It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere. "Why didn't you go with her?" she said. "I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself." "As if I wasn't always by myself." Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with its involuntary surrender. He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But the pace he set was terrific. "You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets." "Not odder than you, do I? You ought to be swinging up a mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see you." "Do you remember?" "I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me, hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper ledge down on to the track. Your hair—you had lots of hair, all tawny—some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the mountain. I had found my wild cat." "I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer." "Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the terror of the mountains in them." "And yours—yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now." "That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams." "Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press on you and hurt you?" They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night. "Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there—you and I could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear." They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion. "Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she. "I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back." "Isn't it—horrible?" "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 pass. 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 passions." "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. She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow. Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat. He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to between them. She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart. At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all passion of flesh and blood. In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated; eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable, not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing was accomplished. Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it. "This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go." She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme. She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration, sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any one of them would kill her. She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all. Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work of her. As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the throat of the beast. She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised her courage. "It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But when it hurts most it's healing." That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back, above hers. Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street. The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion. The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast, though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed, unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh. The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging, rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow, lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her, like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering. It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble. She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door, and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room. His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut her in. "What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this. "You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you." "I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door." He shut it. "Won't you sit down?" She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself. Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour. Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her hand and felt the stuff. "It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly. He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch. "You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?" "Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do." "If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will be my doing." "Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be responsible—if I die?" "I set them on to you." "Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man for the job." "The best man—to die?" "War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that intention." "You will die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does." "Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?" "I care—because they die." Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done. "Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That ends it." She rose. "I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come and tell a man she cares for him." "Why not?" he said simply. "I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why shouldn't I tell you? You know it—as God knows it." "I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there." "Owen—shall I ever be where you are now?" "I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what you cared for." It was not. Yet she yearned for it—his youth that was made to love her, his youth that returning, a dim ghost, followed her and loved her still. "No," she said, "it isn't only that." She paused in her going and knelt down by his half-packed portmanteau. With her free left hand she lifted up, folded and laid smooth the new suit he had flung in and crushed. Her back was now towards him and the door he was about to open. "Owen," she said, "since I'm breaking all the rules, why can't I go out, too, and look after you?" He shook his head. "It's not the place for women," he said. "Women? Haven't I told you that I'm like a man? I'm like you, Owen, if it comes to that." He smiled. "If you were like me, you'd stay at home." "What should I stay for?" "To look after Laura Gunning. That's what you'd want to do, if you were—I. And," he said quietly, "it's what you're going to do." She rose to her feet and faced him, defying the will that he laid on her. She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say"How do you know? And why should I?" "Because there's nothing else that you can do for me." She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to her to say. |