"If there are he"ll be happy. He"ll believe that there"s a plot against him to write him down. He"ll believe that he"s Keats. He"ll believe anything. You needn"t be sorry for him. If only you or I had Nicky"s hope of immortality--if we only had the joy he has even now, in the horrible act of creation. Why, he"s never tired. He can go on for ever without turning a hair, whereas look at _our_ hair after a morning"s work. Think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour."
Their wild pace slackened.
"It"s a dog"s life, yours and mine, Jinny. Upon my soul, for mere sensation, if I could choose I"d rather be Nicky."
He paused.
"And then--when you think of his supreme illusion----"
"Has he another?"
"You know he has. If all of us could believe that when the woman we love refuses us she only does it because of her career----"
"If he _did_ believe that----"
"Believe it? He believes now that she didn"t even refuse him. He thinks he renounced her--for the sake of her career. It"s quite possible he thinks she loves him; and really, considering her absurd behaviour----"
"Oh, I don"t mind," she moaned, "he can believe anything he likes if it makes him happier."
"He _is_ happy," said George tempestuously. "If I were to be born again, I"d pray to the high G.o.ds, the cruel G.o.ds, Jinny, to make me mad--like Nicky--to give me the gift of indestructible illusion. Then, perhaps, I might know what it was to live."
She had seen him once, and only once, in this mood, the night he had dined with her in Kensington Square six weeks before he married Rose.
"But you and I have been faithful to reality--true, as they say, to life. If the idiots who fling that phrase about only knew what it meant!
You"ve been more faithful than I. You"ve taken such awful risks. You fling your heart down, Jinny, every time."
"Do you never take risks? Do you never fling your heart down?"
He looked at her. "Not your way. Not unless I _know_ that I"ll get what I want."
"And haven"t you got it?"
"I"ve got most of it, but not all--yet."
His tone might or might not imply that getting it was only a question of time.
"I say, where are you going?"
She was heading rapidly for Augustus Road. She wanted to get away from George.
"Not there," he protested, perceiving her intention.
"I must."
He followed her down the long road where the trees drooped darkly, and he stood with her by the gate.
"How long will you be?" he said.
"I can"t say. Half-an-hour--three-quarters--ever so long."
He waited for an hour, walking up and down, up and down the long road under the trees. She reappeared as he was turning at the far end of it.
He had to run to overtake her.
Her face had on it the agony of unborn tears.
"What is it, Jinny?" he said.
"Mabel Brodrick."
She hardly saw his gesture of exasperation.
"Oh, George, she suffers. It"s terrible. There"s to be an operation--to-morrow. I can think of nothing else."
"Oh, Jinny, is there no one to take care of you? Is there no one to keep you from that woman?"
"Oh don"t--if you had seen her----"
"I don"t want to see her. I don"t want _you_ to see her. You should never have anything to do with suffering. It hurts you. It kills you.
You ought to be taken care of. You ought to be kept from the sight and sound of it." He gazed wildly round the Heath. "If Brodrick was any good he"d take you out of this d.a.m.ned place."
"I wouldn"t go. Poor darling, she can"t bear me out of her sight. I believe I"ve worn a path going and coming."
They had left the beaten path. Their way lay in a line drawn straight across the Heath from Brodrick"s house. It was almost as if her feet had made it.
"Jinny"s path," he said.
They were silent, and he gathered up, as it were, the burden of their silence when he stopped and faced her with his question--
"How are you going on?"
LIX
A YEAR pa.s.sed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to Tanqueray"s question.
She had gone on somehow. He himself had made it easier for her by his frequent disappearances. He had found a place somewhere on Dartmoor where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little people, where he hid himself from Rose. It helped her--not to have the question raised.
Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with his question. He had left her, about eleven o"clock in the evening, in her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution, a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don"t you do as I do?
Why don"t you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"
It seemed so simple, Tanqueray"s solution, that at first she wondered why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the world and she shall be my daughter."
But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick"s death. Jane had been with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.
After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude"s hands. Every day brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room with Gertrude, led by her hand.