The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Creators, by May Sinclair, Illustrated by
Arthur I. Keller


This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org





Title: The Creators
       A Comedy


Author: May Sinclair



Release Date: July 4, 2008  [eBook #25971]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREATORS***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 25971-h.htm or 25971-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/5/9/7/25971/25971-h/25971-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/5/9/7/25971/25971-h.zip)


Transcriber's note:

      [oe] represents the oe-ligature.





THE CREATORS

A Comedy

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "The Helpmate," Etc.

With Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller







New York
The Century Co.
1910

Copyright, 1909, 1910, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1910




[Illustration: "To the book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You
can drink now, George."]




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


"To the book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You can drink now,
George."

"How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose, musing.

"Why do you talk about my heart?"

Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.

"And he," she said, "has still a chance if I fail you?"

She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to
her to say.

It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"

"George," she said ... "I love you for defending him"

She closed her eyes, "I'm quite happy"

Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them.




THE CREATORS




I


Three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he
there for? And at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the
first time that evening, as if they said that he would see.

She had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table
between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him,
George Tanqueray, to meet.

Everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with
Jane Holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than
he. It was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by
Gisborne, R.A. He had given most of his attention to the portrait.

Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not
Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face,
broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a
straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her
genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her
features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened
queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the
bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight
enough when her will was dominant. He had got her hair, the darkness and
the mass of it. Tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that Gisborne
had put his best work into that, and when Gisborne resented it he had
told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted Jane
Holland's hair. (This was in the days when Gisborne was celebrated and
Tanqueray was not.)

If Jane had had the face that Gisborne gave her she would never have had
any charm for Tanqueray. For what Gisborne had tried to get was that
oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. Not a hint had he caught
of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy
possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden
gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine,
deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight.

When Tanqueray wanted to annoy Jane he told her that she looked like her
portrait by Gisborne, R.A.

They were all going to the play together. But at the last moment, she,
to Tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. She was too tired, she said,
to go.

The celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course,
if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would
sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They
bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration.
And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and
Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get
rid of them.

She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for.
Her tired eyes helped her.

Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.

"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"

"I am certainly not going with them----" He paused, hesitating.

"Then--you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she
hesitated too.

"But you're tired?" he said.

"Not now."

She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her
appeal.

That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose
to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though
he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the
moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted
to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but
one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.

That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the
first time in many weeks.

She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go
that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would
not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified
her.

Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six
weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him.
There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six
weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping
him.

"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.

"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."

"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"

"It won't work."

"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."

She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived
alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.

There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in
Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut
herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at
the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the
place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of
honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her
writing-table. His "Works"--five novels--were on a shelf by themselves
at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.

For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was
the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her
charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable
innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great
nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary
taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their
nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right
people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even
of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility
and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have
touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with
its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had
discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the
Master, told her was "_the_ unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred
and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on
his tremendous height.

But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.

"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"

"What hasn't?"

"Your pop--your celebrity."

"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they----"

"_They_ needn't. I must. Celebrity--you observe that I call it by no
harsher name--celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to
end that way."

"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I
hate it sometimes."

"You hate it, yet you're drawn."

"By what? By my vanity?"

"Not by your vanity, though there is that."

"By what, then?"

"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."

"Mayn't I be?"

"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."

For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was
silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.

"Because you've genius."

"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"

He laughed. "Why not I?"

"Because it was you who told me not to keep back. You told me not to
live alone. Don't you remember?"

He remembered. It was in the days when he first knew her.

"I did. Because you ran to the other extreme then. You were terrified of
life."

"Because I was a woman. You told me to be a woman!"

"Because I was the only man you knew. How you remember things."

"That comes of living alone. I've never really forgotten anything you
ever said to me. It's where I score."

"You had nobody but me to talk to then, if you remember."

"No. Nobody but you."

"And it wasn't enough for you."

"Oh, wasn't it? When you were never the same person for a week together.
It was like knowing fifteen or twenty men."

He smiled. "I've always been the same man to you, Jinny. Haven't I?"

"I'm not so sure," said she.

"Anyhow, you were safe with me."

"From what?"

"From being 'had.' But now you've begun knowing all sorts of people----"

"Is that why you've kept away from me?"

He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable,
pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the
persecutors, the pursuers. Did _I_ ever pursue you?"

"No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any
one."

"_They_ will. And they'll have you at every turn."

"No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them."

"They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'"

"Do I?" She said it defiantly.

"No. You never lend--you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let
everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you."

"Oh--you----"

"And yet," he said, "I wonder----"

He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes.

"Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your
books?"

"Where you get yours," she said.

Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these
dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people."

She smiled, recognizing them.

"Look at _me_," he said.

"Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation.

"Yes, me. I was born out of it."

"And I--wasn't I born? Look at _me_?" She turned to him, holding her
head high.

"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening--and I
see a difference already."

"What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in
me."

It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the
secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever
and the brilliance fever brought.

She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly
alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair,
close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his
face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent,
sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full,
pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip
accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his
features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind,
suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his
difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost
something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet
somehow more obscure.

Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven.

He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the
hills, questing the visionary maid.

It was not she. His trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. She
saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was
not she. She saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason,
that it was not she. That showed that he was approaching headlong the
point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him
back. He was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that
insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. Any
woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand.

And between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey,
dumb, and holding them dumb. She searched for words to dispel it, but no
words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. That was
not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart.

He tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking
about the room and examining the things in it. There were some that it
had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in
material prosperity. Yes. He had liked her better when she had worked
harder and was as poor as he. They had come to look on poverty as their
protection from the ruinous world. He now realized that it had also been
their protection from each other. He was too poor to marry.

He reflected with some bitterness that Jane was not, now.

She in her corner called him from his wanderings. She had made the
coffee. He drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old
place on the sofa by her side.

She brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. She had man[oe]uvred to
keep him. And now she wished that she had let him go.

"Aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said.

"No. I shan't sleep if I do."

"Haven't you been sleeping?"

"Not very well."

"That's why you're looking like your portrait. That man isn't such a
silly ass as I thought he was."

"I wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and
everything."

"Everything?"

"You know what I mean. The horrid thing that's happened to me. My--my
celebrity." She brought it out with a little shiver of revolt.

He laughed. "But when you remind me of it every minute? When it's
everlastingly, if I may say so, on the carpet?"

Her eyes followed his. It was evident that she had bought a new one.

"It doesn't mean what you think it does. It isn't, it really isn't as
bad as that----"

"I was afraid."

"You needn't be. I'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger
mouthfuls."

"Why apologize?"

"I can't help it. You make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu."

"_I_ make you feel----?"

"Yes. You--you. You don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded.

"You know what I think you."

"I don't. I only know what you used to think me."

"I think the same."

"Tell me--tell me."

"I think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years,
you'll write a superb book, Jinny. But it all depends on what you do
with yourself in the next five years."

He paused.

"At the present moment there's hardly any one--of our generation, mind
you--who counts except you and I."

He paused again.

"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our
families have cast us off."

"Mine hasn't yet."

"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.

He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the
rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in
such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray
said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his
first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake.
He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him
from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the
"consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.

Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and
inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm
and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.

"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet
that's our temptation, yours and mine."

Again he paused.

"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws
them by one divine sense. Ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the
very soul, into the thick of it. _The_ unpardonable sin is separating
literature from life. You know that as well as I do."

She did. She worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls
of men. There was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the
serene, inspired audacity of Jane Holland. Her genius seemed to have
kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation.

Tanqueray continued in his theme. Talking like this allayed his
excitement.

"We're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. They're the stuff
we work in. It's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. We're
being tempted all the time. People--people--people--we can't have enough
of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. The thing is--to keep 'em off us. And
Jane, I _know_--they're getting at you."

She did not deny it. They were.

"And you haven't the--the nerve to stand up against it."

"I have stood up against it."

"You have. So have I. When we were both poor."

"You want me to be poor?"

"I don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just
pleasantly short of cash. There's nothing like that for keeping you out
of it."

"You want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? Deprived of everything that
makes life amusing?"

"Thoroughly uncomfortable. Deprived of everything that stands in the way
of your genius."

She felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing
that had been tacked on to her. He cared for it and could be tender to
it, but not to her.

"You're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain.

"My cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the
cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be
prepared to be burnt."

"It's all very well for you, George. I don't like being burnt."

That roused him; it stirred the devil in him.

"Do you suppose _I_ like it? Why, you--you don't know what burning _is_.
It means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink
themselves drunk."

"You don't want to be drunk, George. Any more than I do."

"I do not, thank God. But it would be all the same if I did. I can't get
a single thing I do want."

"Can't you? I should have thought you could have got most things you
really wanted."

"I could if I were a grocer or a draper. Why, a hair-dresser has more
mastery of the means of life."

He was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the
matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration
there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit.

He began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from
his mood. Now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them,
only that dark, unhappy fire.

He was quiet now. He had caught sight of some sheets of manuscript lying
on her desk.

"What's this?" he said.

"Only the last thing I've written."

"May I look?"

"You may."

He took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the
leaves over with a nervous hand. He was not reading. There was no
thought in his eyes.

He looked at her again. She saw that he was at the mercy of his moment,
and of hers.

For it was her moment. There was a power that every woman had, if she
cared to use it and knew how. There was a charm that had nothing to do
with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. These things had
their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other
power. His senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her.
She knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. She had
only to kindle her flame, send out her signal.

And she said to herself, "I can't. I can't take him like this. He isn't
himself. It would be hateful of me."

In that moment she had no fear. Love held her back and burning honour
that hardly knew itself from shame. It accused her of having
man[oe]uvred for that moment. It said, "You can't let him come in like
this and trap him."

Another voice in her whispered, "You fool. If you don't marry him some
other woman will--in this mood of his." And honour cried, answering it,
"Let her. So long as it isn't I."

She had a torturing sense of his presence. And with it her fear came
back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from
him.

He flung the manuscript into the place she had left, and bowed forward,
hiding his face in his hands. He rose too, and she knew that his moment
had gone. She had let it go.

Then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to
her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart.

"Do you know what I should like to do?" she said. "I should like to
sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for nobody
to come near me but you, nobody to read me but you, nobody to talk about
me but you. Do you remember?"

He did, but he was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his
mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held
immorality.

"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"

"I've told you why."

"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you----"

He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the
physician who knew her malady.

"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be
worst of all."

And so he left her.




II


He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to
think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so
much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him
alone and insisted on his letting her alone.

This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as
an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption
in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of
sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked
with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the
eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that
plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.

His device was, "Look and let go." He had never allowed himself to hold
on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you
were stifled by the stuff you worked in. Your senses, he maintained,
were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it
with the first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many
degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use
to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was
even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine,
rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. It yearned
perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no
more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the
undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be
its own. The live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in
any other way. Genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. It
was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the
sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with
experience to do their work for them.

And yet there was no more assiduous devotee of experience than George
Tanqueray. He repudiated with furious contempt any charge of
inspiration. There was no such thing as inspiration. There was instinct,
and there was eyesight. The rest was all infernal torment and labour in
the sweat of your brow. All this Tanqueray believed sincerely.

It would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same
time so unsophisticated as he.

For five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined
to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it,
among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for
their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk
perceptibly from their advances. He condemned their manner as a shade
too patronizing to his proud obscurity. And now, at two-and-thirty, of
three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, Jane
Holland.

He had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode
incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country
back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people,
persistent, insufferable people.

For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead. The
charm of Hampstead was that nobody whom he knew lived there.

He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too
steep for traffic. He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a
green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at
the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low
hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the grass of his slope
turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to
purple. He looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded
himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in Hampstead whom he
knew. And that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last
he had found peace. He would stay there for ever, in those two rooms.

Here, on the morning after he had dined with Jane Holland, he sat down
to write. And he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it
created. In those days Tanqueray could never count upon his genius. The
thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never
let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. At times it
seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times
it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. He courted it, and
it avoided him. He let it go, and it came back to him, caressing and
tormenting him, compelling his embrace. There were days when it pursued
and captured him, and then it had wings that swept him divinely to its
end. There were days when he had to go out and find it, and lure the
winged thing back to him. Once caught, it was unswerving in its
operations.

But Tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius
failed him. And apparently it had failed him now. In forty-eight hours
he had accomplished nothing.

At the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what
he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. His genius
had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. But still he
had cared for it supremely. Now, the horrible thing was that he did not
care. His genius was of all things that which interested him least. He
was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating
because it was aimless and obscure.

That came of dining with Jane Holland.

He was not in love with Jane. On the contrary, he was very angry with
her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. And he
was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could
not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was
not in it.

But wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were
always running upon Jane. They ran on her now. He conceived of her more
than ever as the unfit. "She's too damnably clever," he kept saying to
himself, "too damnably clever." And he took up her last book just to see
again how damnably clever she was.

In an instant he was at her feet. She wasn't clever when she wrote that.
What a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. It
matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. Almost as
clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. Reading Jane Holland, Tanqueray
became depressed or exalted according to his mood. He was now depressed.

But he could not leave her. In spirit he remained at her feet. He bowed
himself in the dust. "I couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my
life. I shall never do anything like that."

He wrote and told her so. But he did not go to see her, as he would have
done six weeks ago.

And then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did
not feel them. "I don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. She's
like me." Too like him to be altogether fit.

So he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her,
while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day.

He went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond Hampstead.
He lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think
about Jane. For all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible
for him to think of anything else. And when he got back into his room
its solitude was intolerable. For ten days he had not spoken to any
woman but his landlady. Every morning, before he sat down to write, he
had to struggle with his terror of Mrs. Eldred. It was growing on him
like a nervous malady.

An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a
large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The
appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and
demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it
was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things
unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out
to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became
tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her
figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed,
rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For
though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it
quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed.

He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could
call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced
himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he
forgot himself so far as to implore her for God's sake not to talk to
him.

The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to
her, it would not be necessary for her to talk.

He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him
at a figure which surprised him by its moderation.

Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill,
frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the
obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk,
bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands.

He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other
end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because,
being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from
Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from
things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that
dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of
creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge.

It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or
three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the
sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of
self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of
inimitable remoteness.

He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably
feminine. He smiled, simply to reassure it.

"How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?"

"I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak."

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to
play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose
Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty,
yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from
some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have
achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only
grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose
as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her
face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large
for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a
thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a
feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All
but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft,
so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners,
and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards
it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as
delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness,
when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust
largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she
tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and
smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. Mouse-colored hair
it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that
curled away under the coil.

She wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a
knot of brown ribbon at her throat.

Thus attired, for three days Rose waited on him. For three days she
never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready.

In three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort.
There was about Rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to
everything she laid her hands on. (Her hands were light in their touch
and exquisitely gentle.) His writing-table was like a shrine that she
tended. Every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay
ready to his hand. Not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its
place. The charm was that he never caught her at it. In all her
ministrations Rose was secret and silent and unseen.

Only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and
Rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the
magic and rhythm of a song, "Puss--Puss--Puss," she called;
"Minny--Min--Min--Minny--Puss--Puss--Puss." That was the hymn with which
Rose saluted the night. It ought to have irritated him, but it didn't.

It was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her
admirable silence. She had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from
under the book he was reading.

"It isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir."

"I know it isn't. But what are you to do if you've nobody to talk to?"

A long silence. It seemed as if Rose was positively thinking.

"You should go out more, sir."

"I don't like going out."

Silence again. Rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its
drawer. Yet she lingered.

"Would you like to see the little dogs, sir?"

"Little dogs? I didn't know there were any."

"We keep them very quiet; but we've seven. We've a fox and a dandy"
(Rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an Aberdeen, and two
Aberdeen pups, and two Poms, a mole and a white. May they come up, sir?"

"By all means let them come up."

She ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her
heels. Tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (He was fond of animals.)
The fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. The old Aberdeen ran
away from him backwards, showing her teeth. Her two pups sat down in the
doorway and yapped at him.

Rose tried not to laugh, while the Poms ran round and round her skirts,
panting with their ridiculous exertions.

"That's Prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. He doesn't belong to us.
And this," said Rose, darting under the table and picking up the white
Pom, "this is Joey."

The white Pom leaped in her arms. He licked her face in a rapture of
affection.

"Is Joey a pedigree dog, too?" said Tanqueray.

"Yes," said Rose. She met his eyes without flinching.

"So young a dog----"

"No, sir, Joey's not so very young."

She was caressing the little thing tenderly, and Tanqueray saw that
there was something wrong with Joey.

Joey was deplorably lean and puny, and his hair, which should have stood
out till Joey appeared three times the size he was, his hair, what hair
he had, lay straight and limp along his little back. Rose passed her
hand over him the wrong way.

"You should always brush a Pom the wrong way, sir. It brings the hair
on."

"I'm afraid, Rose, you've worn his hair away with stroking it."

"Oh no, sir. That's the peculiarity of Joey's breed. Joey's my dog,
sir."

"So I see."

He saw it all. Joey was an indubitable mongrel, but he was Rose's dog,
and she loved him, therefore Joey's fault, his hairlessness, had become
the peculiarity, not to say the superiority, of Joey's breed.

She read his thoughts.

"We're taking great pains to bring it on before the tenth."

"The tenth?"

"The Dog Show, sir."

(Heavens above! She was going to show him!)

"And do you think you'll bring it on before the tenth?"

"Oh yes, sir. You've only got to brush a Pom's hair backwards and it
comes."

The little dogs clamoured to be gone. She stooped, stroking them,
smoothing their ears back and gazing into their eyes, lost in her own
tenderness, and unaware that she was watched. If Rose had been skilled
in the art of allurement she could not have done better than let him see
how she loved all things that had life.

"How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose, musing.

[Illustration: "How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose,
musing]

She moved slowly to the door, gathering up the puppies in her arms, and
calling to the rest to follow her. "Come along," she said, "and see what
Pussy's doing."

He heard her voice going down-stairs saying,
"Puss--Puss--Pussy--Min--Min--Min."

When she appeared to him the next day, Minny, the cat, was hanging by
his claws on to her shoulder.

"Are you fond of cats, sir?"

"I adore them." (He did.)

"Would you like to have Minny, sir? He'll be nice company for you."

"Ought I to deprive you of his society?"

"I don't mind, sir. I've got the little dogs." She looked at him softly.
"And you've got nothing."

"True, Rose. I've got nothing."

That evening, as he sat in his chair, with Rose's cat curled up on his
knee, he found himself thinking, preposterously thinking, about Rose.

