
"Forgive me," he said. "It was too strong for me."
"Never again," she murmured. "Promise me, never again till you're well."
"Never again." He smiled as he answered.
Dr. Brodrick, calling late that night, was informed by Laura of the
extent to which he had been disobeyed. He thundered at her and
threatened, a Brodrick beside himself with fury.
"Do you suppose," she said, "it isn't awful for me to have to stand by
and see it, and do nothing? What can I do?"
He looked down at her. The little thing had a will of her own; she was
indeed, for her size, preposterously over-charged with will. Never had
he seen a small creature so indomitably determined. He put it to her.
She had a will; why couldn't she use it?
"His will is stronger than mine," she said. "And his genius is stronger
than his will."
"You overrate the importance of it. What does it matter if he never
writes another line?"
It seemed to her that he charged him with futility, that he echoed--and
in this hour!--the voice of the world that tried to make futile
everything he did.
"It doesn't matter to you," she said. "You never understood his genius;
you never cared about it."
"Do you mean to tell me that you--_you_ care about it more than you care
about him? Upon my word, I don't know what you women are made of."
"What could I do?" she said. "I had to use my own judgment."
"You had not. You had to use mine."
He paused impressively.
"It's no use, my child, fighting against the facts."
To Henry Laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of
life. He had got to make her take it.
He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact.
It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in
its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks,
behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven
poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for
Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged
him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his
own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all
the facts.
"_This_ isn't what's killing him," she said. "It's all the other things,
the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria--that began it. He
ought never to have been sent there. Then--five years on that abominable
paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To
have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile
weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not."
He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were
really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience
and forbearance.
"You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?"
"No," said Laura, passionately, "it's the truth."
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean it's what it amounted to. They--they drove him to it with their
everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."
"I should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse
criticism."
"You don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. You can't judge.
Anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last--the very last," she cried.
"My dear Mrs. Prothero, nobody wanted him to----"
"He did it, though. He did it because he was not what you all thought
him."
"We thought him splendid. My brother was saying only the other day he
had never seen such pluck."
"Well, then, it's his pluck--his splendour that he's dying of."
"And you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?"
"I don't hold you responsible for anything."
She was trembling on the edge of tears.
"Come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. You've been doing too
much. You're overstrained."
She smiled. That was so like them. They were sane when they got hold of
one stupid fact and flung it at your head. But you were overstrained
when you retaliated. When you had made a sober selection from the facts,
such a selection as constituted a truth, and presented it to them, you
were more overstrained than ever. They couldn't stand the truth.
"I don't hold _you_ responsible for his perversity," said the poor
Doctor.
"You talked as if you did."
"You misunderstood me," he said sadly. "I only asked you to do what you
could."
"I have done what I could."
He ordered her some bromide then, for her nerves.
That evening Prothero was so much better that he declared himself well.
The wind had changed to the south. She had prayed for a warm wind; and,
as it swept through the great room, she flung off her fur-lined coat and
tried to persuade herself that the weather was in Owen's favour.
At midnight the warm wind swelled to a gale. Down at the end of the
garden the iron gate cried under the menace and torture of its grip. The
sound and the rush of it filled Prothero with exultation. Neither he nor
Laura slept.
She had moved her bed close up against his, and they lay side by side.
The room was a passage for the wind; it whirled down it like a mad
thing, precipitating itself towards the mouth of the night, where the
wide north window sucked it. On the floor and the long walls the very
darkness moved. The pale yellow disc that the guarded nightlight threw
upon the ceiling swayed incessantly at the driving of the wind. The
twilight of the white beds trembled.
Outside the gust staggered and drew back; it plunged forward again, with
its charge of impetus, and hurled itself against the gate. There was a
shriek of torn iron, a crash, and the long sweeping, rending cry of live
branches wrenched from their hold, lacerated and crushed, trailing and
clinging in their fall.
Owen dragged himself up on his pillows. Laura's arm was round him.
"It's nothing," she said, "only the gate. It was bound to go."
"The gate?"
It seemed to her touch that he drew himself together.
"I said I'd come back--through it----" he whispered. "I shall--come
back"--his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoarse vibration--"over
it--treading it down."
At that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. The
handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. He shuddered and
shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror.
He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word
should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.
Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The
air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid
and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet
that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted
seven strokes.
It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.
Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about
five minutes.
And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the
hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over
his dead body.