The Creators Part 102

"About the child."

There was a terrible pause.

"Will you tell her," said Brodrick, "or shall I?"

"I'll tell her. I'll tell her now. But you must back me up."

Brodrick fetched Jane. He had found her as Gertrude had said. She was heavy-eyed, and dazed with the embraces of her dream. But when she saw the look that pa.s.sed between Hugh and Henry her face was one white fear.

The two were about to arraign her. She took the chair that Henry held for her.

Then he told her. And Brodrick backed him up with silence and a face averted.

It was not until Henry had left them together that he spoke to her.

"Don't take it so hardly, Jinny," he said. "It's not as if you knew."

"I might have known," she answered.

She was thinking, "George told me that I should have to pay--that there'd be no end to my paying."

LIII

The Brodricks--Hugh--Henry--all of them--stood justified. There was, indeed, rather more justice than mercy in their att.i.tude. She could not say that they had let her off easily. She knew (and they had taken care that she should know) the full extent of her misdoing.

That was it. They regarded her genius (the thing which had been tacked on to her) more as a crime than a misfortune. It was a power in the highest degree destructive and malign, a power utterly disintegrating to its possessor, and yet a power entirely within her own control. They refused to recognize in it any divine element of destiny, while they remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the family, the race.

And she had been warned often enough. They had always told her that she would have to pay for it.

But now that the event had proved them so deplorably right, now that they were established as guardians of the obvious, and masters of the expected, they said no more. They a.s.sumed no airs of successful prophecy. They were sorry for her. They gathered about her when the day of reckoning came; they couldn't bear to see her paying, to think that she should have to pay. She knew that as long as she paid they would stand by her.

More than ever the family closed in round her; it stood solid, a sheltering and protecting wall.

She was almost unaware how close they were to her. It seemed to her that she stood alone there, in the centre of the circle, with her sin. Her sin was always there, never out of her sight, in the little half-living body of the child. Her sin tore at her heart as she nursed, night and day, the little strange, dark thing, stamped with her stamp. She traced her sin in its shrunken face, its thread-like limbs, its sick nerves and bloodless veins.

There was an exaltation in her anguish. Her tenderness, shot with pain, was indistinguishable from a joy of sense. She went surrendered and subdued to suffering; she embraced pa.s.sionately her pain. It appeased her desire for expiation.

They needn't have rubbed it into her so hard that it was her sin. If she could have doubted it there was the other child to prove it. John Henry Brodrick stood solid and sane, a Brodrick of the Brodricks, rosy and round with nourishment, not a nerve, Henry said, in his composition, and the stomach of a young ostrich. It was in little Hugh's little stomach and his nerves that the mischief lay. The screaming, Henry told her, was a nervous system. It was awful that a baby should have nerves.

Henry hardly thought that she would rear him. He didn't rub that in, he was much too tender. He replied to her agonized questioning that, yes, it might be possible, with infinite precaution and incessant care. With incessant care and infinite precaution she tended him. She had him night and day. She washed and dressed him; she prepared his food and fed him with her own hands. It was with a pang, piercing her fatigue, that she gave him to the nurse to watch for the two hours in the afternoon when she slept. For she had bad nights with him because of the screaming.

Brodrick had had bad nights, too. It had got on his nerves, and his digestion suffered. Jane made him sleep in a room at the other end of the house where he couldn't hear the screaming. He went unwillingly, and with a sense of cowardice and shame. He couldn't think how Jinny could stand it with _her_ nerves.

She stood it somehow, in her pa.s.sion for the child. It was her heart, not her nerves, that his screams lacerated. Beyond her heavy-eyed fatigue she showed no signs of strain. Henry acknowledged in her that great quality of the nervous temperament, the power of rising high-strung to an emergency. He intimated that he rejoiced to see her on the right track, subst.i.tuting for the unhealthy excesses of the brain the normal, wholesome life of motherhood. He was not sure now that he pitied her. He was sorrier, ten times sorrier, for his brother Hugh.

Gertrude Collett agreed with the Doctor. She insisted that it was Brodrick and not Jane who suffered. Gertrude was in a position to know.

She hinted that n.o.body but she really did know. She saw more of him than any of his family. She saw more of him than Jane. Brodrick's suffering was Gertrude's opportunity, the open, consecrated door where she entered soft-footed, angelic, with a barely perceptible motion of her ministrant wings. Circ.u.mstances restored the old intimate relation. Brodrick was worried about his digestion; he was afraid he was breaking up altogether, and Gertrude's solicitude confirmed him in his fear. Under its influence and Gertrude's the editor spent less and less of his time in Fleet Street. He found, as he had found before, that a great part of his work could be done more comfortably at home. He found, too, that he required more than ever the co-operation of a secretary. The increased efficiency of Addy Ranger made her permanent and invaluable in Fleet Street. Jane's preoccupation had removed her altogether from the affairs of the "Monthly Review." Inevitably Gertrude slid into her former place.

She had more of Brodrick now than she had ever had; she had more of the best of him. She was a.s.sociated with his ambition and his dream. Now that Jane's hand was not there to support it, Brodrick's dream had begun to sink a little, it was lowering itself almost to Gertrude's reach. She could touch it on tiptoe, straining. She commiserated Jane on her exclusion from the editor's adventures and excitements, his untiring pursuit of the young talents (his scent for them was not quite so infallible as it had been), his curious or glorious finds. Jane smiled at her under her tired eyes. She was glad that he was not alone in his dream, that he had some one, if it was only Gertrude.

For, by an irony that no Brodrick could possibly have foreseen, Jane's child separated her from her husband more than her genius had ever done.