He supposed she was Mrs. Eldred's daughter. He did not like to think of
her as Mrs. Eldred's daughter. She was charming now; but he had a vision
of her as she might be in twenty years' time, grown shapeless and
immense, and wheezing as Mrs. Eldred wheezed. Yet no; that was too
horrible. You could not think of Rose as--wheezing. People did not
always take after their mothers. Rose must have had a father. Of course,
Eldred was her father; and Eldred was a small man, lean and brown as a
beetle; and he had never heard him wheeze.

At dinner-time Rose solved his doubt.

"Aunt says, sir, do you mind my waitin' on you?"

"I do not mind it in the very least."

"It's beginning to be a trouble to Aunt now to get up-stairs."

"I wouldn't dream of troubling your aunt."

Her aunt? Mrs. Eldred was not her mother. Ah, but you could take after
your aunt.

He found that this question absorbed him more than was becoming. He
determined to settle it.

"Are you going to stay here, then?" he asked, with guile.

"Yes, sir. I've come back to live with Uncle."

"Have you always lived here?"

"Yes, sir. Father left me to Uncle when he died."

"Then, Rose, Mrs. Eldred is not your aunt?"

"Oh no, sir," said Rose eagerly.

Tanqueray felt a relief out of all proportion to its cause.

He continued the innocent conversation.

"And so you're going to look after me, are you?"

"Yes," said Rose. He noticed that when she dropped the "sir," it was
because her voice drew itself back with a little gasping breath.

"And your aunt, you think, really won't be equal to it?"

"Well, sir, you see, she gets all of a flutter like, and then she
w'eezes, and she knows that's irritating for you to hear." She paused.
"And Aunt was afraid that if you was irritated, sir, you'd go. Nothin'
could keep you."

(How thoroughly they understood him!)

"Well, I'm not irritated any more. But it is unfortunate, isn't it, that
she--er--wheezes?"

He had tried before now to make Rose laugh. He wanted to see how she did
it. It would be a test. And he perceived that, somewhere behind her
propriety, Rose cherished a secret, iniquitous enjoyment of her aunt.

An imp of merriment danced in Rose's eyes, but the rest of her face was
graver than ever. ("Good," he thought; "she doesn't giggle.")

"Oh, Mr. Tanqueray, talk of w'eezin', you should hear Aunt snore."

"I have heard her. In my dreams."

Rose, abashed at her own outburst, remained silent for several minutes.
Then she spoke again.

"Do you think, sir, you could do without me on the tenth?"

"No. I don't think I could possibly do without you."

Her face clouded. "Not just for the tenth?"

"Why the tenth?"

"The Dog Show, sir. And Joey's in it."

"I forgot."

"Miss Kentish, the lady up-stairs, is going for her holiday on the
tenth."

He saw that she was endeavouring to suggest that if he couldn't do
without her, he and he alone would be keeping her from the superb
spectacle of the Dog Show with Joey in it.

"So you want me to go for a holiday, too. Is that it?"

"Well, sir, if it's not inconvenient, and you don't really mind
Aunt----"

"Doesn't she want to see Joey, too?"

"Not if you required her, sir."

"I don't require her. I don't require anybody. I'm going away, like the
lady up-stairs, for the tenth. I shall be away all day."

"Oh, thank you, sir." She glowed. "Do you think, sir, Joey'll get a
prize?"

"Certainly, if you bring his hair on."

"It's coming. I've put paraffin all over him. You'd laugh if you were to
see Joey now, sir."

Rose herself was absolutely serious.

"No, Rose, I should not laugh. I wouldn't hurt Joey's feelings for the
world."

Tanqueray had his face hidden under the table where he was setting a
saucer of milk for Minny, the cat.

Rose rejoiced in their communion. "He's quite fond of you, sir," she
said.

"Of course he's fond of me," said Tanqueray, emerging. "Why shouldn't he
be?"

"Well, Minny doesn't take to everybody."

"I am more than honoured that he should take to me."

Rose accepted that statement with incorruptible gravity. It was the
fifth day, and she had not laughed yet.

But on the seventh day he met her on the stairs going to her room. She
carried a lilac gown over her arm and a large hat in her hand. She was
smiling at the hat. He smiled at her.

"A new gown for the Rose Show?"

"The Dog Show, sir." She stood by to let him pass.

"It's the same thing. I say, what a howling swell you'll be."

At that Rose laughed (at last he had made her).

She ran up-stairs; and through a door ajar, he heard her singing in her
own room.




III


In Tanqueray's memorandum-book for nineteen hundred and two there stands
this note: "June 10th. Rose Show. Remember to take a holiday."

Rose, he knew, was counting the days till the tenth.

About a fortnight before the tenth, Tanqueray was in bed, ill. He had
caught a cold by walking furiously, and then lying out on the grass in
the chill of the May evening. There was a chance, Rose said, of its
turning to influenza and bronchitis, and it did.

He was so bad that Mrs. Eldred dragged herself up-stairs to look at him.

"Bed's the best place, sir, for you," she said. "So just you lie quiet
'ere, sir, and Rose'll look after you. And if there's anything you
fancy, sir, you tell Rose, and I'll make it you."

There was nothing that he fancied but to lie still there and look at
Rose when, in a spare hour, she sat by his window, sewing. Bad as he
was, he was not so far gone as to be ever oblivious of her presence.
Even at his worst, one night when he had had a touch of fever, he was
aware of her wandering in and out of his room, hanging over him with a
thermometer, and sitting by his bedside. When he flung the clothes off
she was there to cover him; when his pillow grew hot she turned it; when
he cried out with thirst she gave him a cool drink.

In the morning she was pale and heavy-eyed; her hair was all unsleeked,
and its round coils were flattened at the back. She had lain down on her
bed, dressed, for five minutes at a time, but she had not closed her
eyes or her ears all night.

In a week he was well enough to enjoy being nursed. He was now
exquisitely sensitive to the touch of her hands, and to the nearness of
her breathing mouth as her face bent over him, tender, absorbed, and
superlatively grave. What he liked best of all was to hold out his weak
hands to be washed and dried by hers; that, and having his hair brushed.

He could talk to her now without coughing. Thus--

"I say, what a bother I am to you."

Rose had taken away the basin and towels, and was arranging his hair
according to her own fancy. And Rose's fancy was to part it very much on
one side, and brush it back in a curl off his forehead. It gave him a
faint resemblance to Mr. Robinson, the elegant young draper in the High
Street, whom she knew.

"There's nothing I like so much," said she, "as tucking people up in bed
and 'aving them lie there and nursing 'em. Give me anybody ill, and
anybody 'elpless, and me lookin' after 'em, and I'm happy."

"And the longer I lie here, Rose, the happier you'll be?"

"Yes. But I want you to get well, too, sir."

"Because you're so unselfish."

"Oh no. There isn't anybody selfisher than me."

"I suppose," said Tanqueray, "that's why I _don't_ get well."

Rose had a whole afternoon to spare that day. She spent it turning out
his drawers and finding all the things there were to mend there. She was
sitting by his bed when, looking up from her mending, she saw his eyes
fixed on her.

"I don't irritate you, sittin' here, do I, sir?"

"Irritate me? What do you think I'm made of?"

Rose meditated for the fraction of a second.

"Brains, sir," said she.

"So you think you know a man of brains when you see him, do you?"

"Yes, sir."

"What were you, Rose, before you came here?"

"I was nurse in a gentleman's family. I took care of the baby."

"Did you like taking care of the baby?"

"Yes."

Rose blushed profoundly and turned away. He wondered why.

"I had a bad dream last night," said Tanqueray. "I dreamt that your aunt
got into this room and couldn't get out again. I'm afraid of your aunt."

"I dare say, sir. Aunt is so very 'uge."

Rose dropped her g's and, when deeply moved, her aitches; but he did not
mind. If it had to be done, it couldn't be done more prettily.

"Rose, do you know when I'm delirious and when I'm not?"

"Yes, sir. You see, I take your temperature."

"It must be up now to a hundred and eighty. You mustn't be alarmed at
anything I say. I'm not responsible."

"No, sir." She rose and gravely took his temperature.

"Aren't you afraid of my biting the bulb off, and the quicksilver flying
down my throat, and running about inside me for ever and ever?"

"No, sir."

"You don't seem to be afraid of anything."

"I'm not afraid of many things, and I would never be afraid of you,
sir."

"Not if I went mad, Rose? Raving?"

"No. Not if you went mad. Not if you was to strike me, I wouldn't." She
paused. "Not so long as I knew you was really mad, and didn't mean to
hurt me."

"I wouldn't hurt you for the world."

He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

That evening, when she was giving him his medicine, he noticed that her
eyelids were red and her eyes gleaming.

"You've been crying. What's made you cry?"

Rose did not answer.

"What is it?"

"Miss Kentish keeps on callin' and callin' me. And she scolds me
something awful when I don't come."

"Give my compliments to Miss Kentish, Rose, and tell her she's a beast."

"I _'ave_ told her that if it was she that was ill I'd nurse her just
the same and be glad to do it."

"You consider that equivalent to calling her a beast, do you?"

Rose said, "Well----" It was a little word she used frequently.

"Well, I'm sorry you think I'm a beast."

Rose's face had a scared look. She could not follow him, and that
frightened her. It is always terrifying to be left behind. So he spared
her.

"Why would you be glad to nurse Miss Kentish?"

"Because," said Rose, "I like taking care of people."

"Do you like taking care of me?"

Rose was silent again. She turned suddenly away. It was the second time
she had done this, and again he wondered why.

By the eighth day Tanqueray was strong enough to wash his own hands and
brush his own hair. On the ninth the doctor and Rose agreed that he
might sit up for an hour or two in his chair by the window. On the
eleventh he came down-stairs for dinner. On the thirteenth Rose had
nothing more to do for him but to bring him his meals and give him his
medicine, which he would otherwise have forgotten.

At bed-time, therefore, he had two sovereigns ready for her in an
envelope. Rose refused obstinately to take them; to have anything to do
with sovereigns.

"No, sir, I couldn't," she reiterated.

But when he pressed them on her she began to cry.

And that left him wondering more.




IV


On the fourteenth day, Tanqueray, completely recovered, went out for a
walk. And the first thing he did when he got back was to look at his
note-book to see what day of the month it was.

It was the tenth, the tenth of June, the day of the Dog Show. And the
memorandum stared him in the face: "Rose Show. Remember to take a
holiday."

He looked in the paper. The show began at ten. And here he was at
half-past one. And here was Rose, in her old green and brown, bringing
in his luncheon.

"Rose," he said severely, "why are you not at the Rose Show?"

Rose lowered her eyes. "I didn't want to go, sir."

"How about the new gown?"

(He remembered it.)

"That don't matter. Aunt's gone instead of me."

"Wearing it? She couldn't. Get into it at once, and leave that
confounded cloth alone and go. You've plenty of time."

She repeated that she did not want to go, and went on laying the cloth.

"Why not?" said he.

"I don't want to leave you, sir."

"Do you mean to say you've given up that Dog Show--with Joey in it--for
me?"

"Joey isn't in it; and I'd rather be here looking after you."

"I won't be looked after. I insist on your going. Do you hear?"

"Yes, sir, I hear you."

"And you're going?"

"No, sir." She meditated with her head a little on one side; a way she
had. "I've got a headache, and--and--and I don't want to go and see them
other dogs, sir."

"Oh, that's it, is it? A feeling for Joey?"

But by the turn of head he knew it wasn't. Rose was lying, the little
minx.

"But you _must_ go somewhere. You _shall_ go somewhere. You shall go--I
say, supposing you go for a drive with me?"

"You mustn't take me for drives, sir."

"Mustn't I?"

"I don't want you to give me drives--or--or anything."

"I see. You are to do all sorts of things for me, and I'm not to be
allowed to do anything for you."

She placed his chair for him in silence, and as he seated himself he
looked up into her face.

"Do you want to please me, Rose?"

Her face was firm as she looked at him. It was as if she held him in
check by the indomitable set of her chin, and the steady light of her
eyes. (Where should he be if Rose were to let herself go?)

Her mouth trembled, it protested against these austerities and
decisions. It told him dumbly that she did want, very much, to please
him; but that she knew her place.

Did she? Did she indeed know her place? Did he know it?

"You're right, Rose. That isn't the way I ought to have put it. Will you
do me the honour of going for a drive with me?"

She looked down, troubled and uncertain.

"It can be done, Rose," he said, answering her thoughts. "It can be
done. The only thing is, would you like it?"

"Yes, sir, I would like it very much."

"Can you be ready by three o'clock?"

At three she was ready.

She wore the lilac gown she had bought for the Show, and the hat. It had
red roses in it.

He did not like her gown. It was trimmed with coarse lace, and he could
not bear to see her in anything that was not fine.

"Is anything wrong with my hair?" said Rose.

"No, nothing's wrong with your hair, but I think I like you better in
the green and brown----"

"That's only for every day."

"Then I shall like you better every day."

"Why do you like my green and brown dress?"

He looked at her again and suddenly he knew why.

"Because you had it on when I first saw you. I say, would you mind
awfully putting it on instead of that thing?"

She did mind, awfully; but she went and put it on. And still there was
something wrong with her. It was her hat. It did not go with the green
and brown. But he felt that he would be a brute to ask her to take that
off, too.

They drove to Hendon and back. They had tea at "Jack Straw's Castle."
(Rose's face surrendered to that ecstasy.) And then they strolled over
the West Heath and found a hollow where Rose sat down under a birch-tree
and Tanqueray stretched himself at her feet.

"Rose," he said suddenly, "do you know what a wood-nymph is?"

"Well," said Rose, "I suppose it's some sort of a little animal."

"Yes, it's a little animal. A delightful little animal."

"Can you catch it and stroke it?"

"No. If you tried it would run away. Besides, you're not allowed to
catch it, or to stroke it. The wood-nymph is very strictly preserved."

Rose smiled; for though she did not know what a wood-nymph was, she knew
that Mr. Tanqueray was looking at her all the time.

"The wood-nymphs always dress in green and brown."

"Like me?"

"Like you. Only they don't wear boots" (Rose hid her boots), "nor yet
collars."

"You wouldn't like to see me without a collar."

"I'd like to see you without that hat."

Any difficulty in taking Rose about with him would lie in Rose's hat. He
could not say what was wrong with it except that the roses in it were
too red and gay for Rose's gravity.

"Would you mind taking it off?"

She took it off and put it in her lap. Surrendered as she was, she could
not disobey. The eternal spell was on her.

Tanqueray removed her hat gently and hid it behind him. He laid his
hands in her lap. It was deep delight to touch her. She covered his
hands with hers. That was all he asked of her and all she thought of
giving.

On all occasions which she was prepared for, Rose was the soul of
propriety and reserve. But this, the great occasion, had come upon her
unaware, and Nature had her will of her. Through Rose she sent out the
sign and signal that he waited for. And Rose became the vehicle of that
love which Nature fosters and protects; it was visible and tangible, in
her eyes, and in her rosy face and in the naïf movements of her hands.

Sudden and swift and fierce his passion came upon him, but he only lay
there at her feet, holding her hands, and gazing into her face, dumb,
like any lover of her class.

Then Rose lifted her hands from his and spoke.

"What have you done with my hat?"

In that moment he had turned and sat on it.

Deliberately, yet impulsively, and without a twinge of remorse, he had
sat on it. But not so that Rose could see him.

"I haven't done anything _with_ it," said he, "I couldn't do anything
with a hat like that."

"You've 'idden it somewhere."

He got up slowly, feigning a search, and produced what a minute ago had
been Rose's hat.

It was an absurd thing of wire and net, Rose's hat, and it had collapsed
irreparably.

"Well, I declare, if you haven't gone and sat on it."

"It looks as if I had. Can you forgive me?"

"Well--if it was an accident."

He looked down upon her tenderly.

"No, Rose, it was not an accident. I couldn't bear that hat."

He put his hand on her arm and raised her to her feet.

"And now," he said, "the only thing we can do is to go and get another
one."

They went slowly back, she shamefaced and bareheaded, he leading her by
the arm till they found themselves in Heath Street outside a magnificent
hat-shop.

Chance took him there, for Rose, interrogated on the subject of
hat-shops, was obstinately reticent.

But here, in this temple, in its wonderful window, before a curtain, on
a stage, like actors in a gay drama, he saw hats; black hats and white
hats; green and blue and rose-coloured hats; hats of all shapes and
sizes; airily perched; laid upon velvet; veiled and unveiled;
befeathered and beflowered. Hats of a beauty and a splendour before
which Rose had stood many a time in awful contemplation, and had hurried
past with eyes averted, leaving behind her the impermissible dream.

And now she had a thousand scruples about entering. He had hit, she
said, on the most expensive shop in Hampstead. Miss Kentish wouldn't
think of buying a hat there. No, she wouldn't have it. He must please,
please, Mr. Tanqueray, let her buy herself a plain straw and trim it.

But he seized her by the arm and drew her in. And once in there was no
more use resisting, it only made her look foolish.

Reality with its harsh conditions had vanished for a moment. It was like
a funny dream to be there, in Madame Rodier's shop, with Mr. Tanqueray
looking at her as she tried on innumerable hats, and Madame herself,
serving her, putting the hats on the right way, and turning her round
and round so that Mr. Tanqueray could observe the effect from every side
of her.

Madame talked all the time to Mr. Tanqueray and ignored Rose.

Rose had a mortal longing for a rose-coloured hat, and Madame wouldn't
let her have it. Madame, who understood Mr. Tanqueray's thoughts better
than if he had expressed them, insisted on a plain black hat with a
black feather.

"That's madame's hat, sir," said Madame. "We must keep her very simple."

"We must," said Tanqueray, with fervour. He thought he had never seen
anything so enchanting in its simplicity as Rose's face under the broad
black brim with its sweeping feather.

Rose had to wear the hat going home. Tanqueray carried the old one in a
paper parcel.

At the gate of the corner house he paused and looked at his watch.

"We've half-an-hour yet before we need go in. I want to talk to you."

He led her through the willows, and up the green slope opposite the
house. There was a bench on the top, and he made her sit on it beside
him.

"I suppose," he said, "you think that when we go in I shall let you wait
on me, and it'll be just the same as it was before?"

"Yes, sir. Just the same."

"It won't, Rose, it can't. You may wait on me to-night, but I shall go
away to-morrow."

She turned her face to him, it was dumb with its trouble.

"Oh no--no, sir--don't go away."

"I must. But before I go, I want to ask you if you'll be my wife----"

The hands she held clasped in her lap gripped each other tight. Her
mouth was set.

"I'm asking you now, Rose. To be my wife. My wife," he repeated
fiercely, as if he repelled with violence a contrary suggestion.

"I can't be your wife, sir," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because," she said simply, "I'm not a lady."

