Part 107 (1/2)

”There you're wrong. He did splendid work out in Africa and India. He's got as good a record as you have in your own profession. It's no use your looking as if you wished he hadn't, for he has.”

”You mistake me. I am delighted to hear it. In that case, why doesn't he practise, instead of living on his wife?”

”He doesn't live on her. His journalism pays for his keep--if we're going to be as vulgar as all that.”

Jinny was in revolt.

”I imagine all the same,” said John, ”that Prothero's wife is considerably the better man.”

”She'd hate you if she knew you'd said so.”

”Prothero's wife,” said Henry, ”is a lady for whom I have the very highest admiration. But Prothero is impossible. _Im_--possible.”

Jane left the room.

LV

It seemed to have struck everybody all at once that Prothero was impossible. That conviction was growing more and more upon his publishers. His poems, they a.s.sured him, were no longer worth the paper they were written on. As for his job on the ”Morning Telegraph,” he was aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as a continuous idiot.

His impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of Laura's marvellous achievement. Laura's luck persisted (she declared) because she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn into the columns of the ”Morning Telegraph,” became increasingly obscure. It made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his high place and his praise. Of course she knew that it was not _his_ place or _his_ praise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of her appraisers set him high. Obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him.

She knew the uses of unpopularity. It kept him perfect; sacred in a way, and uncontaminated. It preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his vision. His genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. It swung in ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon.

She would not have had it otherwise. It was through Owen's obscurity that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her fellow-wors.h.i.+ppers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt.

As for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked him to have made it, if he could. An opulent poet was ridiculous, the perversion of the sublime. If one of them was to be made absurd by the possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it should be she.

The size of Laura's income, contrasted, as Prothero persisted in contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. Large and comfortable as it appeared to Prothero, it was not yet so large nor was it so comfortable that Laura could lie back and rest on it. She was heartrending, irritating, maddening to Prothero in her refusals to lie back on it and rest. She toiled prodigiously, incessantly, indefatigably. She implored Prothero to admit that if she was prodigious and incessant, she _was_ indefatigable, she never tired. There was nothing wonderful in what she did. She had caught the silly trick of it.

It could be done, she a.s.sured him, standing on your head. She enjoyed doing it. The wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. He argued vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary to set your teeth and go at it like that.

And the more he argued the more Laura laughed at him. ”I can't help it,”

she said; ”I've got the habit. You'll never break me of it, after all these years.”

For the Kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the memory of her former poverty. She had no illusions. She had never had them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. After all, looking at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. And it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. It had no stability. It might at any moment cease. She might have an illness, or Owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the pace _he_ went at it. Or the ”Morning Telegraph” might throw him over.

All sorts of things might happen. In her experience they generally did.

Of course, in a way Owen was right. They didn't want all the money. But what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. And then, in the first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. To begin with, she had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. They were always bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to Owen. And she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give Owen's long legs s.p.a.ce to ramp up and down in. The den he had chosen had been too small for him. He was better, she thought, since he had had his great room.

The house justified itself. It was rea.s.suring to know that whatever happened they would have a roof over their heads. But it could not be denied that she had been extravagant.

And Owen had been the least shade extravagant too. He had found a poet even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again.

And on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a slum, and ”advanced him,” as the medical student put it, twenty pounds to go to America with.

He had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had done.

”It was a sudden impulse,” he said. ”I yielded to it.”

”Oh, Owen dear, don't have another soon. These impulses are ruinous.”