Part 103

He did not answer.

She merely laid the idea before him to look at. He must weigh, she said, the dangers and the risks. From the expression of his face she gathered that these were the last things he would weigh.

And yet he hesitated. She looked at him. His eyes were following the movements of Laura Gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous Kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and plunged and leaped into the hedges.

Jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. The war, she said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead almost certainly to a regular job on the "Telegraph" at home.

He saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. His eyes, as they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. Then they wandered from her.

He asked if he might think it over and let her know.

"When," she said, "can you let me know?"

"I think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day."

The day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided. Brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of Jane, and Prothero, with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting Laura.

Tanqueray, thus left behind with Nina, watched him as he went.

"He's off, Nina. Bolted." His eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating, delighted eyes and recklessly observant.

"So has Jane," said Nina, with her dangerous irony.

Apart from them and from their irony, Prothero was at last alone with Laura on the top of Wendover Hill. She had ceased to dart and to plunge.

He found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and there he stretched himself at her side.

"Do you know," he said, "this is the first time I've seen you out of doors."

"So it is," said she in a strange, even voice.

She drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she were bathing them in the pure air. Her face was turned from him and lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved; she drank the air like water. To his eyes she was the white image of mortal thirst.

"Is it absolutely necessary for you to live in Camden Town?" he said.

She sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity.

"It is. Absolutely." She explained that Baxter, her landlord, had been an old servant of Papa's, and that the important thing was to be with people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways.

He sighed.

"Do you know what I should do with you if I could have my way? I should turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning till nine at night. I should make you walk a mile with me twice a day--not too fast. All the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your feet. I should bring you something nice to eat every two hours."

"And how much work do you suppose I should get through?"

"Work? You wouldn't do any work for a year at least--if I had my way."

"It's a beautiful dream," said she. She closed her eyes, but whether to shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say.

"I don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if I were dead. You don't know how tre--mend--ously alive I am."

"I know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if I had my way--if you were happy."

She was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in front of her at nothing.