At that Tanqueray cried, "Ah," as if she had hurt him.

"No, sir, I'm not, and you mustn't think of it."

"I shall think of nothing else, and talk of nothing else, until you say
yes."

She shook her little head; and from the set of her chin he was aware of
the extreme decision of her character.

He refrained from any speech. His hand sought hers, for he remembered
how, just now, she had unbent at the holding of her hand.

But she drew it gently away.

"No," said she. "I look at it sensible. I can see how it is. You've been
ill, and you're upset, and you don't know what you're doin'--sir."

"I do--madam."

She smiled and drew back her smile as she had drawn back her head. She
was all for withdrawal.

Tanqueray in his attempt had let go the parcel that he held. She seized
it in a practical, business-like manner which had the perfect touch of
finality. Then she rose and went back to the house, and he followed her,
still pleading, still protesting. But Rose made herself more than ever
deaf and dumb. When he held the gate open for her she saw her advantage,
darted in, and vanished (his divinity!) down the area steps.

She went up-stairs to her little garret, and there, first of all, she
looked at herself in the glass. Her face was strange to her under the
black hat with its sweeping feather. She shook her head severely at the
person in the glass. She made her take off the hat with the feather and
put it by with that veneration which attends the disposal of a best hat.
The other one, the one with the roses, she patted and pulled and
caressed affectionately, till she had got it back into something of the
shape it had been, to serve for second best. Then she wished she had
left it as it was.

She loved them both, the new one because he had given it her, and the
old one because he had sat on it.

Finally she smoothed her hair to an extreme sleekness, put on a clean
apron and went down-stairs.

In the evening she appeared to Tanqueray, punctual and subservient,
wearing the same air of reticence and distance with which she had waited
on him first. He was to see, it seemed to say, that she was only little
Rose Eldred, his servant, to whom it was not proper that he should
speak.

But he did speak. He put his back to the door she would have escaped by,
and kept her prisoned there, utterly in his power.

Rose, thus besieged, delivered her ultimatum.

"Well," she said, "you take a year to think it over sensible."

"A year?"

"A year. And if you're in the same mind then as you are now, p'raps I
won't say no."

"A year? But in a year I may be dead."

"You come to me," said Rose, "if you're dyin'."

"And you'll have me then?" he said savagely.

"Yes. I'll 'ave you then."

But, though all night Tanqueray by turns raged and languished, it was
Rose who, in the morning, looked about to die. Not that he saw her. He
never saw her all that day. And at evening he listened in vain for her
call at the gate, her salutation to the night: "Min--Min--Minny!
Puss--Puss--Puss!"

For in the afternoon Rose left the house, attended by her uncle, who
carried by its cord her little trunk.

In her going forth she wore a clean white linen gown. She wore, not the
Hat, nor yet the sad thing that Tanqueray had sat on, but a little black
bonnet, close as a cap, with a black velvet bow in the front, and black
velvet strings tied beneath her chin.

It was the dress she had worn when she was nurse in a gentleman's
family.




V


Late in the evening of that day, Tanqueray, as he sat in miserable
meditation, was surprised by the appearance of Mrs. Eldred. She held in
her hand Rose's hat, the hat he had given her, which she placed before
him on the table.

"You'll be good enough, sir," said Mrs. Eldred, "to take that back."

"Why should I take it back?" he replied, with that artificial gaiety
which had been his habitual defence against the approaches of Mrs.
Eldred.

"Because, it was all very well for you to offer Rose wot you did, sir,
and she'd no call to refuse it. But a 'at's different. There's meanin',"
said Mrs. Eldred, "in a 'at."

Tanqueray looked at the hat.

"Meaning? If you knew all the meaning there is in that hat, Mrs. Eldred,
you'd feel, as I do, that you knew _something_. Half the poetry that's
been written has less meaning in it than that hat. That hat fulfills all
the requirements of poetry. It is simple--extremely simple--and sensuous
and passionate. Yes, passionate. It would be impossible to conceive a
hat less afflicted with the literary taint. It stands, as I see it, for
emotion reduced to its last and purest expression. In short, Mrs.
Eldred, what that hat doesn't mean isn't worth meaning."

"If you'd explain _your_ meaning, sir, I should be obliged."

"I am explaining it. My meaning, Mrs. Eldred, is that Rose wore that
hat."

"I know she did, sir, and she 'adn't ought to 'ave wore it. I'm only
askin' _you_, sir, to be good enough to take it back."

"Take it back? But whatever should I do with it? I can't wear it. I
might fall down and worship it, but--No, I couldn't wear it. It would be
sacrilege."

That took Mrs. Eldred's breath away, so that she sat down and wheezed.

"Does Rose not know what that hat means?" he asked.

"No, sir. I'll say that for her. She didn't think till I arst her."

"Then--I think--you'd perhaps better send Rose to me."

"Sir?"

"Please send her to me. I want her."

"And you may want her, sir. Rose isn't here."

"Not here? Where is she? I must see her."

"Rose is visitin' in the country, for her 'ealth."

"Her health? Is she ill?"

Mrs. Eldred executed a vast gesture that dismissed Rose.

"Where is she?" he repeated. "I'll go down and see her."

"You will not, sir. Her uncle wouldn't hear of it."

"But, by God! he shall hear of it."

He rang the bell with fury.

"It's no use your ringin', sir. Eldred's out."

"What have you done this for?"

"To get the child out of harm's way, sir. We're not blamin' you, sir.
We're blamin' 'er."

"Her? Her?"

"Properly speakin', we're not blamin' anybody. We're no great ones for
blamin', me and Eldred. But, if you'll excuse my sayin' so, sir, there's
a party would be glad of your rooms next month, a party takin' the 'ole
'ouse, and if you would be so good as to try and suit yourself
elsewhere----Though we don't want to put you to no inconvenience, sir."

It was extraordinary, but the more Mrs. Eldred's meaning was offensive,
the more her manner was polite. He reflected long afterwards that,
really, a lady, in such difficult circumstances, could hardly have
acquitted herself better.

"Oh, is that all? I'll go. But you'll give me Rose's address."

"You leave Rose alone, sir. Rose's address don't concern you."

"Rose's address concerns me a good deal more than my own, I can tell
you. So you'd better give it me."

"Look 'ere, sir. Are you actin' honest by that girl, or are you not?"

"What the devil do you mean by asking me that?"

His violence made her immense bulk tremble; but her soul stood firm.

"I dessay you mean no 'arm, sir. But we can't 'ave you playin' with 'er.
That's all."

"Playing with her? Playing?"

"Yes, playin'. Wot else is it? You know, sir, you ain't thinkin' of
marryin' 'er."

"That's just what I am thinking of."

"You 'aven't told _'er_ that."

"I _have_ told her. And, by Heaven! I'll do it."

"You mean that, sir?"

"Of course I mean it. What else should I mean?"

She sat meditating, taking it in slowly.

"You'll never make 'er 'appy, sir. Nor she you."

"She and I are the best judges of that."

"'Ave you spoke to 'er?"

"Yes. I told you I had."

"Not a word 'ave she said to _me_."

"Well, I dare say she wouldn't."

"Sir?"

"She wouldn't have me."

Mrs. Eldred's lower lip dropped, and she stared at Tanqueray.

"She wouldn't 'ave you? Then, depend upon it, that's wot made 'er ill."

"Ill?"

"Yes, ill, sir. Frettin', I suppose."

"Where's that address? Give it me at once."

"No, sir, I darsen't give it you. Eldred'd never forgive me."

"Haven't I told you I'm going to marry her?"

"I don't know, sir, as 'ow Rose'll marry _you_. When she's set, she's
set. And if you'll forgive my saying it, sir, Rose is a good girl, but
she's not in your class, sir, and it isn't suitable. And Rose, I dessay,
she's 'ad the sense to see it so."

"She's got to see it as I see it. That address?"

Mrs. Eldred rose heavily. She still trembled.

"You'd best speak to her uncle. 'E'll give it you if 'e approves. And if
'e doesn't 'e won't."

He stormed. But he was impotent before this monument of middle-class
integrity.

"When will Eldred be back?"

"We're expecting of 'im nine o'clock to-night."

"Mind you send him up as soon as he comes in."

"Very good, sir."

She paused.

"Wot am I to do with that 'at?"

He looked at her and at the hat. He laughed.

"You can leave the hat with me."

She moved slowly away. "Stop!" he cried; "have you got such a thing as a
band-box?"

"I think I might 'ave, sir; if I could lay my 'and on it."

"Lay your hand on it, then, and bring it to me."

She brought it. An enormous band-box, but brown, which was a good
colour. He lowered the hat into it with care and shut the lid on it,
reverently, as if he were committing some sacred emblem to its shrine.

He sat at his writing-table, tried to work and accomplished nothing. His
heart waited for the stroke of nine.

At nine there came to his summons the little, lean, brown man, Rose's
uncle. Eldred, who was a groom, was attired with excessive horsiness. He
refused to come further into the room than its threshold, where he stood
at attention, austerely servile, and respectfully despotic.

The interview in all points resembled Tanqueray's encounter with Mrs.
Eldred; except that the little groom, who knew his world, was even more
firmly persuaded that the gentleman was playing with his Rose.

"And we can't 'ave that, sir," said Eldred.

"You're not going to have it."

"No, sir, we ain't," reiterated Eldred. "We can't 'ave any such goin's
on 'ere."

"Look here--don't be an idiot--it isn't your business, you know, to
interfere."

"Not my business? When 'er father left 'er to me? I should like to know
what is my business," said Mr. Eldred hotly.

Tanqueray saw that he would have to be patient with him. "Yes, _I_ know.
_That's_ all right. Don't you see, Eldred, I'm going to marry her."

But his eagerness woke in Eldred a ghastlier doubt. Rose's uncle stood
firmer than ever, not turning his head, but casting at Tanqueray a
small, sidelong glance of suspicion.

"And _why_ do you want to marry her, sir? You tell me that."

Tanqueray saw.

"Because I want her. And it's the only way to get her. Do you need me to
tell you that?"

The man reddened. "I beg your pardon, sir."

"You beg _her_ pardon, you mean."

Eldred was silent. He had been hit hard, that time. Then he spoke.

"Are you certain sure of your feelin's, sir?"

"I'm certain of nothing in this world except my feelings."

"Because" (Eldred was slow but steady and indomitable in coming to his
point), "because we don't want 'er 'eart broke."

"_You_'re breaking it, you fool, every minute you stand there. Give me
her address."

In the end he gave it.

Down-stairs, in the kitchen, by the ashes of the raked-out fire, he
discussed the situation with his wife.

"Did you tell him plain," said Mrs. Eldred, "that we'd 'ave no
triflin'?"

"I did."

"Did you tell 'im that if 'e was not certain sure 'e wanted 'er, there
was a young man who did?"

Eldred said nothing to that question. He lit a pipe and began to smoke
it.

"Did you tell 'im," his wife persisted, "about Mr. Robinson?"

"No, I didn't, old girl."

"Well, if it 'ad bin me I should have said, 'Mr. Tanqueray, for all
you've fam'ly on your side and that, we're not so awful anxious for Rose
to marry you. We'd rather 'ave a young man without fam'ly, in a good
line o' business and steady risin'. And we know of such as would give
'is 'ead to 'ave 'er.' That's wot I should 'ave said."

"I dessay you would. I didn't say it, because I don't want 'im to 'ave
'er. That I don't. And if 'e was wantin' to cry off, and I was to have
named Mr. Robinson, that'd 'ave bin the very thing to 'ave stirred 'im
up to gettin' 'er. That's wot men _is_, missis, and women, too, all of
'em I've ever set eyes on. Dorgs wot'll leave the bone you give 'em, to
fight for the bone wot another dorg 'e's got. Wot do you say to that,
Mrs. Smoker, old girl?"

Mrs. Smoker, the Aberdeen, pricked up her ears and smiled, with her eyes
only, after the manner of her breed.

"Anyhow," said Mrs. Eldred, "you let 'im see as 'ow we wasn't any way
snatchin' at 'im?"

"I did, missis."




VI


Mr. Eldred, groom and dog fancier, profoundly musing upon human nature
and illuminated by his study of the lower animals, had hit upon a truth.
Once let him know that another man desired to take Rose away from him
and Mr. Tanqueray would be ten times more desirous to have her. What Mr.
Eldred did not see was the effect upon Mr. Tanqueray of Rose's taking
herself away, or he would not have connived at her departure. "Out o'
sight, out o' mind," said Mr. Eldred, arguing again from his experience
of the lower animals.

But with Tanqueray, as with all creatures of powerful imagination, to be
out of sight was to be perpetually in mind.

All night, in this region of the mind, Rose's image did battle with
Jane's image and overcame it.

It was not only that Jane's charm had no promise for his senses. She was
unfit in more ways than one. Jane was in love with him; yet her attitude
implied resistance rather than surrender. Rose's resistance, taking, as
it did, the form of flight, was her confession of his power. Jane held
her ground; she stood erect. Rose bowed before him like a flower shaken
by the wind. He loved Rose because she was small and sweet and
subservient. Jane troubled and tormented him. He revolted against the
tyranny of Jane.

Jane was not physically obtrusive, yet there were moments when her
presence in a room oppressed him. She had further that disconcerting
quality of all great personalities, the power to pursue and seize, a
power so oblivious, so pure from all intention or desire, that there was
no flattery in it for the pursued. It persisted when she was gone.
Neither time nor space removed her. He could not get away from Jane. If
he allowed himself to think of her he could not think of anything else.
But he judged that Rose's minute presence in his memory would not be
disturbing to his other thoughts.

His imagination could play tenderly round Rose. Jane's imagination
challenged his. It stood, brandishing its flaming sword before the gates
of any possible paradise. There was something in Jane that matched him,
and, matching, rang defiance to his supremacy. Jane plucked the laurel
and crowned herself. Rose bowed her pretty head and let him crown her.
Laurel crowns, crowns of glory, for Jane. The crown of roses for Rose.

He meant, of course, the wedding-wreath and the wedding-ring. His
conversation with the Eldreds had shown him that marriage had not
entered into their humble contemplations; also that if there was no
question of marriage, there could be no question of Rose.

He had known that in the beginning, he had known it from the
uncompromising little Rose herself. From the first flowering of his
passion until now, he had seen marriage as the sole means to its
inevitable end. Tanqueray had his faults, but it was not in him to bring
the creature he loved to suffering and dishonour. And the alternative,
in Rose's case, was not dishonour, but frustration, which meant
suffering for them both. He would have to give Rose up unless he married
her.

At the moment, and the moment's vision was enough for him, he saw no
reason why he should not marry her. He wanted to obtain her at once and
to keep her for ever. She was not a lady and she knew it; but she had a
gentleness, a fineness of the heart which was the secret of her
unpremeditated charm. Without it Rose might have been as pretty as she
pleased, she would not have pleased Tanqueray. He could withstand any
manifestly unspiritual appeal, restrained by his own fineness and an
invincible disdain. Therefore, when the divine folly fell upon him, he
was like a thing fresh from the last touch of the creator, every sense
in him unworn and delicate and alert.

And Rose had come to him when the madness of the quest was on him, a
madness so strong that it overcame his perception of her social lapses.
It was impossible to be unaware of some of them, of certain phrases, of
the sudden wild flight of her aspirates. But these things were entangled
with her adorable gestures, with the soft ways of her mouth, with her
look when she hung about him, nursing him; so that a sane judgment was
impossible.

It was palpable, too, that Rose was not intellectual, that she was not
even half-educated. But Tanqueray positively disliked the society of
intellectual, cultivated women; they were all insipid after Jane. After
Jane, he did not need intellectual companionship in his wife. He would
still have Jane. And when he was tired of Jane there would, no doubt, be
others; and when he was tired of all of them, there was himself.

What he did need in his wife was the obstinate, dumb devotion of a
creature that had no life apart from him; a creature so small that in
clinging it would hang no weight on his heart. And he had found it in
Rose.

Why should he not marry her?

She was now, he had learned, staying with her former mistress at Fleet,
in Hampshire.

The next morning he took a suitable train down to Fleet, and arrived,
carrying the band-box, at the door of the house where Rose was. He sat a
long time in the hall of the house with the band-box on his knees. He
did not mind waiting. People went in and out of the hall and looked at
him; and he did not care. He gloried in the society of the sacred
band-box. He enjoyed the spectacle of his own eccentricity.

At last he was shown into a little room where Rose came to him. She came
from behind, from the garden, through the French window. She was at his
side before he saw her. He felt her then, he felt her fear of him.

He turned. "Rose," he said, "I've brought you the moon in a band-box."

"Oh," said Rose, and her cry had a thick, sobbing vibration in it.

He put his arm on her shoulder and drew her out of sight and kissed her,
and she was not afraid of him any more.

"Rose," he said, "have you thought it over?"

"Yes, I have. Have you?"

"I've thought of nothing else."

"Sensible?"

"Oh, Lord, yes."

"You've thought of how I haven't a penny and never shall have?"

"Yes."

"And how I'm not clever, and how it isn't a bit as if I'd any head for
studyin' and that?"

"Yes, Rose."

"Have you thought of how I'm not a lady? Not what you'd call a lady?"

There was no answer to that, and so he kissed her.

"And how you'd be if you was to marry some one who was a lady? Have you
thought of that?"

"I have."

"Well then, it's this way. If you was a rich man I wouldn't marry you."
She paused.

"But you will, because I'm a poor one?"

"Yes."

"Thank God I'm poor."

He drew her to him and she yielded, not wholly, but with a shrinking of
her small body, and a soft, shy surrender of her lips.

She was thinking, "If he married a lady he'd have to spend ten times on
her what he need on me."

All she said was, "There are things I can do for you that a lady
couldn't."

"Oh--don't--don't!" he cried. That was the one way she hurt him.

"What are you going to do with me now?" said she.

"I'm going to take you for a walk. We can't stay here."

"Can you wait?"

"I have waited."

She ran away and stayed away for what seemed an interminable time. Then
somebody opened the door and handed Rose in. Somebody kissed her where
she stood in the doorway, and laughed softly, and shut the door upon
Rose and Tanqueray.

Rose stood there still. "Do you know me?" said she, and laughed.

Somebody had transformed her, had made her slip her stiff white gown and
dressed her in a muslin one with a belt that clipped her, showing her
pretty waist. Somebody had taught her how to wear a scarf about her
shoulders; and somebody had taken off that odious linen collar and bared
the white column of her neck.

"_She_ made me put it on," said Rose. "She said if I didn't, I couldn't
wear the hat."

Somebody, Rose's mistress, had been in Rose's secret. She knew and
understood his great poem of the Hat.

Rose took it out of the band-box and put it on. Impossible to say
whether he liked her better with it or without it. He thought without;
for she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it at the back.

