Part 72

So monstrous was Nicky's capacity for illusion that he went away thinking he had given Jane up for the sake of her career.

And Jane tried to think of Nicky and be sorry for him. But she couldn't. She was immoderately happy. She had given up Brodrick's magazine and Brodrick's money for Tanqueray's sake. Tanks would have his chance. He would be able to take a house, and then that little wife of his wouldn't have to sit with her hands before her, fretting her heart away because of Tanks. She was pleased, too, because she had made Brodrick do what he hadn't meant and didn't want to do.

But as she lay in bed that night, not thinking of Brodrick, she saw suddenly Brodrick's eyes fixed on her with a look in them which she had not regarded at the time; and she heard him saying, in that queer, quiet voice of his, "I'm almost glad to have lost you this way."

"I wonder," she said to herself, "if he really spotted me."

XIX

Brodrick's house, Moor Grange, stood on the Roehampton side of Putney Heath, just discernible between the silver and green of the birches. With its queer, red-tiled roofs, pitched at every possible slope, white, rough-cast, many-cornered walls, green storm-shutters, lattice windows of many sorts and sizes, Brodrick's house had all the brilliant eccentricity of the twentieth century.

But Brodrick's garden was at least a hundred years older than his house. It had a beautiful green lawn with a lime-tree in the middle and a stone-flagged terrace at the back overlooking the north end of the Heath. Behind the house there was a kitchen garden that had survived modernity.

Brodrick's garden was kept very smooth and very straight, no impudent little flowers hanging out of their beds, no dissolute straggling of creepers upon walls. Even the sweet-peas at the back were trained to a perfect order and propriety.

And in Brodrick's house propriety and order were carried to the point of superstition. Nothing in that queer-cornered, modern exterior was ever out of place. No dust ever lay on floor or furniture. All the white-painted woodwork was exquisitely white. Time there was measured by a silver-chiming clock that struck the quiet hours with an infallible regularity.

And yet Brodrick was not a tidy nor a punctual man. In his library the spirit of order contended against fearful odds. For Brodrick lived in his library, the long, book-lined, up-stairs room that ran half the length of the house on the north side. But even there, violate as he would his own sanctuary, the indestructible propriety renewed itself by a diurnal miracle. He found books restored to their place, papers sorted, everything an editor could want lying ready to his hand. For the spirit of order rose punctually to perform its task.

But in the drawing-room its struggles and its triumph were complete.

It had been, so Brodrick's sisters told him, a man's idea of a drawing-room. And now there were feminine touches, so incongruous and scattered that they seemed the work of a person establishing herself tentatively, almost furtively, by small inconspicuous advances and instalments. A little work-table stood beside the low settle in the corner by the fireplace. Gay, shining chintz covered the ugly chairs. There were cushions here and there where a woman's back most needed them. Books, too, classics in slender duo-decimo, bought for their cheapness, novels (from the circulating library), of the kind that Brodrick never read. On the top of a writing-table, flagrantly feminine in its appointments, there stood, well in sight of the low chair, a photograph of Brodrick which Brodrick could not possibly have framed and put there.

The woman who entered this room now had all the air of being its mistress; she moved in it so naturally and with such assurance, as in her sphere. You would have judged her occupied with some mysterious personal predilections with regard to drawing-rooms. She paused in her passage to reinstate some article dishonoured by the parlour-maid, to pat a cushion into shape and place a chair better to her liking. At each of these small fastidious operations she frowned like one who resents interference with the perfected system of her own arrangements.

She sat down at the writing-table and took from a pigeonhole a sheaf of tradesmen's bills. These she checked and docketed conscientiously, after entering their totals in a book marked "Household." From all these acts she seemed to draw some secret enjoyment and satisfaction. Here she was evidently in a realm secure from the interference of the incompetent.

With a key attached to her person she now unlocked the inmost shrine of the writing-table. A small squat heap of silver and of copper sat there like the god of the shrine. She took it in her hand and counted it and restored it to its consecrated seat. She then made a final entry: "Cash in Hand, thirty-five shillings."

She sat smiling in tender contemplation of this legend. It stood for the savings of the last month, effected by her deft manipulation of the household. There was no suggestion of cupidity in her smile, nor any hint of economy adored and pursued for its own sake.

She was Gertrude Collett, the lady who for three years had acted as Brodrick's housekeeper, or, as she now preferred to call herself, his secretary. She had contrived, out of this poor material of his weekly bills, to fashion for herself a religion and an incorporeal romance.

She raised her face to the photograph of Brodrick, as if spiritually she rendered her account to him. And Brodrick's face, from the ledge of the writing-table, looked over Gertrude's head with an air of being unmoved by it all, with eyes intent on their own object.

She, Brodrick's secretary, might have been about five-and-thirty. She was fair with the fairness which is treacherous to women of her age, which suffers when they suffer. But Gertrude's skin still held the colours of her youth as some strong fabric holds its dye. Her face puzzled you; it was so broad across the cheek-bones that you would have judged it coarse; it narrowed suddenly in the jaws, pointing her chin to subtlety. Her nose, broad also across the nostrils and bridge, showed a sharp edge in profile; it was alert, competent, inquisitive. But there was mystery again in the long-drawn, pale-rose lines of her mouth. A wide mouth with irregular lips, not coarse, but coarsely finished. Its corners must once have drooped with pathos, but this tendency was overcome or corrected by the serene habit of her smile.

It was not the face of a dreamer. Yet at the moment you would have said she dreamed. Her eyes, light coloured, slightly prominent, stared unsheltered under their pale lashes and insufficient brows. They were eyes that at first sight had no depths in them. Yet they seemed to hold vapour. They dreamed. They showed her dream.

She started as the silver-chiming clock struck the quarter.

She went up-stairs to the room that was her own, and examined herself carefully in the looking-glass. Then she did something to her hair. Waved slightly and kept in place by small amber-coloured combs, Gertrude's hair, though fragile, sustained the effect of her almost Scandinavian fairness. Next she changed her cotton blouse for an immaculate muslin one. As she drew down the blouse and smoothed it under the clipping belt, she showed a body flat in the back, sharp-breasted, curbed in the waist; the body of a thoroughly competent, serviceable person. Her face now almost suggested prettiness, as she turned and turned its little tilted profile between two looking-glasses.

At half-past three she was seated at her place in Brodrick's library. A table was set apart for her and her type-writer on a corner by the window.

The editor was at work at his own table in the centre of the room. He did not look up at her as she came in. His eyes were lowered, fixed on the proof he was reading. Once, as he read, he shrugged his shoulders slightly, and once he sighed. Then he called her to him.

She rose and came, moving dreamily as if drawn, yet holding herself stiffly and aloof. He continued to gaze at the proof.

"You sat up half the night to correct this, I suppose?"

"Have I done it very badly?"

He did not tell her that she had, that he had spent the best part of his morning correcting her corrections. She was an inimitable housekeeper, and a really admirable secretary. But her weakness was that she desired to be considered admirable and inimitable in everything she undertook. It would distress her to know that this time she had not succeeded, and he did not like distressing people who were dependent on him. It used to be so easy, so mysteriously easy, to distress Miss Collett; but she had got over that; she was used to him now; she had settled down into the silent and serene performance of her duties. And she had brought to her secretarial work a silence and serenity that were invaluable to a man who detested argument and agitation.