Part 125

His voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. But he could see things plainly. It was with the certainty, the terrible lucidity of passion that he saw himself. The vision was disastrous to all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long tradition of the Brodricks. But he saw true.

Jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him.

"And is it really," she said, "as bad as that?"

"It always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing you want. Luckily for me I've only really wanted one thing."

"One thing?"

"You--or a woman like you. Only there never was a woman like you."

"I see. That's why you care for me?"

"Does it matter why?"

"Not a bit. I only wondered."

He looked at her almost as if he also wondered. Then they were silent. Jane was content to let her wonder die, but Brodrick's mind was still groping in obscurity. At last he seemed to have got hold of something, and he spoke.

"Of course, there's your genius, Jinny. If I don't say much about it, you mustn't think I don't care."

"Do you? There are moments when I hate it."

Her face was set to the mood of hatred.

"Hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it."

"I wouldn't marry it, if I didn't think I could look after it."

"You needn't bother. It can look after itself."

She paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the pattern of the sofa-cover.

"Did you think I cared for it so frightfully?" she said.

"I know you did."

"I care for it still." She turned to him with her set face. "But I could kill it if it came between you and me."

XXXIV

Jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of her adoration.

For the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible, audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible on some verge between creation and oblivion. This withdrawal had once been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover it.

She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life. That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible, had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no longer moved her.

Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful, adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon, found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked tenderly in passing.

And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered, red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched in the poignant, tender light of it.

That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock. She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the quarters.

She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett. She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had listened humbly while Gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of the sacred Books. She had stood like a child, breathless with attention, when Gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed her the little squat god in his shrine.