Her motherhood had the fierce ardour and concentration of the disastrous power. It was as if her genius had changed its channel and direction, and had its impulse bent on giving life to the half-living body. Nothing else mattered. She could not have travelled farther from Brodrick in her widest, wildest wanderings. The very hours conspired against them. Jane had to sleep in the afternoon, to make up for bad nights. Brodrick was apt to sleep in the evenings, after dinner, when Jane revived a little and was free.

The year pa.s.sed and she triumphed. The little half-living body had quickened. The child, Henry said, would live; he might even be fairly strong. His food nourished him. He was gaining weight and substance.

Jane was to be congratulated on her work which was nothing short of a miracle. _Her_ work; _her_ miracle; Henry admitted it was that. He had had to stand by and do nothing. He couldn't work miracles. But if Jane had relaxed her care for a moment there was no miracle that could have saved the child.

To Jane it _was_ a miracle. It was as if her folding arms had been his antenatal hiding-place; as if she had brought him forth with anguish a second time.

She would not have admitted that she loved him more than his brother.

Jacky was as good as gold; but he was good with Gertrude and happy with Gertrude. The baby was neither good nor happy with anybody but Jane.

Between her and the little twice-born son there was an unbreakable tie.

He attached himself to his mother with a painful, pitiful pa.s.sion. Out of her sight he languished. He had grown into her arms. Every time he was taken from them it was a rending of flesh from tender flesh.

His attachment grew with his strength, and she was more captured and more chained than ever. He "had" her, as Tanqueray would have said, at every turn. Frances and Sophy, the wise maternal women, shook their heads in their wisdom; and Jane smiled in hers. She was wiser than any of them. She had become pure womanhood, she said, like Gertrude. She defied Gertrude's womanhood to produce a superior purity.

Brodrick had accepted the fact without astonishment. The instinct of paternity was strong in him. Once married to Jane her genius had become of secondary importance. The important thing was that she was his wife; and even that was not so important as it had been. Only last year he had told her, jesting, that he never knew whether she was his wife or not.

He hardly knew now (they saw so little of each other); but he did know that she was the mother of his children.

In the extremity of her anguish Jane had not observed this change in Brodrick's att.i.tude. But now she had leisure to observe. What struck her first was the way Gertrude Collett had come out. It was in proportion as she herself had become sunk in her maternal functions that Gertrude had emerged. She was amazed at the extent to which a soft-feathered angel, innocent, heaven knew, of the literary taint, could const.i.tute herself a great editor's intellectual companion. But Gertrude's intellect retained the quality of Gertrude. In all its manifestations it was soothing and serene. And there was not too much of it--never any more than a tired and slightly deteriorated editor could stand.

Jane had observed (pitifully) the deterioration and the tiredness. A falling off in the high fineness of the "Monthly Review" showed that Brodrick was losing his perfect, his infallible scent. The tiredness she judged to be the cause of the deterioration. Presently, when she was free to take some of his work off his shoulders, he would revive.

Meanwhile she was glad that he could find refreshment in his increased communion with Gertrude. She knew that he would sleep well after it. And so long as he could sleep----

She said to herself that she had done Gertrude an injustice. She was wrong in supposing that if Hugh had been married to their angel he would have tired of her, or that he would ever have had too much of her. You couldn't have too much of Gertrude, for there was, after all, so very little to have. Or else she measured herself discreetly, never giving him any more than he could stand.

But Gertrude's discretion could not disguise from Jane the fact of her ascendency. She owed it to her very self-restraint, her amazing moderation. And, after all, what was it but the power, developed with opportunity, of doing for Brodrick whatever it was that Jane at the moment could not do? When Jane shut her eyes and tried to imagine what it would be like if Gertrude were not there, she found herself inquiring with dismay why, whatever would he do without her? What would she do herself? It was Gertrude who kept them all together. She ran the house noiselessly on greased wheels, she smoothed all Brodrick's rose-leaves as fast as Jane crumpled them. Without Gertrude there would be no peace.

Before long Jane had an opportunity of observing the fine height to which Gertrude _could_ ascend. It was at a luncheon party that they gave, by way of celebrating Jane's return to the social life. The Herons were there, the young people, who had been asked without their mother, to celebrate Winny's long skirts; they and the Protheros and Caro Bickersteth. Jane was not sure that she wanted them to come. She was afraid of any disturbance in the tranquil depths of her renunciation.

Laura said afterwards that she hardly knew how they had sat through that luncheon. It was not that Jinny wasn't there and Brodrick was. The awful thing was that both were so lamentably altered. Brodrick was no longer the enthusiastic editor, gathering around him the brilliant circle of the talents; he was the absorbed, depressed and ponderous man of business. It was as if some spirit that had breathed on him, sustaining him, lightening his incipient heaviness, had been removed. Jinny sat opposite him, a pale Mater Dolorosa. Her face, even when she talked to you, had an intent, remote expression, as if through it all she were listening for her child's cry. She was silent for the most part, pa.s.sive in Prothero's hands. She sat unnoticed and effaced; only from time to time the young girl, Winny Heron, sent her a look from soft eyes that adored her.

On the background of Jane's silence and effacement nothing stood out except Gertrude Collett.

Prothero, who had his hostess on his right hand, had inquired as to the ultimate fate of the "Monthly Review." Jane referred him to Miss Collett on his left. Miss Collett knew more about the Review than she did.

Gertrude flushed through all her faded fairness at Prothero's appeal.

"Don't you know," said she, "that it's in Mr. Brodrick's hands entirely now?"

Prothero did know. That was why he asked. He turned to Jane again. He was afraid, he said, that the Review, in Brodrick's hands, would be too good to live.

"_Is_ it too good to live, Gertrude?" said she.

Gertrude looked at Brodrick as if she thought that _he_ was.

"I don't think Mr. Brodrick will let it die," she said. "If he takes a thing up you can trust him to carry it through. He can fight for his own. He's a born fighter."