"No," he said. "It isn"t."
They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.
"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"
"It isn"t late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.
He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence.
Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.
"You"d like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb and dangerous mood.
He roused himself almost irritably.
"Thanks, no. Don"t bother about it."
She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant acts.
Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches,"
from its shelf and open it.
She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth, motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.
He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast, and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain from her pain.
"Why didn"t you call out?" he said.
"I didn"t want you to know."
"You"d have been burnt sooner?"
He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and her eyes met his.
"I"d have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than hurt--your hands."
His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out of her sight.
She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of his recoil.
"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you"d be glad to get rid of it on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.
"There"s nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.
"No, Owen, nothing; except that I"m tired of it."
"The tiredness will pa.s.s. Is that burn hurting you?"
"Not yet. I don"t mind it."
He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.
She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced her.
"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn"t written it, I should never have been here."
"That"s why, then, isn"t it?"
"I suppose so. You _had_ to write it, and I _had_ to come."
"Yes, Owen," she said gently.
"You brought me here," he said.
"I can"t understand it."
"Can"t understand what?"
"The fascination I had for you."
He closed the book and laid it down.
"You were my youth, Nina."
He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him.
"My youth was dumb. It couldn"t make itself immortal. You did that for it."
"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."
"No. They _are_ me. They are what I was. Your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate pa.s.sions."
"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.
"You don"t know me. You don"t remember me. But I know and remember you.
You asked me once how I knew. That"s how. I"ve been where you were."
He paused.
"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like an unhappy ghost."
It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.
Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.
She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.
He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.