"Do you like my hair?" said she.

"Why didn't you do it like that before?"

"I don't know. I wanted to. But I didn't."

"Why not?"

Rose hid her face. "I thought," said she, "you'd notice, and think--and
think I was after you."

No. He could never say that she had been after him, that she had laid a
lure. No huntress she. But she had found him, the hunted, run down and
sick in his dark den. And she had stooped there in the darkness, and
tended and comforted him.

They set out.

"_She_ said I was to tell you," said Rose, "to be sure and take me
through the pine-woods to the pond."

How well that lady knew the setting that would adorn his Rose; sunlight
and shadow that made her glide fawn-like among the tall stems of the
trees. Through the pine-woods he took her, his white wood-nymph, and
through the low lands covered with bog myrtle, fragrant under her feet.
Beyond the marsh they found a sunny hollow in the sand where the heath
touched the pond. The brushwood sheltered them.

Side by side they sat and took their fill of joy in gazing at each
other, absolutely dumb.

It was Tanqueray who broke that beautiful silence. He had obtained her.
He had had his way and must have it to the end. He loved her; and the
thing beyond all things that pleased him was to tease and torment the
creatures that he loved.

"Rose," he said, "do you think I'm good-looking?"

"No. Not what you call good-looking."

"How do you know what I call good-looking?"

"Well--_me_. Don't you?"

"You're a woman. Give me your idea of a really handsome man."

"Well--do you know Mr. Robinson?"

"No. I do not know Mr. Robinson."

"Yes, you do. He keeps the shop in the High Street where you get your
'ankychiefs and collars. You bought a collar off of him the other day.
He told me."

"By Jove, so I did. Of course I know Mr. Robinson. What about him?"

"Well--_he's_ what I call a _handsome_ man."

"Oh." He paused. "Would you love me more if I were as handsome as Mr.
Robinson?"

"No. Not a bit more. I couldn't. I'd love you just the same if you were
as ugly as poor Uncle. There, what more do you want?"

"What, indeed? Rose, how much have you seen of Mr. Robinson?"

"How much? Well--I see him every time I go into his shop. And every
Sunday evening when I go to church. And sometimes he comes and has
supper with us. 'E plays and 'e sings beautiful."

"The devil he does! Well, did he ever take you anywhere?"

"Once--he took me to Madame Tussaws; and once to the Colonial
Exhibition; and once----"

"You minx. That'll do. Has he ever given you anything?"

"He gave me Joey."

"I always knew there was something wrong about that dog."

"And last Christmas he gave me a scented sashy from the shop."

"Never--anything else?"

"Never anything else." She smiled subtly. "I wouldn't let 'im."

"Well, well. And I suppose you consider Mr. Robinson a better dressed
man than I am?"

"Yes, he was always a beautiful dresser. He makes it what you might call
'is hobby."

"Of course Mr. Robinson wants you to marry him?"

"Yes. Leastways he says so."

"And I suppose your uncle and aunt want you to marry him?"

"They were more for it than I was."

"Rose--he's got a bigger income than I have."

"He never told me what his income is."

"But you know?"

"I dare say Uncle does."

"Better dressed--decidedly more handsome----"

"Well--he _is_ that."

"A bigger income. Rose, do you want Mr. Robinson to be found dead in his
shop--horribly dead--among the collars and the handkerchiefs--spoiling
them, and--not--looking--handsome--any more?"

"Oh, Mr. Tanqueray!"

"Then don't talk about him."

He turned his face to hers. She put up her hands and drew his head down
into the hollow of her breasts that were warm with the sun on them.

"Rose," he said, "if you stroke my hair too much it'll come off, like
Joey's. Would you love me if my hair came off?"

She kissed his hair.

"When did you begin to love me, Rose?"

"I don't know. I think it must have been when you were ill."

"I see. When I was bowled over on my back and couldn't struggle. What
_made_ you love me?"

She was silent a long time, smiling softly to herself.

"I think it was because--because--because you were so kind to Joey."

"So you thought I would be kind to you?"

"I didn't--I didn't think at all. I just----"

"So did I," said Tanqueray.




VII


It had been arranged that Rose was to be married from the house of her
mistress, and that she was to remain there until her wedding-day. There
were so many things to be seen to. There was the baby. You couldn't,
Rose said, play fast and loose with _him_. Rose, at her own request, had
come to take care of the baby for a month, and she was not going back on
that, not if it was ever so. Then there were all the things that her
mistress, Rose said, was going to learn her. So many things, things she
was not to do, things she was not to say, things she was on no account
to wear. Rose, buying her trousseau, was not to be trusted alone for a
minute.

It had been put to Rose, very gently by her mistress, very gravely by
her master, whether she would really be happy if she married this
eccentric young gentleman with the band-box. Was it not possible that
she might be happier with somebody rather less eccentric? And Rose
replied that she knew her own mind; that she couldn't be happy at all
with anybody else, and that, if she could, she'd rather be unhappy with
Mr. Tanqueray, eccentricity, band-box and all. Whereas, if he was to be
unhappy with _her_, now----But, when it came to that, they hadn't the
heart to tell her that he might, and very probably would be.

If Rose knew her own mind, Tanqueray knew his. The possibility of being
unhappy with Rose (he had considered it) was dim compared with the
certainty that he was unhappy without her. To be deprived of the sight
and sound of her for six days in the week, to go down to Fleet, like the
butcher, on a Sunday, and find her rosy and bright-eyed with affection,
with a little passion that grew like his own with delay, that grew in
silence and in secret, making Rose, every Sunday, more admirably shy;
to be with her for two hours, and then to be torn from her by a train he
had to catch; all this kept Tanqueray in an excitement incompatible with
discreet reflection.

Rose would not name a day before the fourteenth of July, not if it was
ever so. He adored that little phrase of desperate negation. He was in a
state of mind to accept everything that Rose did and said as adorable.
Rose had strange audacities, strange embarrassments. Dumbness would come
upon Rose in moments which another woman, Jane for instance, would have
winged with happy words. She had a look that was anything but dumb, a
look of innocent tenderness, which in another woman, Jane again, would
not have been allowed to rest upon him so long. He loved that look. In
her very lapses, her gentle elision of the aitch, he found a foreign, an
infantile, a pathetic charm.

So the date of the wedding was fixed for the fourteenth.

It was now the twelfth, and Tanqueray had not yet announced his
engagement.

On the morning of the twelfth two letters came which made him aware of
this omission. One was from young Arnott Nicholson, who wanted to know
when, if ever, he was coming out to see him. The other was from Jane's
little friend, Laura Gunning, reminding him that the twelfth was Jane's
birthday.

He had forgotten.

Yet there it stood in his memorandum-book, entered three months ago,
lest by any possibility he should forget.

How, in the future, was he going to manage about birthdays? For,
whenever any of the three had a birthday, they all celebrated it
together. Last time it had been Tanqueray's birthday, and they had made
a day of it, winding up with supper in little Laura's rooms. Such a
funny, innocent supper that began with maccaroni, and ended, he
remembered, with bread and jam. Before that, it had been Laura's
birthday, and Tanqueray had taken them all to the play. But on Jane's
birthday (and on other days, _their_ days) it was their custom to take
the train into the country, to tramp the great white roads, to loiter in
the fields, to climb the hillsides and lie there, prone, with slackened
limbs, utterly content with the world, with each other and themselves.
As he thought of those days, their days, he had a sudden vision of his
marriage-day as a dividing line, sundering him from them, their
interests and their activities. He could not think of Rose as making one
of that company.

Laura now inquired innocently what his plans were for that day. Would he
meet them (she meant, would he meet her and Jane Holland) at Marylebone,
by the entrance, at eleven o'clock, and go with them somewhere into the
country?

Would he? He thought about it for five minutes, and decided that on the
whole he would rather go than not. He was restless in these days before
his wedding. He could not stand the solitude of this house where Rose
had been and was not. And he wanted to see Jane Holland again and make
it right with her. He was aware that in many ways he had made it wrong.

He would have to tell her. He would have to tell Nicholson. And
Nicholson, why, of course, Nicholson would have to see him through. He
must go to Nicholson at once.

Nicholson lived at Wendover. There was a train from Marylebone about
eleven. It was possible to combine a festival for Jane with a descent
upon Nicky.

By the entrance, at eleven, Laura Gunning waited for him, punctually
observant of the hour. Beyond, on the pavement before the station, he
saw the tall figure of another woman. It was Nina Lempriere. She was not
waiting--Nina never waited--but striding impatiently up and down. He
would have to reckon, then, with Nina Lempriere, too. He was glad that
Jane was with her.

Little Laura, holding herself very straight, greeted him with her funny
smile, a smile that was hardly more than a tremor of her white lips.
Laura Gunning, at twenty-seven, had still in some of her moods the
manner of a child. She was now like a seven-year-old made shy and
serious by profound excitement. She was a very small woman and she had a
small face, with diminutive features in excessively low relief, a face
shadowless as a child's. Everything about Laura Gunning was small and
finished with an innocent perfection. She had a small and charming
talent for short stories, little novels, perfect within the limits of
their kind.

Tanqueray laid before her his Wendover scheme. Laura said he must ask
Jane. It was Jane's birthday. Jane, being asked, said, No, she didn't
mind where they went, provided they went somewhere. She supposed there
was a gate they could sit on, while Tanqueray called on Nicky. Tanqueray
said he thought he saw Nicky letting her sit on a gate. Considering that
Nicky had been pestering him for the last six months (he had) to bring
her out to have tea with him on one of their days.

"And we've never been," said he.

Jane let it pass. But Nina Lempriere, as Tanqueray well knew, had a
devil in her. Nina's eyes had the trick of ignoring your position in the
space they traversed, which made it the more disconcerting when they
came back and fixed you with their curious, hooded stare. They were
staring at Tanqueray now.

"Where have you been?" said she. "We haven't heard of you for ages."

"I've been ill."

Jane looked at him and said nothing.

"Ill? And you never told us?" said Nina.

"I was all right. I was well looked after."

"Who looked after you?"

He did not answer her. For in that instant there rose before him the
image of Rose Eldred, tender and desirable, and it kept him dumb.

Nina, whose devil was nothing if not persistent, repeated her question.
He divined already in Nina a secret, subtle hostility.

"Oh," he said abruptly. "I looked after myself."

Jane stared intently at a notice of the departure and arrival of trains.

Laura, aware of embarrassment somewhere, began to talk to him
light-heartedly, in her fashion, and the moment passed.

In the train, going down to Wendover, Laura talked to Jane. Nina did not
talk. Her queer eyes, when they looked at him, had a light in them of
ironic devilry and suspicion. They left him speculating on the extent
to which he was cutting himself off. This journey down to Wendover was a
stage in the process. He was going down to tell Nicholson, to ask
Nicholson to see him through.

How would Jane take it? How would Nina? How would Laura? He had said to
himself, light-heartedly, that his marriage would make no difference,
that he should retain them, all three, as an intellectual seraglio.
Would this, after all, be possible? When they heard that he, George
Tanqueray, was marrying a servant in a lodging-house?

Aware now, vividly aware, of the thing he was doing, he asked himself
why, if he was not in love with Jane, he had not been in love with Nina?
Nina had shown signs. Yes, very unmistakably she had shown signs. He
could recall a time when there had lurked a betraying tenderness about
her ironic mouth; when her queer eyes, as they looked at him, took on a
certain softness and surrender. It had not touched him. To his mind
there had always been something a little murky about Nina. It was the
fault, no doubt, of her complexion. Not but what Nina had a certain
beauty, a tempestuous, haggard, Roman eagle kind of beauty. She looked
the thing she was, a creature of high courage and prodigious energy.
Besides, she had a devil. Without it, he doubted whether even her genius
(he acknowledged, a little grudgingly, her genius) could have done all
it did.

It had entered into Tanqueray's head (though not his heart) to be in
love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to
be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he
wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not
conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to say,
of trying to marry her. Nina had the thing called temperament, more
temperament and murkier than he altogether cared for; but, as for
marrying, you might as well try to marry some bird of storm on the wing,
or a flash of lightning on its career through heaven. Nina--career and
all--was pre-eminently unfit.

She had shown, more than once, this ironic antagonism, as if she knew
what he thought of her, and owed him a grudge.

If not Nina, why not Laura? She was small and she was pretty and she was
pathetic, and he liked women to be so. Why was it that with all her
feminine smallness and prettiness and pathos he had never cared for her?

They were talking.

"Tired, Laura?" Jane asked.

"Only sleepy. Papa had another dream last night."

They laughed. So did Laura, though her tragedy was there, the tragedy
which had given her that indomitable face.

Laura lived under conditions which would have driven Tanqueray mad. She
had a father; she who, as Jane said, could least of all of them afford a
father. Her father had had a sunstroke, and it had made him dream
dreams. He would get up a dozen times in the night and wander in and out
of Laura's bedroom, and sit heavily on her bed and tell her his dreams,
which terrified Laura.

"It wasn't funny, this time," said she. "It was one of his horrid ones."

Nobody laughed then. They were dumb with the pity and horror of it.
Laura's father, when he was awake, was the most innocent, most
uninspired, most uncreative of old gentlemen; but in his dreams he had a
perfect genius for the macabre. The dreams had been going on for about a
year, and they were making Laura ill. Tanqueray knew it, and it made him
sad.

That was why he had not cared to care for Laura.

Yet little Laura, very prettily, very innocently, with an entire
unconsciousness, had let him see where her heart was. And as prettily
and innocently and unconsciously as he could, he had let her see that
her heart was no concern of his, any more than Nina's.

And she had not cherished any resentment, she had not owed him any
grudge. She had withdrawn herself, still prettily, still innocently, so
that she seemed, with an absurd prettiness, to be making room for Jane.

He had even a vague recollection of himself as acquiescing in her
withdrawal, on those grounds. It was almost as if there had been an
understanding between him and Laura, between Jane and Laura, between
him and Jane. They had behaved perfectly, all three. What made their
perfection was that in all these withdrawals, acquiescences and
understandings not one of them had given any outward sign. They had kept
their spoken compact. They had left each other free.

As for his mere marriage, he was certain with all of them to be
understood. It was their business, as they had so often told each other,
to understand. But he was not sure that he wanted to be understood with
the lucidity, the depth, the prodigious thoroughness of which they were
capable.

He said to himself, "The blood of these women is in their brains." That
was precisely what he had against them.




VIII


It was a perfect day, Jane's birthday, like a young June day, a day of
the sun, of white distances and vivid foregrounds.

Wendover Hill looked over Arnott Nicholson's white house and over his
green garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly
quiet, a perfect peace. It was strange and sad, said Tanqueray, that a
quiet and peace like that should be given to Nicky--to write poems in.
Jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from
anything so charming, so perfect in its way as Nicky.

"Do you think," said she, as they crowded on his doorstep, "do you think
he'll be at home?"

"Rather. We shall find him in his library, among his books and his
busts, seething in a froth of abominable manuscripts, and feeling
himself immortal."

Arnott Nicholson was at home, and he was in his library, with his books
and his busts, and with Gisborne's great portrait of Jane Holland (the
original) above his chimney-piece. He was, as Tanqueray had predicted,
seething in his froth. Their names came to him there--Miss Holland and
Mr. Tanqueray. In a moment Nicky was out of his library and into his
drawing-room.

He was a singularly attractive person, slender, distinguished, highly
finished in black and white. He was dressed, not like a candidate for
immortality, but in the pink of contemporary perfection.

He was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. And delighted, of course, he
said, to see Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. He insisted on their all
staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come,
a day. He ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. He brought peaches and
chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things
mortal and savouring of mortality.

He went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one
aware that he entertained immortal guests. He couldn't get over it, he
said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance,
out of their blue. Heavens! Supposing he had been out! He stood there
glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room.

It was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished
furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great
bowls of roses everywhere. The whole house had a strange feminine
atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had passed over it. Yet it
was Nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts
feminine.

Nicky was looking at Jane as she stooped over the roses. "Do you know,"
he said, "that you've come home? Come and see yourself."

He led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its
high place.

"You bought it?" said she.

"Rather. Gisborne painted it for me."

"Oh, Nicky!"

"It's your genius brooding over mine--I mean over me."

He looked at her again. When he looked at you Nicky's perfect clothes,
his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black
moustache, Nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his
enormous, prominent black eyes.

"I put you there," he said, "to inspire me."

Nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked
about his inspiration.

"Do I?"

She did. They had caught him in the high act of creation. He'd been at
it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so
furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have
destroyed himself. His head was burning now.

"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you
thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.

His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had
so strongly the literary taint.

Nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them
anywhere. Only, as it happened, he had to be at home. He was expecting
Miss Bickersteth. They knew Miss Bickersteth?

They knew her. Nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of
cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and Miss Bickersteth was
eminently right.

The lady, he said, might be upon them any minute.

"In that case," said Tanqueray, "we'll clear out."

"_You_ clear out? But you're the very people he wants to see."

"He?"

Hugh Brodrick. Miss Bickersteth was bringing Hugh Brodrick.

They smiled. Miss Bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being
brought.

Brodrick was the right man to bring. He implored them to stay and meet
Brodrick.

"Who _is_ Brodrick?"

Brodrick, said Nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be
clung to and never to be let go. Brodrick was on the "Morning
Telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. And the Jews
were at the back of Brodrick. So much so that he was starting a monthly
magazine--for the work of the great authors only. That was his,
Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through.
Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the
advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He
could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the
back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave
the popular magazines behind him.

"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.

"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"

"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a
gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."

"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.

"And he wants--he told me--to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr.
Tanqueray. And he's sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You'll
all be in it. It's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all
days."

In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be
seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.

A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It
was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring
noises in it.

"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."

And he went out.

He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr.
Hugh Brodrick.

Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with
his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of
Tanqueray, of Brodrick.

Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso
inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but
regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who
grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull
sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from
the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes.
They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze,
which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his
interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her
in her corner.

This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky,
as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of
introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate.
It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.

Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet
what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his
positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her,
pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor
of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any
business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his
slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the
very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an
approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.

"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.

"Not very often."

There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a
voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.

"Only that it's an easy run down from Marylebone."

"It is--very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation
with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.

It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He
was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes.
For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them,
he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at
Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering
quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky's house.

Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on
the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to
Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As
a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had
sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious
teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an
incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering,
full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and
genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the
dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth.
There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no
ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the
spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely,
with a look of having grown there.

Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by
trying to make her talk about Shelley (she had edited him). He hoped
that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. To Nicky the
transition was a natural one.

