Part 64 (1/2)

”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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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.

XXIX

That was a solid, practical idea of Brodrick's. All that he had heard of Owen Prothero connected him securely with foreign countries. By the fact that he had served in South Africa, to say nothing of his years in the Indian Medical Service, he was pointed out as the right man to send to the Russian army in Manchuria; add to this the gift of writing and your War Correspondent was complete. It was further obvious that Prothero could not possibly exist in England on his poems.

At the same time Brodrick was aware that he had reasons for desiring to get the long, ugly poet out of England as soon as possible. His length and his ugliness had not deterred Jane Holland from taking a considerable interest in him. Brodrick's reasons made him feel extremely uncomfortable in offering such a dangerous post as War Correspondent to young Prothero. Therefore when it came to Prothero's accepting it, he did his best to withdraw the offer. It wasn't exactly an offer. He had merely mentioned it as a possible opening, a suggestion in the last resort. He pointed out to Prothero the dangers and the risks, among them damage to his trade as a poet. Poets were too precious. There were, he said, heaps of other men.

But Prothero had leaped at it; he had implored Brodrick not to put another man in; and the more he leaped and implored the more Brodrick tried to keep him off it.

But you couldn't keep him off. He was mad, apparently, with the sheer l.u.s.t of danger. He _would_ go. ”If you do,” Brodrick had said finally, ”you go at your own risk.”

And he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. Brodrick, in these days, found himself reiterating, ”He _would_ go, he _would_ go.” And all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his death, because of Jane Holland.

He saw a great deal of Jane Holland in the weeks that followed Prothero's departure.

They had reached the first month of autumn, and Jane was sitting out on the lawn in Brodrick's garden. The slender, new-born body of Prothero's Poems lay in her lap. Eddy Heron stretched himself at her feet. Winny hung over her shoulder. Every now and then the child swept back her long hair that brushed Jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see what, as she phrased it, Mr. Prothero had done. Opposite them Mrs. Heron and Gertrude Collett sat quietly sewing.

Eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about Jane as if she wasn't there.