Part 135

Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause. It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.

Her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the bedroom that she had been called on to admire. Rose's bedroom was a wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the smoothest and the whitest thing in it was Tanqueray's pillow where Tanqueray's head had never lain. There was a tiny dressing-room beyond, and through the open door Jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where, night after night, Tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off the orgy of the day's work. The dressing-room was a place where he could hide from Rose by night as he hid from her by day.

And Rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the dressing-room.

Jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove the fear and jealousy. She must let Rose see that she was not dangerous; and she knew how.

She began by asking Rose when she was coming out to Putney? And Rose answered that she was busy and couldn't say for sure.

"You won't be busy in August, will you? If you'll come then I'll show you a room you haven't seen, the prettiest room in the house."

Rose drew in her breath. Her face had the soft flush in it that came when she was deeply moved.

"I've got some of its dear little things all ready for it now," said Jane. "You must see them."

"I should dearly love to."

"I never thought, Rose, that I should have it."

Rose meditated. "They come," said she, "mostly to them that doesn't think."

"There's only one thing, Rose. I'm afraid. Oh, I'm so dreadfully afraid."

"I shouldn't be afraid," said Rose, "if it was me."

"It's because I've been so happy."

"You'll be 'appier still when it's come. It'd make all the difference to me if I 'ad a child. But that's what I haven't and never shall have."

"You don't know. You don't know."

"Yes. I do know." Rose's mouth trembled. She glanced unaware at the pillow that lay so smooth beside her own. "I 'aven't let on to him how much I want it. I wouldn't" (Rose steadied her mouth to get the words out). "Not if it was ever so."

"You darling," said Jane, and kissed her, and at that Rose burst into tears.

"I oughtn't to be keeping you here," she said. And they left the bedroom.

"Aren't you coming in?" said Jane.

Rose had turned away from her at Tanqueray's door.

"I can't," she whispered. "Not with me eyes all swelled up like this."

She went down-stairs to her little kitchen, where in the half-darkness she crouched down beside Minny who, with humped shoulders and head that nodded to the fender, dozed before the fire.

XXXVII

Laura Gunning was writing a letter to Tanqueray to congratulate him on his book and to explain why she had not come to his birthday party. It was simply impossible to get off now. Papa, she said, couldn't be left for five minutes, not even with the morning paper.

It was frightfully hard work getting all this into any intelligible form of words; getting it down at all was difficult. For the last hour she had been sitting there, starting and trembling at each rustle of the paper. Mr. Gunning could not settle down to reading now. He turned his paper over and over again in the vain search for distraction; he divided it into parts and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper.

It was a perpetual wind of newspaper, now high, now low; small, creeping sounds that rose to a crescendo; rushing, ripping, shrieking sounds of agitated newspaper, lacerating Laura's nerves, and murderous to the rhythm of her prose.

Tears fell from Laura's eyes as she wrote; they dropped, disfiguring her letter. Her head ached. It was always aching now. And when she tried to write she felt as if she were weaving string out of the grey matter of her brain, with the thread breaking all the time.