But Miss Bickersteth did not want to talk about Shelley. Shelley, she
declared irreverently, was shop. She wanted to talk about people whom
they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say
anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet.
And she had just seen Jane and Tanqueray going out together through the
long window on to the lawn.

"I suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now."

"Now?" repeated poor Nicky vaguely.

"Now that one of them has got an income."

"I didn't think he was a marrying man."

"No. And you wouldn't think, would you, she was a marrying woman?"

"I--I don't know. I haven't thought about it. He _said_ he wasn't going
to marry."

"Oh." Two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the
pinkness of Miss Bickersteth's face.

"It's got as far as that, has it? That shows he's been thinking of it."

"I should have thought it showed he wasn't."

Miss Bickersteth's mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its
outline and its colouring. Her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of
her face.

"How have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? Do you
always go about with your head among the stars?"

"My head----?" He felt it. It was going round and round.

"Yes. Is a poet not supposed ever to see anything under his exquisite
nose?"

"I am not," said Nicky solemnly, "always a poet. And when a person tells
me he isn't going to do a thing, I naturally think he isn't."

"And I naturally think he is. Whatever you think about George Tanqueray,
_he's_ sure to do the other thing."

"Come--if you can calculate on that."

"You can't calculate on anything. Least of all with George Tanqueray.
Except that he'll never achieve anything that isn't a masterpiece. If
it's a masterpiece of folly."

"Mind you," she added, "I don't say he will marry Jane Holland, and I
don't say it would be a masterpiece of folly if he did."

"What do you say?"

"That if he ever cares for any woman enough to marry her, it will be
Jane."

"I see," said Nicky, after some reflection. "You think he's that sort?"

"I think he's a genius. What more do you want?"

"Oh, _I_ don't want anything more," said Nicky, plunging head-first into
a desperate ambiguity. He emerged. "What I mean is, when we've got Him,
and when we've got Her--creators----" He paused before the immensity of
his vision of Them. "What business have we----"

"To go putting one and one together so as to make two?"

"Well--it doesn't seem quite reverent."

"You think them gods, then, your creators?"

"I think I--worship them."

"Ah, Mr. Nicholson, _you're_ adorable. And I'm atrocious."

"I believe," said Nicky, "tea is in the garden."

"Let us go into the garden," said Miss Bickersteth.

And they went.

Tea was served in a green recess shut in from the lawn by high yew
hedges. Nicky at his tea-table was more charming than ever, surrounded
by old silver and fine linen, making tea delicately, and pouring it into
fragile cups and offering it, doing everything with an almost feminine
dexterity and grace.

After tea the group scattered and rearranged itself. In Nicky's perfect
garden, a garden of smooth grass plots and clipped yew-trees, of lupins
and larkspurs, of roses that would have been riotous but for the
restraining spirit of the place; in a green alley between lawn and
orchard, Mr. Hugh Brodrick found himself with Miss Holland, and alone.
Very quietly, very persistently, with eyes intent, he had watched for
and secured this moment.

"You don't know," he was saying, "how I've wanted to meet you, and how
hard I've worked for it."

"Was it so hard?"

"Hard isn't the word for it. If you knew the things I've done----" He
spoke in his low, even voice, saying eager and impulsive things without
a sign of eagerness or impulse.

"What things?"

"Mean things, base things. Going on my knees to people I didn't know,
grovelling for an introduction."

"I'm sorry. It sounds awful."

"It was. I've been on the point of meeting you a score of times, and
there's always been some horrid fatality. Either you'd gone when I
arrived, or I had to go before you arrived. I believe I've seen
you--once."

"I don't remember."

"At Miss Bickersteth's. You were coming out as I was going in." He
looked at his watch. "And _now_ I ought to be catching a train."

"Don't catch it."

"I shan't. For I've got to tell you how much I admire your work. I'm not
going to ask how you do it, for I don't suppose you know yourself."

"I don't."

"I'm not even going to ask myself. I simply accept the miracle."

"If it's miracles you want, look at George Tanqueray."

He said nothing. And now she thought of it, he had not looked at George
Tanqueray. He had looked at nobody but her. It was the look of a man who
had never known a moment's uncertainty as to the thing he wanted. It was
a look that stuck.

"Why aren't you at his feet?" she said.

"Because I'm not drawn--to my knees--by brutal strength and cold,
diabolical lucidity."

"Oh," she cried, "you haven't read him."

"I've read all of him. And I prefer you."

"Me? You've spoilt it all. If you can't admire him, what is the use of
your admiring me?"

"I see. You don't want me to admire you."

He said it with no emphasis, no emotion, as if he were indifferent as to
what she wanted.

"No. I don't think I do."

"You see," he said, "you have a heart."

"Oh, if people would only leave my heart alone!"

"And Tanqueray, I believe, has a devil."

She turned on him.

"Give me George Tanqueray's devil!" She paused, considering him. "Why do
you talk about my heart?"

[Illustration: "Why do you talk about my heart?"]

"Because, if I may say so, it's what I like most in you."

"Anybody can like _that_."

"Can they?"

"Yes. For ten people who care for me there isn't one capable of caring
for George Tanqueray."

"How very unfortunate for him."

"Unfortunate for me, you mean."

He smiled. He was not in the least offended. It was as if her perverse
shafts never penetrated his superb solidity.

And yet he was not obtuse, not insensitive. He might fall, she judged,
through pride, but not through vanity.

"I admit," said he, "that he is our greatest living novelist."

"Then," said she, "you are forgiven."

"And I may continue to adore your tenderness?"

"You may adore anything--after that admission."

He smiled again, like one satisfied, appeased.

"What," he said presently, "is Miss Lempriere's work like? Has she
anything of your breadth, your solidity, your fire?"

"There's more fire in Nina Lempriere's little finger than in my whole
body."

Brodrick took out his pocket-book and made a note of Nina.

"And the little lady? What does she do?"

"Little things. Charming, delicious, funny, pathetic things. Everything
she does is like herself."

"I must put her down too." And he made another note of Laura.

They had turned on to the lawn. Their host was visible, gathering great
bunches of roses for his guests.

"What a lovable person he is," said Brodrick.

"Isn't he?" said Jane.

They faced the house, the little house roofed with moss, walled with
roses, where, thought Jane, poor Nicky nested like the nightingale he
wasn't and would never be.

"I wonder," said Brodrick, "how he gets the perfection, the peace, the
finish of it, the little feminine touches, the flowers on the table----"

"Yes, Mr. Nicholson and his house always look as if they were expecting
a lady."

"But," said Brodrick, "it's so pathetic, for the lady never comes."

"Perhaps if she did it wouldn't be so peaceful."

"Perhaps. But it must be sad for him--living alone like this."

"I don't know. I live alone and I'm not sad."

"You? You live alone?"

"Of course I do. So does Mr. Tanqueray."

"Tanqueray. He's a man, and it doesn't matter. But you, a woman----It's
horrible."

He was almost animated.

"There's your friend, Miss Bickersteth. She lives alone."

"Miss Bickersteth--is Miss Bickersteth."

"There's Nina Lempriere."

"The fiery lady?" He paused, meditating. "Why do her people let her?"

"She hasn't got any. Her people are all dead."

"How awful. And your small friend, Miss Gunning? Don't say she lives
alone, too."

"She doesn't. She lives with her father. He's worse than a family----"

"Worse than a----?" He stared aghast.

"Worse than a family of seven children."

"And that's a misfortune, is it?" He frowned.

"Yes, when you have to keep it--on nothing but what you earn by writing,
and when it leaves you neither time nor space to write in."

"I see. She oughtn't to have to do it."

"But she has, and it's killing her. She'd be better if she lived alone."

"Well--I don't know anything about Miss Gunning. But for you----"

"You don't know anything about me."

"I do. I've seen you. And I stick to it. It's horrible."

"What's horrible?" said Miss Bickersteth, as they approached.

"Ask Mr. Brodrick."

But Brodrick, thus appealed to, drifted away towards Nicholson,
murmuring something about that train he had to catch.

"What have you done to agitate him?" said Miss Bickersteth. "You didn't
throw cold water on his magazine, did you?"

"I shouldn't have known he had a magazine."

"What? Didn't he mention it?"

"Not to me."

"Then something _is_ the matter with him." She added, after a thoughtful
pause, "What did you think of him?"

"There's no doubt he's a very amiable, benevolent man. The sort of man
who wants everybody to marry because he's married himself."

"But he isn't married."

"Well, he looks it. He looks as if he'd never been anything _but_
married all his life."

"Anyhow," said Miss Bickersteth, "that's safe. Safer than not looking
married when you are."

"Oh, he's safe enough," said Jane. As she spoke she was aware of
Tanqueray standing at her side.




IX


The day was over, and they were going back.

Their host insisted on accompanying them to the station. They had given
him a day, and every moment of it, he declared solemnly, was precious.

They could hardly have spent it better than with Nicky in his perfect
house, his perfect garden. And Nicky had been charming, with his humble
ardour, his passion for a perfection that was not his.

The day, Miss Holland intimated, was his, Nicky's present, rather than
theirs. He glowed. It had been glorious, anyhow, a perfect day. A day,
Nicky said, that made him feel immortal.

He looked at Jane Holland and George Tanqueray, and they tried not to
smile. Jane would have died rather than have hurt Nicky's feelings. It
was not in her to spoil his perfect day. All the same, it had been their
secret jest that Nicky _was_ immortal. He would never end, never by any
possibility disappear. As he stuck now, he always would stick. He was
going with them to the station.

Sensitive to the least quiver of a lip, the young man's mortal part was
stung with an exquisite sense of the becoming.

"If I feel it," said he, "what must _you_ feel?"

"Oh, we!" they cried, and broke loose from his solemn and detaining
eyes.

They walked on ahead, and Nicholson was left behind with Laura Gunning
and Nina Lempriere. He consented, patiently and politely, to be thus
outstripped. After all, the marvellous thing was that he should find
himself on that road at all with Them. After all, he had had an hour
alone with Him, in his garden, and five-and-twenty minutes by his watch
with Her. It was enough if he could keep his divinities in sight,
following the flutter of Miss Holland's veil.

Besides, she had asked him to talk to Nina and look after Laura. She was
always asking him to be an angel, and look after somebody. Being an
angel seemed somehow his doom. But he was sorry for Laura. They said she
had cared for Tanqueray; and he could well believe it. He could believe
in any woman caring for Him. He wondered how it had left her. A little
defiant, he thought, but with a quiet, clear-eyed virginity. Determined,
too. Nicholson had never seen so large an expression of determination on
so small a face.

He always liked talking to Laura; but he shrank inexpressibly from
approaching Nina, the woman with unquiet eyes and nervous gestures, and
a walk that suggested the sweep of a winged thing to its end. A glance
at Nina told him that wherever she was she could look after herself.

Morose, fearlessly disarrayed, and with it all a trifle haggard and
forlorn, Nina Lempriere had the air of not belonging to them. She
paused, she loitered, she swept tempestuously ahead, but none of her
movements had the slightest reference to her companions. From time to
time he glanced uncomfortably at Nina.

"Leave her," said Laura, "to herself."

"Do you think," he said, "she minds being left?"

"Not she. She likes it. You don't suppose she's thinking of _us_?"

"Dear me, no; but one likes to be polite."

"She'd so much rather you were sincere."

"I say, mayn't I be both?"

"Oh yes, but you couldn't always be with Nina. She makes you feel
sometimes as if it was no use your existing."

"Do you think," he said, "she'll stand beside Jane Holland?"

"No. She may go farther."

"Go farther? How?"

"She's got a better chance."

"A better chance? I shouldn't have backed her chance against Miss
Holland's."

"It _is_ better. She doesn't get so mixed up with people. If she _were_
to----"

He waited.

"She'd go with a rush, in one piece, and either die or come out of it
all right. Whereas Jane----"

He waited breathlessly.

"Jane would be torn to tatters, inch by inch."

Nicholson felt a curious constriction across his chest. His throat dried
as he spoke again.

"What do you think would tear her most?"

"Oh, if she married."

"I thought you meant that."

"The thing is," said Laura, "not to marry." She said it meditatively and
without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had
been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept
her view.

He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same
thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He,
Tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they
all took. Not to marry.

He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to
chastity and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How
wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the
things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of
course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary
priest and priestesses of a god diviner than desire. And She--he saw her
more virgin, more perfect than they all.

"You think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if Miss
Holland--married it would injure her career?"

"Injure it? There wouldn't be any career left to injure."

Was it really so? He recorded, silently, his own determination to
remember that. It had for him, also, the consecration of a vow.

A thought struck him. Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him
and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a
preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the
situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity,
renouncing Jane.

Another thought struck him. It struck him hard, with the shock almost of
blasphemy. It broke into speech.

"Not," he said, "if she were to marry Him?"

Laura was silent, and he wondered.

Why not? After all it was natural. She matched him. The thing was
inevitable, and it was fitting. So supremely fitting was it that he
could not very well complain. He could give her up to George Tanqueray.




X


Jane Holland and Tanqueray had left the others some considerable way
behind. It was possible, they agreed, to have too much of Nicky, though
he did adore them.

The wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop
down into Wendover. A white road, between grass borders and hedgerows,
their green powdered white with the dust of it. Over all, the pallor of
the first white hour of twilight.

For a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight
and the road were theirs.

The two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging
challenge to fatigue. He, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step
of some fine, untamed animal. She, at his side, kept the wild pace he
set with a smooth motion of her own. She carried, high and
processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host's garden, wild
parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. As she
went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. A light wind
woke on the hill and played with her. Her long veil, grey-blue and
transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted
about her, now clinging to her neck, her breasts, now fluttering itself
free.

He looked at her, and thought that if Gisborne, R.A., hadn't been an
idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. Protected
by the charm of Rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of
Jane's. He could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a
woman, she had points. He could afford, being extremely happy himself,
to make Jane happy too.

So sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that Jane
was utterly defenceless and exposed.

"Yes," he said, "it's been a day."

"Hasn't it?"

She saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. The coming joy, the joy of
his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he
looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her
again.

"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"

"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been
indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."

It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her
about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been
manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she
was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse
than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite
feeling of treachery toward Jane.

Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that
they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in?

"It was you, Jane, who did it."

"No, George; it was you. You introduced him."

He owned it. "I did it because I hoped you'd fall in love with him."

She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her.

"That," said she, "would have been very bad for Nicky."

"Yes. But it would have been very good for you."

She had her moment of torment; then she recovered.

"I thought," said she, "that was the one thing I was not to do."

"You're not to do it seriously. But you couldn't fall in love with Nicky
seriously. Could you? Could anybody?"

"Why are you so unkind to Nicky?"

"Because he's so ungovernably a man of letters."

"He isn't. He only thinks he is."

"He thinks he's Shelley, because his father's a squire."

"That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think
anything so deliciously absurd. Don't you wish _you_ could feel like
that!"

He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame.

"To feel myself an immortal, a blessed god!"

They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all
divine.

"Such a tragic little god," said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little
god without a single apostle or a prophet--nobody," she wailed, "to
spread the knowledge of him."

"I say--_we_'ll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown
God."

"He won't like that, our calling him unknown."

"Let's call him the Unapparent--the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped."

"In one aspect. In another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric----"

"An ode to immortality on legs----"

"Nicky hasn't any legs. He's a breath--a perpetual aspiration."

"Oh, at aspiring he beats Shelley into apoplexy."

"He stands for the imperishable illusion----"

"The stupendous hope----"

"And, after all, he adores _you_."

"And nobody else does," said Tanqueray.

"That's Nicky's achievement. He _does_ see what you are. It's his little
claim to immortality. Just think, George, when Nicky dies and goes to
heaven he'll turn up at the gates of the poets' paradise, and they'll
let him in on the strength of that. The angel of the singing stars will
come up to him and say, 'Nicky, you sing abominably, but you can see.
You saw George Tanqueray when nobody else could. Your sonnets and your
ballads are forgiven you; and we've got a nice place for you, Nicky,
near Keats and Shelley.' Because it wouldn't be heaven for Nicky if he
wasn't near them."

"How about _them_, though?"

"Oh, up in heaven you won't see anything of Nicky except his heart."

"I suppose he'll be stuck somewhere near you, too. It won't be heaven
for him if he isn't. The first thing he'll ask is, 'Where's Jane?'"

"And then they'll break it to him very gently--'Jane's in the other
place, Nicky, where Mr. Tanqueray is. We had to send her down, because
if she wasn't there it wouldn't be hell for Mr. Tanqueray.'"

"But why am _I_ down there?"

"Because you didn't see what Nicky was."

"If you don't take care, Jinny, he'll 'have' you like the rest. You're
laying up sorrow for yourself in the day when Nicky publishes his
poems."

"It's you he'll turn to."

"No. I'm not celebrated," said he grimly. "There, do you see the full
horror of it?"

"I do," she moaned.

Tanqueray's devil came back to him.

"Do you think he'll fall in love with Laura?"

"No, I don't." She said it coolly, though his gaze was upon her, and
they were both of them aware of Nicky's high infatuation.

"Why not?" he said lightly.

"Because Nicky'll never be in love with any woman as she is; and nobody
could be in love with Laura as she isn't."

She faced him in her courage. He might take it, if he liked, that she
knew Nicky was in love with her as she was not; that she knew Tanqueray
would never, like Nicky, see her as she was not, to be in love with
that.

"Oh, you're too subtle," he said. But he understood her subtlety.

He must tell her about Rose. Before the others could come up with them
he must tell her. And then he must tell Nicky.

"Jane," he said, "will you forgive me for never coming to see you? I
simply couldn't come."

"I know, George, I know."

"You don't. You don't know what I felt like."

"Perhaps not. And yet, I think, you might----"

But what she thought he might have done she would not tell him.

"At any rate," said he, "you'll let me come and see you now? Often; I
want to come often."

He meant to tell her that his marriage was to make no difference.

"Come as often as you want. Come as often as you used to."

"Was it so very often?"

"Not too often."

"I say, those were glorious times we had. We'll have them again, Jinny.
There are things we've got to talk about. Things we've got to do. Why,
we're hardly beginning."

"Do you remember saying, 'When you've made yourself an absolutely clear
medium, then you can begin'?"

"I remember."

He was content now to join her in singing the duet of remembrance.

She dismissed herself. "What have _you_ been doing?"

"Not much. It looks as if I couldn't do things without you."

A look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed.

"That isn't so, George. There never was anybody less dependent on other
people. That's why nothing has ever stopped you. Nothing ever will.
Whereas--you're right about me. Anything might stop me."

"Could _I_ stop you?"

Not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question,
whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete
his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his
power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her.

"You?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate
vibration. He had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung
from Jane.

Her eyes met his. Steady they were and deep, under their level brows;
but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. Something in her
startled him with its intensity.

