The Creators Part 114

"She doesn't bore _you_, Uncle Hugh, of course, because you're a man."

(Winny said that.)

"Then," said Eddy, "there's _us_. You know, we're an awful family for a woman like Jinny to have married into. There isn't one of us fit to black her boots. And I believe Uncle Henry thinks she wasn't made for anything except to bring more of us into the world."

Brodrick's face displayed a fine flush.

"_You_'re all right, Uncle Hugh."

Brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute.

"I keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her."

"What else did you say to him?"

Eddy became excited. "Oh--I got in one before we left--I landed him neatly. I asked him why on earth--if he thought she was neurotic--he let her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any fat nurse would have done the job as well? And why he let her break her neck, running round after Aunt Mabel? I had him there."

"What did your Uncle say to that?" (Brodrick's voice was rather faint.)

"He didn't say anything. He couldn't--oh--well, he _did_ say my impertinence was unendurable. And I said _his_ was, when you think what Jinny is."

He meditated on it. He had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent youth.

"We really came," Winny said, "to know whether Jinny _is_ going away?"

"She is going away," said Brodrick, "for three months."

He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "And _if_--she has to stay a year?"

"She shall stay," Brodrick said.

LX

She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and n.o.body else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. n.o.body would find her.

Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside; it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.

The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door that opened into a pa.s.sage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.

By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table, at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny on the open moor.

For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was a.s.sailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.

Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild earth and wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven.

Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an endless pa.s.sing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.

And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the gra.s.s was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the sweet earth of the south-west.

Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself, tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.

There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.

Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's plan.

And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote, a.s.suring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay.

Brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with Gertrude. His letters contained little besides praise of Gertrude. There was no reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay.

She stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her staying. Walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled from her pa.s.sion by the half-darkness, her Idea came back to her. It came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost.

It had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with her. But through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and labour of creation.

When she reached the farm she found George Tanqueray sitting in the porch. The lamp-light through the open door revealed him.

"Whatever brought you here?" she said.

"What always brings me."

She understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was in subjection to the Idea.

"Have you come to turn me out?" she said.

"No, Jinny."

He explained that he was staying in the village, at the Three Crowns. He had arrived that evening and had walked over.

He followed her into the deep kitchen. At the supper-table his place had been laid for him already. He had ordered it so.

He looked at her, smiling an apology.

"Is it all right?" he said.

"Perfectly all right, George."

They talked all evening and far into the night. She parted from him at the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. Under the ash-trees her Idea showed in its immense and luminous perfection. It trembled into life. It drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room.

She had found what she had come for.

That was the effect he always had on her.

LXI

Brodrick had been alone in the first fortnight that followed Jane's extraordinary departure. Instead of settling down to be comfortable with Gertrude, he had packed her off to the seaside with the children and their nurse. He had often wondered what he should do without Gertrude.