Her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about
Rose. It was not the moment.

"I didn't know she was like that," he thought.

No, he had never known until now what Jane was; never seen until now
that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more,
to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm.

And, with the charm of Rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he
had known, it would have made any difference. All he knew or cared to
know was that he was going to marry Rose the day after to-morrow.

He would have to ask Nicky to let him go back with him and stay the
night. Then he could tell him. And he could get out of telling Jane. He
liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. Still
less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her
bleed.

He must get away from Jane.




XI


On the morning after Wendover Jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with
dreams. Last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept.
It passed into her dreams, and joy woke her.

She sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught,
agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe.

She went to it and stood there, looking at herself. For the last three
months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. Sometimes she
had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. Every day the
woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more
dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't
stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's
inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she
put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that
had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her
Genius.

And now she did not look like _that_ in the very least. She looked, to
her amazement, like any other woman.

Nobody had ever said that Jane was handsome. She hadn't one straight
feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. She wasn't pretty,
either. There was something about her too large and dominating for that.
She had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its
effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some
ugliness subdued. It was part of her queerness that she had the square
brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck
that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity
some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer
still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might
draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for
the blood it took it had given her back fire.

Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the
glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had
seen. She had felt herself cruelly despoiled, disinherited of the
splendours and powers of her sex. And here she was, looking, as she
modestly put it, like any other woman. Any one of the unknown multitude
whom lately, in prophetic agony, she had seen surrounding Tanqueray;
women dowered, not with the disastrous gift of genius, but with the
secret charm and wonder of mere womanhood. One of these (she had always
reckoned with the possibility), one of these conceivably might at any
moment, and inevitably would when her moment came, secure and conquer
Tanqueray. She had been afraid, even in vision, to measure her power
with theirs.

But now, standing there in the long nightgown that made her so straight
and tall, with arms raised, holding up the thick mass of her hair, her
body bent a little backwards from the waist, showing it for the slender
and supple thing it was, seeing herself so incredibly feminine and so
alive, she defied any one to tell the difference. If any difference
there were it was not in her body, neither was it in her face. That was
the face which had looked at Tanqueray last night; the face which he had
called up to meet that strange excitement and that tenderness of his.
Her body was the body of a woman created in a day and a night by joy for
its own wooing.

This glorious person was a marvel to itself. It was so incomprehensibly,
so superlatively happy. Its eyes, its mouth, its hands and feet were
happy. It was happy inside and out and all over. It had developed a
perfectly preposterous capacity for enjoyment. It found pleasure in
bathing itself, in dressing itself, in brushing its hair. And its very
hair, when it had done with it, looked happy.

It was at its happiest at ten o'clock, when Jane sat down to write a
letter to Tanqueray. The letter had to be written. For yesterday Nina
Lempriere had asked her to supper in her rooms on Sunday, and she was to
bring George Tanqueray. If, said Nina, she could get him.

Sunday was the seventeenth. This was Wednesday, the thirteenth. She
would hear from Tanqueray to-night or to-morrow at the latest. And there
would be only four days to get through till Sunday.

To-night and to-morrow went, and Tanqueray did not write. Jane's heart
began to ache with an intolerable anxiety.

It was on Saturday night that the letter came.

     "Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper.
     I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday.

     "Yrs., G. T.

     "P.S.--Nicky saw me through."

Not a word about his wife.

At first the omission did not strike her as significant. It was so like
Tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the
secret soul of it himself. He must have wondered how she would take it.

She took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling
her that Tanqueray was dead. She took it, as she would have taken the
stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. She faced, as
it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy
of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence
constrained her to all the observances of decency.

She crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed
that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made
her suffer. Then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined
it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the
place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible.

Verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. She was
aware of the existence of the woman. There had been a woman all the
time. But she couldn't realize her. She only knew that she meant
finality, separation.

An hour passed. She went to bed. Her footsteps and her movements in
undressing were hushed and slow. She was still like some one who knows
that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the
next room. Stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide
herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there
being only a wall between the living and the dead.

The best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie
awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till
they hammered her to stupefaction. Unfortunately, towards morning she
fell into a sound sleep.

She woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a
brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things
which last night she had overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined
her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she
portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an
unbearable illumination) Jane saw transparently what _she_ had been to
Tanqueray. She had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. But
she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. So
much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening,
he, George Tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the
other. He had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had
made her suffer.

But never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any
power or splendour of her own.

She wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. It had been
just two days before he married her. Perhaps it had been only his
shyness, or, more likely, his perversity.

But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so
fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each
other and that he hoped they would be friends.

It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was
the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if
there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent
honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.

He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for
one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that
Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer
exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been,
though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness.
She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her
wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must
make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the
smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the
wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not
theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of
excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife.
As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as
Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that
forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart
than Tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into
his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her
husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or
to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to
call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it
would end there.

It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this
friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that
resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.

Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She
was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had
dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had
been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let
him go for a scruple finer than a hair.

And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It
might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it
as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was
so pre-eminently _her_ failure) came of feeling and of understanding at
every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your
head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your
body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain,
passion and insight in her running disastrously together.

It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest
and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like
other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her
scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of
response.

Her heart, of course, he must have heard. It had positively screamed at
him. But her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. She
remembered how she had said to him that night, "Mayn't I be a woman?"
and he had answered her brutally. What _had_ concerned him was her
genius. If there had been twenty women in her he would have made her
sacrifice them all to that. He had cared for it to the point of
tenderness, of passion. She had scores of his letters in a drawer,
there; love-letters written to her genius. She knew one of them, the
last, by heart. It was written at Hampstead.

"Jinny," it had said, "I'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet.
I'm in the dust, Jinny, kissing your feet. Shivers of exquisite
adoration are going up and down my spine. Do you know what you've done
to me, you unspeakably divine person? I've worn out the knees, the knees
of my trousers; I've got dust in my hair, Jinny, kissing your feet."

That letter (there was a great deal more of it) had tided her over
Tanqueray's worst absence; it had carried her on, so to speak, to
Wendover. As she thought of it her heart was filled with hatred and
jealousy of her genius.

It was odd, but she had no jealousy and no hatred for Tanqueray's wife.

She hated and was jealous of her genius, not only because it had forced
Tanqueray to care for it, but because, being the thing that had made her
different from other women, it had kept Tanqueray from caring about her.

And she had got to live alone with it.

Her solitude had become unbearable. The room was unbearable; it was so
pervaded, so dominated by her genius and by Tanqueray. Most of all by
Tanqueray. There were things in it which he had given to her, things
which she had given to him, as it were; a cup he drank out of, a tray he
used for his cigar-ash; things which would remain vivid for ever with
the illusion of his presence. She could not bear to see them about. She
suffered in all ways, secretly, as if Tanqueray were dead.

A bell rang. It was four o'clock. Somebody was calling.

As to one preoccupied with a bereavement, it seemed to her incredible
that anybody _could_ call so soon. She was then reminded that she had a
large acquaintance who would be interested in seeing how she took it.
She had got to meet all these people as if nothing had happened. She
remembered now that she had promised Caroline Bickersteth to go to tea
with her to-day. If she wanted to present an appearance of nothing
having happened, she couldn't do better than go to Caro's for tea. Caro
expected her and would draw conclusions from her absence.

So might her caller if she declared herself not at home.

It was Nicky, come, he said, to know if she were going to Miss
Bickersteth's, and if he might have the pleasure of taking her there.
That was all he cared to go for, the pleasure of taking her.

Jane had never thought of Nicky being there. He was a barrister and he
had chambers, charming chambers, in the Temple, where he gave little
tea-parties and (less frequently) looked up little cases. But on Sundays
he was always a little poet down at Wendover.

They needn't start at once, he said, almost as if he knew that Jane was
dreading it. He sat and talked; he talked straight on end; talked, not
literature, but humble, innocent banalities, so unlike Nicky who cared
for nothing that had not the literary taint.

It was a sign of supreme embarrassment, the only one he gave. He did not
mention Tanqueray, and for a moment she wondered if he had heard. Then
she remembered. Of course, it was Nicky who had seen Tanqueray through.

Nicky was crowning his unlikelihood by refraining from the slightest
allusion to the event. He was, she saw with dreadful lucidity, afraid of
hurting her. And yet, he was (in his exquisite delicacy) behaving as if
nothing had happened. They were going together to Miss Bickersteth's as
if nothing had happened. His manner suggested that they were moving
together in a world where nothing could happen; a world of delightful
and amicable superficialities. She was not to be afraid of him; he was,
as it were, looking another way; he wasn't even aware of any depths. The
sheer beauty and gentleness of him showed her that he had seen and
understood thoroughly what depths there were.

It was her certainty of Nicky's vision that drove her to the supreme act
of courage.

"Why aren't we talking," she said, "about George Tanqueray?"

Nicky blushed in a violent distress. Even so, in the house of mourning,
he would have blushed at some sudden, unsoftened reference to the
deceased.

"I didn't know," he said, "whether he had told you."

"Why shouldn't he?"

Poor Nicky, she had made him blunder, so upset was he by the spectacle
of her desperate pluck. He really _was_ like a person calling after a
bereavement. He had called on account of it, and yet it was the last
thing he was going to talk about. He had come, not to condole, but to
see if there was any way in which he could be of use.

"Well," said Nicky, "he seemed to have kept it so carefully from all his
friends----"

"He told _you_----Why, you were there, weren't you?"

It was as if she had said, "You were there--you saw him die."

"Yes." Nicky's face expressed a tender relief. If she could talk about
it----"But it was only at the last minute."

"I wonder," said she, "why he didn't tell us."

"Well, you know, I think it was because she--the lady----"

He hesitated. He knew what would hurt most; and he shrank almost visibly
from mentioning Her.

"Yes--you've forgotten the lady."

She smiled, and he took courage. "There it is. The lady, you see, isn't
altogether a lady."

"Oh, Nicky----"

He did not look at her. He seemed to be a partaker in what he felt to be
her suffering and Tanqueray's shame.

"Has he known her long?" she said.

"About two months."

She was right then. It had been since that night. It had been her own
doing. She had driven him to her.

"Since he went to Hampstead then?"

"Yes."

"Who was she?"

"His landlady's daughter, I think, or a niece. She waited on him
and--she nursed him when he was ill."

Jane drew in her breath with an almost audible sound. Nicky had sunk
into his chair in his attitude of vicarious, shamefaced misery.

It made her rally. "Nicky," she said, "why do you look like that? I
don't think it's nice of you to sit there, giving him away by making
gloomy faces, in a chair. Why shouldn't he marry his landlady's daughter
if he likes? You ought to stand up for him and say she's charming. She
is. She must be; or he wouldn't have done it."

"He ought not to have done it."

"But he has. It had to happen. Nothing else could have happened."

"You think so? It seems to me the most unpredestined, the most horribly,
fantastically fortuitous occurrence."

"It was what he wanted. Wouldn't you have given him what he wanted?"

"No," said Nicky, "not if it wasn't good for him."

"Oh, Nicky, how do you know what's good for him? You're not George
Tanqueray."

"No. If I were I'd have----" He stopped. His passion, growing suddenly,
recklessly, had brought him to the verge of the depth they were trying
to avoid.

"If you were," said she, with amazing gaiety, "you'd have married this
lady who isn't a lady. And then where would you have been?"

"Where indeed?" said Nicky bitterly.

Jane's face, so gay, became suddenly tragic. She looked away, staring
steadily, dumbly, at something that she saw. Then he knew that he had
raised a vision of the abyss, and of Tanqueray, their Tanqueray, sinking
in it. He must keep her from contemplating that, or she would betray
herself, she would break down.

He searched his heart for some consoling inspiration, and found none. It
was his head which suggested that irrelevance was best.

"_When_," said he, by way of being irrelevant, "are you going to give us
another big book?"

"I don't know," she said. "Never, I think."

He looked up. Her eyes shone perilously over trembling pools of tears.
He had not been irrelevant at all.

"You don't _think_ anything of the sort," he said, with a sharp
tenderness.

"No. I feel it. There isn't another book in me. I'm done for, Nicky."

Her tears were hanging now on the curve of her eyelashes. They shook and
fell.

She sat there silent, fronting the abyss. Nicky was horrified and looked
it. If that was how she took it----

"You've overworked yourself. That's all," he said presently.

"Yes. That's all."

She rose. "Nicky," she said, "it's half-past four. If we're going we
must go."

"Are you sure you want to?"

"Of course I want to." She said it in a tone that for Nicky pointed to
another blunder.

"I only thought," said he simply, "it might bore you."




XII


Miss Bickersteth's house was round the corner. So small a house that a
front room and a back room thrown together hardly gave Caro space enough
for tea-parties. But as the back room formed a recess, what space she
had was admirably adapted for the discreet arrangement of conversation
in groups. Its drawback was that persons in the recess remained unaware
of those who entered by the door of the front room, until they were
actually upon them.

Through that door, opened gently by the little servant, Miss
Bickersteth, in the recess, was heard inquiring with some excitement,
"Can't either of you tell me who she is?"

Only Nina and Laura were with her. Jane knew from their abrupt silence,
as she entered, that they had been discussing George Tanqueray's
marriage. She gathered that they had only just begun. There was nothing
for it but to invite them to go on, to behave in all things as if
nothing had happened, or could happen to her.

"Please don't stop," she said, "it sounds exciting."

"It is. But Mr. Nicholson disapproves of scandal," said Caro, not
without address.

"He's been talking nothing else to me," said Jane.

"Yes, but his scandal and our scandal----"

"Yours isn't in it with his. He's seen her."

Three faces turned to Nicholson's, as if it held for them the reflection
of his vision. Miss Bickersteth's face was flushed with embarrassment
that struggled with curiosity; Nina's was almost fierce in its sombre,
haggard intensity; Laura's, in its stillness, had an appealing anxiety,
an innocent distress. It was shadowless and unashamed; it expressed a
trouble that had in it no taint of self.

Nicky met them with an admirable air of light-heartedness. "Don't look
at me," he said. "I can't tell you anything."

"But--you've seen her," said Miss Bickersteth, seating herself at her
tea-table.

"I've seen her, but I don't know her," he said stiffly.

"She doesn't seem to have impressed him favourably," remarked Miss
Bickersteth to the world in general.

Nicky brought tea to Jane, who opened her eyes at him in deprecation of
his alarming reticence. It was as if she had said, "Oh, Nicky--to please
me--won't you say nice things about her?"

He understood. "Miss Holland would like me to tell you that she is
charming."

"Do you know her, Jinny?" It was Laura who spoke.

"No, dear. But I know George Tanqueray."

"As for Nicky," she went on, with high daring, "you mustn't mind what he
says. He wouldn't think any mortal woman good enough for George."

Nicky's soul smiled all to itself invisibly as it admired her.

"I see," said Miss Bickersteth. "The woman isn't good enough. I hope
she's good."

"Oh--good. Good as they make them."

"He knows," said Jane, "more than he lets out."

She withdrew into the corner where little Laura sat, while Miss
Bickersteth put her witness under severe cross-examination.

"Is it," she said, "the masterpiece of folly?"

"It looks like it. Only, she is good."

"Good, but impossible."

"Im-possible."

"Do you mean--for Him?"

"I mean in herself. Utterly impossible."

"But inevitable?"

"Not in the least, to judge by what I saw."

"Then," said Miss Bickersteth, "how _did_ it happen?"

"I don't know," said Nicky, "how it happened."

There was a long pause. Miss Bickersteth seemed almost to retire from
ground that was becoming perilous.

"You may as well tell them," said Jane, "what you do know."

"I have," said poor Nicky.

"You haven't told us who she is," said Nina.

"She is Mrs. George Tanqueray. She was, I believe, a very humble person.
The daughter--no--I think he said the niece--of his landlord."

"Uneducated?" said Miss Bickersteth.

"Absolutely."

"Common?"

He hesitated and Jane prompted. "No, Nicky."

"Don't tamper," said Miss Bickersteth, "with my witness. Uncommon?"

"Not in the least."

"Any aitches?"

"I decline," said Nicky, "to answer any more questions."

"Never mind. You've told us quite enough. I'm disgusted with Mr.
Tanqueray."

"But why?" said Jane imperturbably.

"Why? When one thinks of the women, the perfectly adorable women he
might have married--if he'd only waited. And he goes and does this."

"He knows his own business best," said Jane.

"A man's marriage is not his business."

"What is it, then?"

Miss Bickersteth was at a loss for once, and Laura helped her. "It's his
pleasure, isn't it?"

"He'd no right to take his pleasure this way."

Jane raised her head.

"He had. A perfect right."

"To throw himself away? My dear--on a little servant-girl without an
aitch in her?"

"On anybody he pleases."

"Can you imagine George Tanqueray," said Nina, "throwing himself away on
anybody?"

"_I_ can--easily," said Nicholson.

"Whatever he throws away," said Nina, "it won't be himself."

"My dear Nina, look at him," said Miss Bickersteth. "He's done for
himself--socially, at any rate."

"Not he. It's men like George Tanqueray who can afford to do these
things. Do you suppose anybody who cares for him will care a rap whom he
marries?"

"I care," said Nicky. "I care immensely."

"You needn't. Marriage is not--it really is not--the fearfully important
thing you think it."

Nicholson looked at his boots, his perfect boots.

"It's _the_ most important act of a man's life," he said. "An ordinary
man's--a curate's--a grocer's. And for Tanqueray--for any one who
creates----"

"For any one who creates," said Nina, "nothing's important outside his
blessed creation."

"And this lady, I imagine," said Miss Bickersteth, "will be very much
outside it."

Nicky raised his dark eyes and gazed upon them. "Good heavens! But a man
wants a woman to inspire him."

"George doesn't," said Jane. "You may trust him to inspire himself."

"You may," said Nina. "In six months it won't matter whether George is
married or not. At least, not to George."

She rose, turning on Nicky as if something in his ineffectual presence
maddened her. "Do you suppose," she said, "that woman counts? No woman
counts with men like George Tanqueray."

"She can hold you back," said Nicky.

"You think so? You haven't got a hundred horse-power genius pulling you
along. When he's off, fifty women hanging on to him couldn't hold him
back."

She smiled. "You don't know him. The first time that wife of his gets in
his way he'll shove her out of it. If she does it again he'll knock her
down and trample her under his feet."

Her smile, more than ever ironic, lashed Nicky's shocked recoil.

"Creators are a brutal crew, Mr. Nicholson. We're all the same. You
needn't be sorry for us."

She looked, over Nicky's head as it were, at Jane and Laura. It was as
if with a sweep of her stormy wing she gathered them, George Tanqueray
and Jane and Laura, into the spaces where they ran the superb course of
the creators.

The movement struck Arnott Nicholson aside into his place among the
multitudes of the uncreative. Who was he to judge George Tanqueray? If
_she_ arraigned him she had a right to. She was of his race, his kind.
She could see through Nicky as if he had been an innocent pane of glass.
And at the moment Nicky's soul with its chivalry and delicacy enraged
her. Caroline Bickersteth enraged her, everybody enraged her except Jane
and little Laura.

She stood beside Jane, who had risen and was about to say good-bye.

Caro would have kept them with her distressed, emphatic "_Must_ you go?"
She was expecting, she said, Mr. Brodrick.

Jane was not interested in Mr. Brodrick. She could not stay and did not,
and, going, she took Nina with her.

Laura would have followed, but Miss Bickersteth held her with a hand
upon her arm. Nicholson left them, though Laura's eyes almost implored
him not to go.

"My dear," said Miss Bickersteth. "Tell me. Have you any idea how much
she cares for him?"

"She?"

"Jane."

"You've no reason to suppose she cares."

"Do you think he cared in the very least for her?"

"I think he may have--without knowing it."

"My dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. He knows, for instance,
all about _us_."

"Us?"

"You and I. We've both of us been there. And Nina."

"How _do_ you know?"

"She was flagrant!"

"Flagrant?"

"Flagrant isn't the word for it. She was flamboyant, magnificent,
superb!"

"You forget she's my friend," said little Laura.

"She's mine. I'm not traducing her. Look at George Tanqueray. I defy any
woman not to care for him. It's nothing to be ashamed of--like an
infatuation for a stockbroker who has no use for you. It's--it's your
apprenticeship at the hands of the master."




XIII


Nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the Strand, overlooking
the river. You approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you
wonder.

In a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat
over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between
them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial
presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final,
consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to
talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them.

They left him behind them in the other room, a room where there was no
evidence of Tanqueray's ever having been. The place was incontestably
and inalterably Nina's. There were things in it cared for by Nina with a
superstitious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it
were, in shrines. And in their company were things that Nina had worn
out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury
of rejection; things on which Nina had inflicted personal violence,
provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate association with her;
signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. It was as
if Nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left
them there. You inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the
open air. There were antlers about and the skins of animals. A
hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. Foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs
staggered together in a corner. Nina herself, long-limbed, tawny,
aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within
walls.

Beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to London,
to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the
river.

It was Nina who began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her
legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its
ease, she talked.

"Jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?"

Jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly
inarticulate.

Nina pondered. "I believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." She
paused on that a moment. "It needn't have happened," she said. "It
wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared."

Jane looked at her then. "I did show him," she said. "That's how it
happened."

"It couldn't. Not that way."

"It did. I waked him up. I made him restless, I made him want things.
But there was nothing--nothing----"

"You forget. I've seen him with you. What's more, I've seen him without
you."

"Ah, but it wasn't _that_. Not for a moment. It could never have been
_that_."

"You could have made it that. You could have made it anything you liked.
Jinny! If I'd been as sure of him as you were, I'd never have let him
go. I'd have held on----"

Her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would
have held on.

"You see," said Jinny, "I was never sure of him."

A silence fell between them.

"You were in it," said Nina, troubling the silence. "It must--it must
have been something you did to him."

"Or something I didn't do."

"Yes. Something you didn't do. You didn't know how."

Jane could have jumped at this sudden echo of her thought.

"And _she_ did," said Nina.

She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece, looking down on Jane.
"Poor Jinny," she said. "How I hated you three years ago."

Jane remembered. It was just three years since Nina had gone away
without saying a word and hidden herself among the mountains where she
was born. In her isolation she had conceived and brought forth her
"Tales of the Marches." And a year ago she had come back to them, the
Nina whom they knew.

"You can't hate me now," Jane said.

"I believe I would if you had been sure of him. But I don't hate you. I
don't even hate her."

"Why should you?"

"Why should I? When I don't believe she's sure of him, either. She's
called out the little temporary animal or the devil in him. That's what
she's married. It won't last."

"No, Nina. Nicky said she was good."

"It's wonderful how good women manage these things."

"Not when they're absolutely simple."

"How do you know she's simple?"

"Oh--because I'm not."

"Simplicity," said Nina, "would only give her more rope."

"Nina--there's one thing Nicky didn't tell us. He never let on that she
was pretty. I suppose he thought that was more than we could bear."

"How do you know she's pretty?"

"That's how I see her. Very pretty, very soft and tender. Shy at first,
and then very gently, very innocently letting herself go. And always
rather sensuous and clinging."

"Poor idiot--she's done for if she clings. I'm not sorry for George,
Jinny; I'm sorry for the woman. He'll lay her flat on the floor and wipe
his boots on her."

Jane shrank back. "Nina," she said, "you loved him. And yet--you can
tear him to pieces."

"You think I'm a beast, do you?"

"Yes. When you tear him--and before people, too."

She shrank a little further. Nina was now sitting on the floor with her
back against Jane's knees.

"It's all very well for you," she said. "He wanted to care for you. He
only wanted me--to care. That's what he is. He makes you care, he makes
you show it, he drives you on and on. He gives nothing; he takes
nothing. But he lets you strip yourself bare; he lets you bring him the
soul out of your body, and then he turns round and treats you as if you
were his cast-off mistress."

She laid her head back on Jane's knee, so that Jane saw her face
foreshortened and, as it were, distorted.

"If I had been--if I'd been like any other woman, good or bad, he'd have
been different."

Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.

[Illustration: Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought]

It was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark
and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not
incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed.
It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture,
violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its
utterance. But she was sorry for it. She hated to see it suffer.

It raised its head.

"Doesn't it look, Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can
be saddled with? It's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger
one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman
and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. We go after it like a
man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights
when he isn't a coward or a fool. And because we fight we're done for.
And then, when we're down, the woman in us turns and rends us. But if we
got what we wanted we'd be just like any other woman. As long," she
added, "as we wanted it."

She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather
like a man, on Jane.

"It's borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn't meant to
matter. She's simply the victim of the Will-to-do-things. It puts the
bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. It's like a whip
laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside."

She paused in her vehemence.

"Jinny--have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?"

Jane stirred in her corner. "I suppose," she said, "if it's any good
I'll have to pay for it."

"You'll have to pay for it with everything you've got and with
everything you haven't got and might have had. With a genius like yours,
Jinny, there'll be no end to your paying. You may make up your mind to
that."

"I wonder," said Jane, "how much George will have to pay?"

"Nothing. He'll make his wife pay. _You_'d have paid if he'd married
you."

"I wonder. Nina--he was worth it. I'd have paid ten times over. So would
you."

"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."

She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina's feet,
and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.

"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There
must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife
into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find
out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I
haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me.
You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"

Her murky face cleared suddenly.

"Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything
stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and
me."




XIV


August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square
had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the
corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the
top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.

Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a
certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the
terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little
people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue
celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves.
They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and
Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it,
vanished when they went.

She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her
secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.

Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do
anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature
that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking,
this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got
up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But
when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to
write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the
blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way."
When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite.
And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from
her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me,
a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington
Gardens."

He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that
walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it
could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish
of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the
solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.

So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and
round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.

She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of
sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So
she hardened it.

She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never
touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August
had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look.
This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen
in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it
had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody
she knew.

At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the
dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living
grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was
beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things
pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in
the Gardens, where she walked.

One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The
little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a
steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently
at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where
you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.

Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes
that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her
so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran
to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a
steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.

And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding
her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came
in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's
wail.

"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if
it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to
them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute--I was a steam-engine
and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could
do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again--I wonder if
he knew I was like that."

The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way
through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in
growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world
again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that
feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt
her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings,
to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees
as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.

There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that
insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of
September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She
could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but
of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial
and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the
world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the
world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew
that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of
sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.

Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and
Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And
the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that
he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see
him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.

He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She
could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of
seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme
distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow
with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban,
adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a
blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would
have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark
flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby;
the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of
Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency
of Hambleby.

Heavens, what a book he would be.

Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so
divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to
deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate
excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were
falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this
virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of
creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.

And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she
hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so
possessed by the furious impulse to be born.

Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think
about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a
year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.

But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby
was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely
as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray.
Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and
Laura Gunning.

That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the
fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.

"Do you like him?" said Jane.

"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along
the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary
taint.

"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"

"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with
him?"

"Not a thing."

If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to
Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a
discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura
spoke again.

"How George would have loved him."

Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were
dead.

Nina broke their silence.

"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"

They did not answer.

"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"

"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Sussex," said Jane.

"And where's she?"

"Wherever he is, I imagine."

"I gave her six months, if you remember."

"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."

"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."

"He might write. It isn't like him not to."

"No," said Jane, "it isn't like him." She rose. "Good-bye, I'm going."

She went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that
blurred the splendour of Hambleby.

"Perhaps," Laura continued, "he thinks _we_ want to drop him. You know,
if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think."

"If," said Nina, "he thought about it at all."

"He'd think about Jinny."

"If he'd thought about Jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl."

It was then that Laura had her beautiful idea. She was always having
them.

"It _was_ Jinny he thought about. He thought about nothing else. He gave
Jinny up for her own sake--for her career. You know what he thought
about marrying."

She was in love with her idea. It made George sublime, and preserved
Jinny's dignity. But Nina did not think much of it, and said so. She sat
contemplating Laura a long time. "Queer Kiddy," she said, "very queer
Kiddy."

It was her tribute to Laura's moral beauty.

"I say, Infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?"

"Why shouldn't I be? I'm human," said the Infant.

"I doubt it. You're such a calm Kiddy. I'd like to know how it takes
you."

"It doesn't take me at all. I don't give it a chance."

"It doesn't give _you_ a chance, when it comes, my child."

"Yes, it does. There's always," said the Infant, speaking slowly,
"just--one--chance. When you feel it coming."

"You don't feel it coming."

"I do. You asked me how it takes _me_. It takes me by stages. Gradual,
insidious stages. In the first stage I'm happy, because it feels nice.
In the second I'm terrified. In the third I'm angry and I turn round and
stamp. Hard."

"Ridiculous baby. With _those_ feet?"

"When those feet have done stamping there isn't much left to squirm, I
can tell you."

"Let's look at them."

Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity
of her feet.

"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."

"It wasn't half as difficult as it looks."

"You're a wonderful Kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you
may thank your stars you don't."

"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn't for Papa. Papa's a
perfect safeguard against passion. I know beforehand that as long as
he's there, passion isn't any good. You see," she explained, "it's so
simple. I wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with Papa. And nobody
would marry me if he had to."

"I see. Is it very bad?"

"Pretty bad. He dreams and dreams _and_ dreams."

"Won't that ever be better?"

Laura shook her head.

"It may be worse. There are things--that I'm afraid of."

"What things, Kiddy, what things?"

"Oh! I don't know----"

"How on earth do you go on?"

"I shut my eyes. And I sit tight. And I go."

"Poor Kiddy. You give me a pain."

"I'm quite happy. I'm working like ten horses to get things done while I
can." She smiled indomitably. "I'm glad Tanks didn't care for me. I
couldn't have let him in for all these--horrors. As for his marrying--I
didn't want you to have him because he wouldn't have been good for you,
but I _did_ want Jinny to."

"And you don't mind--now?"

"There are so many things to mind. It's one nail driving out another."

"It's all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin,"
said Nina. She drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed
her.

"Oh, don't! _Don't_ be sorry for me. I'm all right."

She broke from Nina's hand that still caressed her.

"I am, really," she said. "I like Jinny better than anybody in the world
except you and Tanks. And I like Nina better than all the Tankses that
ever were."

("Nice Kiddy," Nina whispered into Laura's hair.)

"And now Tanks is married, he can't take you away from me."

"Nobody else can," said Nina. "We've stuck together. And we'll stick."




XV


The creation of Hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters.
Jane Holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had
been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of George
Tanqueray. Her celebrity, by removing her from Tanqueray, had cut the
ground from under her feet. So far from being uplifted by it, she had
felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was
celebrated and George Tanqueray was not. It was Tanqueray's belief in
her that had kept her up. It consoled her with the thought that her
celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. For, through it
all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. He swore by her.
He staked his own genius upon hers. As long as he believed in it she
could not really doubt. But now for the first time since she was
celebrated she believed in it herself.

She no longer thought of Tanqueray. Or, if she did think of him, her
thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, passionate jealousy.
She no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. She even
foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at
the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.

She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to
create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was
subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this
thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked
of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it
abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It
could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray.
It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed
on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the
blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. And to those who
did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back
immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme
surrender.

Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable
condition.

The quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain
Tanqueray's most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he
said, "The Lord our God is a consuming fire."

Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all
that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could
put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame.
She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life,
and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious
impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion,
to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. She had attained only
the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in
fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken
dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the
thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth
whole.

She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet
bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing
amazing things.

There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of
Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator
possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four
walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing
breathed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost
tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that
adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no
longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She
no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as
she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its
stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this
incomparable peace.

She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have
been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed
for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of
the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back.
They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some
tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could
defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let
in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing
the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was
Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had
streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they
had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of
an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They
had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific
verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet
unintroduced.

By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that
she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.

For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray.
Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His
greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their
littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity,
so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.

And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her
with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he
was not there.

He had not even written to her since he married.

Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony,
he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy.
Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after
New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she
would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not
bring herself to write.

"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He
must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?"

And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please
me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane
sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after.

In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four.
Tanqueray."

Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in
her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of
his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his
old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug,
of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart
were still.

"What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out."

"I am worn out."

"With Book, Jinny?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting
people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a
spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there.
And there."

His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were
stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts.
Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every
available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on
celebrity.

Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene.

"Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny--"one little
line--I've got to send answers to all that."

"You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of
answering?"

"If it could only end in dreaming."

He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is
it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you
go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by
yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like."

"George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"

"My dear Jinny, I've tried my level best to save you. But you wouldn't
_be_ saved."

"Ah," said she, "you don't know how I've hated it."

"Haven't you liked any of it."

"No," she said slowly. "Not any of it."

"The praise, Jinny, didn't you like the praise? Weren't you just a
little bit intoxicated?"

"Did I look intoxicated?"

"No-no. You carried it fairly well."

"Just at first, perhaps, just at first it goes to your head a bit. Then
you get sick of it, and you don't want ever to have any more of it
again. And all the time it makes you feel such a silly ass."

"You were certainly not cut out for a celebrity."

"But the awful thing is that when you've swallowed all the praise you
can't get rid of the people. They come swarming and tearing and
clutching at you, and bizzing in your ear when you want to be quiet. I
feel as if I were being buried alive under awful avalanches of people."

"I told you you would be."

"If," she cried, "they'd only kill you outright. But they throttle you.
You fight for breath. They let go and then they're at you again. They
come telling you how wonderful you are and how they adore your work; and
not one of them cares a rap about it. If they did they'd leave you alone
to do it."

"Poor Jinny," he murmured.

"Why am I marked out for this? Why is it, George? Why should they take
me and leave you alone?"

"It's your emotional quality that fetches them. But it's inconceivable
how _you_'ve been fetched."

"I wanted to see what the creatures were like. Oh, George, that I
should be so punished when I only wanted to see what they were like."

"Poor Jinny. Poor gregarious Jinny."

She shook her head.

"It was so insidious. I can't think, I really can't think how it began."

"It began with those two spluttering imbecilities you asked me to dine
with."

"Oh no, poor things, they haven't hurt me. They've gone on to dine at
other tables. They're in it, too. They're torn and devoured. They dine
and are dined on."

"But, my dear child, you must stop it."

"If I could. If I could only break loose and get away."

"Get away. What keeps you?"

"Everything keeps me."

"By everything you mean----?"

"London. London does something to your brain. It jogs it and shakes it;
and all the little ideas that had gone to sleep in their little cells
get up and begin to dance as if they heard music. Everything wakes them
up, the streams of people, the eyes and the faces. It's you and Nina and
Laura. It's ten thousand things. Can't you understand, George?"

"It's playing the devil with your nerves, Jinny."

"Not when I go about in it alone. That's the secret."

"It looks as if you were alone a lot, doesn't it?" He glanced
significantly around him.

"Oh--that!"

"Yes," he said, "that. Will you really let me save you?"

"Can you?"

"I can, if I do it my own way."

"I don't care how you do it."

"Good." He rose. "Is there anything in those letters you mind my
seeing?"

"Not a word."

He sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid,
irritable hands. In two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the
little notes of invitation. He then went round the room collecting the
tickets and the cards and the telegrams. These he added to his heap.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised
about you."

He took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on
the fire.

"George----" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to
flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. She was paralyzed,
fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed.

"There," he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you."

"Yes." She smiled. "You can tell me what I'm to say to my stepmother."

"Your stepmother?"

"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."

"Effy?"

"My half-sister."

"Well?"

"I think, George, I may have to have her."

"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being
had?"

He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd
pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always
been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.

"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even
the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."

She said nothing.

"Can you afford to have him done for?"

"If it would help them, George."

"You want to help them?"

"Of course I do."

"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and
rakes in the shekels, not you."

"Ye-es. I know he does."

"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."

Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this
truth.

"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be
a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."

He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of
intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto
expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of
Jinny's style.

"I am going to post this myself," he said, "because I can't trust you
for a minute."

He ran out bareheaded and came back again.

"You can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a
minute."

He sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had
happened. "And now about Hambleby. Another day, Jinny, and I should have
been too late to save him."

"But, George, it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize
the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour."

"Tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything."

"The scenes I do move in! I was so happy once, when I hadn't any money,
when nobody but you knew anything about me."

"Were you really, Jinny?"

"Yes. And before that, when I was quite alone. Think of the hours, the
days, the months I had to myself."

"Then the curse fell, and you became celeb----Even then, with a little
strength of mind, you might have saved yourself. Do you think, if I
became celebrated, I should give myself up to be devoured?"

"If I could only not be celebrated," she said. "Do you think I can ever
creep back into my hole again and be obscure?"

"Yes, if you'll write a book that nobody but I can read."

"Why, isn't Hambleby----?"

"Not he. He'll only make things worse for you. Ten times worse."

"How do you mean?"

"He may make you popular."

"Is _that_ what you think of him?"

"Oh, I think a lot of him. So do you."

He smiled his old teasing and tormenting smile.

"Are you sure you're not just a little bit in love with that little
banker's clerk?"

"I was never in love with a banker's clerk in my life. I've never even
seen one except _in_ banks and tubes and places."

"I don't care. It's the way you'll be had. It's the way you'll be had by
Hambleby if you don't look out. It's the way," he said, "that's
absolutely forbidden to any artist. You've got to know Hambleby outside
and inside, as God Almighty knows him."

"Well?" Jinny's mind was working dangerously near certain personal
matters. George himself seemed to be approaching the same borders. He
plunged in an abyss of meditation and emerged.

"You can't know people, you can't possibly hope to know them, if you
once allow yourself to fall in love with them."

"Can't you?" she said quietly.

"No, you can't. If God Almighty had allowed himself to fall in love with
you and me, Jinny, he couldn't have made us all alive and kicking. You
must be God Almighty to Hambleby or he won't kick."

"Doesn't he kick?"

"Oh, Lord, yes. You haven't gone in deep enough to stop him. I'm only
warning you against a possible danger. It's always a possible danger
when I'm not there to look after you."

He rose. "Anything," he said, "is possible when I'm not there."

She rose also. Their hands and their eyes met.

"That's it," she said, "you weren't there, and you won't be."

"You're wrong," said he, "I've always been there when you wanted me."

He turned to go and came back again.

"If I don't like to see you celebrated, Jinny, it's because I want to
see you immortal."

"You don't want to be alone in your immortality?"

"No. I don't want to be alone--in my immortality."

With that he left her. And he had not said a word about his wife.

Neither for that matter had Jane. She wondered why she had not.

"At any rate," she thought, "_I_ haven't hurt his immortality."




XVI


A week after his visit to Jane Holland, Tanqueray was settled, as he
called it, in rooms in Bloomsbury. He had got all his books and things
sent down from Hampstead, to stay in Bloomsbury for ever, because
Bloomsbury was cheap.

It had not occurred to him to think what Rose was to do with herself in
Bloomsbury or he with Rose. He had brought her up out of the little
village of Sussex where they had lodged, in a farmhouse, ever since
their marriage. Rose had been happy down in Sussex.

And for the first few weeks Tanqueray had been happy too. He was never
tired of playing with Rose, caressing Rose, talking nonsense to Rose,
teasing and tormenting Rose for ever. The more so as she provoked him by
turning an imperturbable face to the attack. He liked to lie with his
head in Rose's lap, while Rose's fingers played with his hair, stirring
up new ideas to torment her with. He was content, for the first few
weeks, to be what he had become, a sane and happy animal, mated with an
animal, a dear little animal, superlatively happy and incorruptibly
sane.

He might have gone on like that for an interminable number of weeks but
that the mere rest from all intellectual labour had a prodigiously
recuperative effect. His genius, just because he had forgotten all about
it, began with characteristic perversity to worry him again. It wouldn't
let him alone. It made him more restless than Rose had ever made him. It
led him into ways that were so many subtle infidelities to Rose. It tore
him from Rose and took him out with it for long tramps beyond the Downs;
wherever they went it was always too far for Rose to go. He would try,
basely, to get off without her seeing him, and managed it, for Rose was
so sensible that she never saw.

Then it made him begin a book. He wrote all morning in a room by
himself. All afternoon he walked by himself. All evening he lay with his
head in Rose's lap, too tired even to tease her.

But, because she had Tanqueray's head to nurse in the evenings, Rose had
been happy down in Sussex. She went about the farm and stroked all the
animals. She borrowed the baby at the farm and nursed it half the day.
And in the evening she nursed Tanqueray's head. Tanqueray's head was
never bothered to think what Rose was doing when she was not nursing it.

Then, because his book made him think of Jane Holland, he sat down one
day and wrote that letter to Jinny.

He did not know that it was because of Jinny that he had come back to
live in Bloomsbury.

They had been a month in Bloomsbury, in a house in Torrington Square.
Rose was sitting alone in the ground-floor room that looked straight on
to the pavement. Sitting with her hands before her waiting for Tanqueray
to come to lunch. Tanqueray was up-stairs, two flights away, in his
study, writing. She was afraid to go and tell him lunch was ready. She
had gone up once that morning to see that he didn't let his fire out,
and he hadn't liked it; so she waited. There was a dish of cutlets
keeping hot for him on the hearth. Presently he would come down, and she
would have the pleasure of putting the cutlets on the table and seeing
him eat them. It was about the only pleasure she could count on now.

For to Rose, as she sat there, the thought had come that for all she saw
of her husband she might as well not be married to him. She had been
better off at Hampstead when she waited on him hand and foot; when she
was doing things for him half the day; when, more often than not, he had
a minute to spare for a word or a look that set her heart fairly
dancing. She had agreed to their marriage chiefly because it would
enable her to wait on him and nobody but him, to wait on him all day
long.

And he had said to her, first thing, as they dined together on their
wedding-day, that he wasn't going to let his wife wait on him. That was
why they lived in rooms (since he couldn't afford a house and servant),
that she might be waited on. He had hated to see her working, he said;
and now she wouldn't have to work. No, never again. And when she asked
him if he liked to see her sitting with her hands before her, doing
nothing, he said that was precisely what he did like. And it had been
all very well so long as he had been there to see her. But now he wasn't
ever there.

It was worse than it was down in Sussex. All morning he shut himself up
in his study to write. After lunch he went up there again to smoke. Then
he would go out by himself, and he might or might not come in for
dinner. All evening he shut himself up again and wrote. At midnight or
after he would come to her, worn out, and sleep, lying like a dead man
at her side.

She was startled by the sound of the postman's knock and the flapping
fall of a letter in the letter-box. It was for Tanqueray, and she took
it up to him and laid it beside him without a word. To speak would have
been fatal. He had let his fire go out (she knew he would); so, while he
was reading his letter, she knelt down by the hearth and made it up
again. She went to work very softly, but he heard her.

"What are you doing there?" he said.

"I thought," said she, "I was as quiet as a mouse."

"So you were. Just about. A horrid little mouse that keeps scratching at
the wainscot and creeping about the room and startling me."

"Do I startle you?"

"You do. Horribly."

Rose put down the poker without a sound.

He had finished his letter and had not begun writing again. He was only
looking at his letter. So Rose remarked that lunch was ready. He put the
letter into a drawer, and they went down.

About half-way through lunch he spoke.

"Look here," he said, "you _must_ keep out of the room when I'm
writing."

"You're always writing now."

Yes. He was always writing now; because he did not want to talk to Rose
and it was the best way of keeping her out of the room. But as yet he
did not know that was why, any more than he knew that he had come to
live in London because he wanted to talk to Jinny. The letter in his
drawer up-stairs was from Jinny, asking him if she might not come and
see his wife. He was not sure that he wanted her to come and see his
wife. Why should she?

"You'll 'urt your brain," his wife was saying, "if you keep on
writ-writin', lettin' the best of the day go by before you put your foot
out of doors. It would do you all the good in the world if you was to
come sometimes for a walk with me----"

It all went in at one ear and out of the other.

So all morning, all afternoon, all evening, Rose sat by herself in the
room looking on the pavement. She had nothing to do in this house that
didn't belong to them. When she had helped the little untidy servant to
clear away the breakfast things; when she had dusted their sitting-room
and bedroom; when she had gone out and completed her minute marketings,
she had nothing to do. Nothing to do for herself; worse than all,
nothing to do for Tanqueray. She would hunt in drawers for things of his
to mend, going over his socks again and again in the hope of finding a
hole in one of them. Rose, who loved taking care of people, who was born
in the world and fashioned by Nature to that end, Rose had nothing to
take care of. You couldn't take care of Tanqueray.

Sometimes she found herself wishing that he were ill. Not dangerously
ill, but ill enough to be put to bed and taken care of. Not that Rose
was really aware of this cruel hope of hers. It came to her rather as a
picture of Tanqueray, lying in his sleeping-suit, adorably helpless, and
she nursing him. Her heart yearned to that vision.

For she saw visions. From perpetual activities of hands and feet, from
running up and down stairs, from sweeping and dusting, from the making
of beds, the washing of clothes and china, she had passed to the life of
sedentary contemplation. She was always thinking. Sometimes she thought
of nothing but Tanqueray. Sometimes she thought of Aunt and Uncle, of
Minnie and the seven little dogs. She could see them of a Sunday
evening, sitting in the basement parlour, Aunt in her black cashmere
with the gimp trimmings, Uncle in his tight broadcloth with his pipe in
his mouth, and Mrs. Smoker sleeping with her nose on the fender. Mr.
Robinson would come in sometimes, dressed as Mr. Robinson could dress,
and sit down at the little piano and sing in his beautiful voice, "'Ark,
'Ark, my Soul," and "The Church's one Foundation," while Joey howled at
all his top notes, and the smoke came curling out of Uncle's pipe, and
Rose sat very still dreaming of Mr. Tanqueray. (She could never hear
"Hark, Hark, my Soul," now, without thinking of Tanqueray.)

Sometimes she thought of that other life, further back, in her
mistress's house at Fleet, all the innocent service and affection, the
careful, exquisite tending of the delicious person of Baby, her humble,
dutiful intimacy with Baby's mother. She would shut her eyes and feel
Baby's hands on her neck, and the wounding pressure of his body against
her breasts. And then Rose dreamed another dream.

She no longer cared to sew now, but when Tanqueray's mending was done,
she would sit for hours with her hands before her, dreaming.

He found her thus occupied one evening when he had come home after
seeing Jane. After seeing Jane he was always rather more aware of his
wife's existence than he had been, so that he was struck now by the
strange dejection of her figure. He came to her and stood, leaning
against the chimney-piece and looking down at her, as he had stood once
and looked down at Jane.

"What is it?" he said.

"It's nothing. I've a cold in me head."

"Cold in your head! You've been crying. There's a blob on your dress."
(He kissed her.) "What are you crying about?"

"I'm not cryin' about _anything_."

"But--you're crying." It gave him pain to see Rose crying.

"If I am it's the first time I've done it."

"Are you quite sure?"

"Certain. I never _was_ one for cryin', nor for bein' seen cry. It's
just--it's just sittin' here with me 'ands before me, havin' nothing to
do."

"I suppose there isn't very much for you to do."

"I've done all there is and a great deal there isn't."

"I say, shall we go to the play to-night?"

She smiled with pleasure at his thought for her. Then she shook her
head. "It's not plays I want--it's work. I'd like to have me hands full.
If we had a little house----"

"Oh no. No--no--no." He looked terrified.

"It would come a lot cheaper. Only a _little_ house, where I could do
all the work."

"I've told you before I won't let you."

"With a girl," she pleaded, "to scrub. A little house up Hampstead way."

"I don't want to live up Hampstead way."

"If you mean Uncle and Aunt," she said, "they wouldn't think of
intrudin'. We settled that, me and Uncle. I'd be as happy as the day is
long."

"You're _not_? And the day is very long, is it?"

He kissed her, first on her mouth and then on the lobe of the ear that
was next to him.

"Kissin' 's all very well," said Rose. "You never kissed me at
Hampstead, and you don't know how happy I was there. Doin' things for
you."

"I don't want things done for me."

"No. I wish you did."

"And, Rose, I don't want to be bothered with a house; to be tied to a
house; to have anything to do with a house."

"Would it worry you?"

"Abominably. And think of the horrors of moving!"

"I'd move you," said Rose.

"I couldn't. Look here. It would kill that book. I must have peace. This
is a beastly hole, I know, but there's peace in it. You don't know what
that damned book _is_."

She gave up the idea of a house; and seven months after her marriage,
she fell into a melancholy.

Sometimes, now, on a fine afternoon, she would go out into the streets
and look listlessly through shop-windows at hats and gowns and all the
pretty things she would have thought it sin so much as to desire to
wear. Where Rose lingered longest was outside those heavenly places
where you saw far off a flutter of white in the windows, which turned
out to be absurd, tiny, short-waisted frocks and diminutive
under-garments, and little heartrending shoes; things of desire, things
of impossible dream, to be approached with a sacred dumbness of the
heart.

The toy-shops, too, they carried her away in a flight; so that Rose
caught herself saying to herself, "Some day, perhaps, I shall be here
buying one of them fur animals, or that there Noah's ark."

Then, p'raps, she said to her very inmost self, things might be
different.

Sometimes she would go up to Hampstead, ridin', as she phrased it, in a
bus, to see her Aunt and Uncle and a friend she had, Polly White. Not
often; for Rose did not hold with gadding about when you had a husband;
besides, she was afraid of Aunt asking her, "Wot's _'E_ doin'?" (By
always referring to Tanqueray as "'E," Mrs. Eldred evaded the problem of
what she was expected to call the gentleman who had so singularly
married her husband's niece.) Most of all Rose dreaded the question,
"Wen is 'E goin' to take a little 'ouse?" For in Rose's world it is
somewhat of a reflection on a married man if he is not a householder.

And last time Mrs. Eldred's inquiries had taken a more terrible and
searching form. "Is 'E lookin' for anything to do besides 'Is writin'?"
Rose had said then that no, he needn't, they'd got enough; an answer
that brought Mrs. Eldred round to her point again. "Then why doesn't 'E
take a little 'ouse?"

Sometimes Polly White came to tea in Bloomsbury. Very seldom, though,
and only when Tanqueray was not there. Rose knew and Polly knew that her
friends had to keep away when her husband was about. As for _his_
friends, she had never caught a sight of them.

Then, all of a sudden, when Rose had given up wondering whether things
would ever be different, Tanqueray, instead of going up-stairs as usual,
sat down and lit a pipe as if he were going to spend the evening with
her. Rose did not know whether she would be allowed to talk. He seemed
thoughtful, and Rose knew better than to interrupt him when he was
thinking.

"Rose," he said at last, apparently as the result of his meditation, "a
friend of mine wants to call on you to-morrow."

"To call on _me_?"

"On you, certainly."

"Shall I have to see him?"

"She, Rose, she. Yes; I think you'll have to see her."

"I didn't know," said Rose, "you had a friend."

She meant what she would have called a lady friend.

"I've dozens," said Tanqueray, knowing what she meant.

"You haven't told me this one's name yet."

"Her name is Jane Holland."

It was Rose who became thoughtful now.

"'As she anything to do with the Jane Holland that's on those books of
yours?"

"She wrote 'em."

"You didn't tell me you knew her."

"Didn't I?"

"I suppose that's how you knew her."

"Yes. That's how I knew her."

"What made 'er take to writin'? Is she married?"

"No."

"I see," said Rose, almost as if she really saw. "And wot shall I've to
do?"

"You'll write a pretty little note to her and ask her to tea."

"Oh dear!"

"You needn't be afraid of her."

"I'm not afraid; but goodness knows what I shall find to talk about."

"You can talk about me."

"I suppose I _shall_ 'ave to talk to her?"

"Well--yes. Or--I can talk to her."

Rose became very thoughtful indeed.

"Wot's she like?"

He considered. What _was_ Jinny like? Like nothing on earth that Rose
had ever seen.

"I mean," said Rose, "to look at."

"I don't know that I can tell you what she's like."

"Is she like Miss Kentish? You remember Miss Kentish at Hampstead?"

He smiled. "Not in the very least."

Rose looked depressed. "Is she like Mrs. 'Enderson down at Fleet?"

"That's nearer. But she's not like Mrs. Henderson. She's--she's
charming."

"So's Mrs. 'Enderson."

"It's another sort of charm. I don't even know whether you'd see it."

"Ah, _you_ should have seen Mrs. 'Enderson with Baby. They was a perfect
picture."

"That's it. I can't see Miss Holland with Baby. I can only see her by
herself."

"I wish," said Rose, "she was married. Because, if she 'ad been, there
might be something----"

"Something?"

"Well--to talk about."

It was his turn to say "I see."

He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thus closing the sitting, and
settled down to a long correspondence in arrears.

At bed-time Rose spoke again.

"How old is she?" Rose said.




XVII


The next day at four o'clock Rose had on her best gown and was
bright-eyed and pink. Brighter-eyed and pinker than Tanqueray had seen
her for many weeks. She was excited, not so much by the prospect of
seeing Miss Holland as by the beautiful vision of her tea-table. There
was a cake with sugar icing on it, and bread and butter rolled as Rose
had seen it rolled at Fleet. She had set out the tea-service that her
aunt had given her for a wedding-present. The table cloth had a lace
edge to it which gratified Rose whenever she thought of it. Tanqueray
had on his nicest suit, and Rose's gaze travelled up and down it, and
paused in ecstasy at his necktie.

"You do pay for dressin'," she said.

"I do indeed," said Tanqueray.

Rose got on very well at tea-time. It was marvellous how many things she
found to say. The conversation really made itself. She had only to sit
there and ask Miss Holland how she liked her tea, weak or strong, and if
she took so much milk or a little drop more, and sugar, one lump or two
lumps, and that sized lump or a little larger? She spun it out till
George was ready to begin talking. And there came a beautiful and sacred
silence while Rose made Tanqueray's tea and gave it him.

After seven months it was still impossible for Rose to hide her deep
delight in waiting on him. More than once her eyes turned from Jane to
watch him in the wonderful and interesting acts of eating and drinking.

For a moment Jane suffered an abominable pang as she realized the things
that were permissible to Rose, the things that she could say to
Tanqueray, the things that she might do for him. At first she had looked
away so that she might not see these tender approaches of Rose to
Tanqueray. Then she remembered that this was precisely what she had come
out to see,--that she had got to realize Rose. And thus, as she brought
herself round to face it fairly, she caught in a flash Rose's attitude
and the secret of it.

It was not a thing flung in her face to madden her, it had no bridal
insolence about it, and none of the consecrated folly of the bride. It
was a thing of pathos and of innocence, something between the
uncontrollable tenderness, the divine infatuation of a mother, and the
crude obsession of a girl uncertain of the man she has set her unhappy
heart on; a thing, Rose's attitude, stripped of all secrecy by its
sadness.

But there was nothing abject in it. It was strong; it was militant under
its pathos and its renunciation. With such a look Rose would have faced
gates of death closing between her and Tanqueray.

So Jane realized Rose.

And she said to herself, "What a good thing Tanks never did care for me.
It would be awful if I made her more uncertain of him."

At this moment Tanqueray said, "How's Hambleby?"

"He's not quite so well as he was," said Jane.

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Tanqueray.

"Is anybody ill?" said Rose. She was always interested in anybody who
was ill.

"Only Hambleby," said Tanqueray.

"Who's he?" said Rose.

"The man Jinny's in love with."

Rose was shocked at this violation of the holy privacies. She looked
reprovingly at Tanqueray.

"Is your tea as you like it?" she inquired, with tact, to make it more
comfortable for Jane.

"I'm going to smoke," said Tanqueray. "Will you come to my den, Jinny,
and talk about Hambleby?"

Rose looked as if positively she couldn't believe her ears. But it was
at Jane that she looked, not at Tanqueray.

"No," said Jinny. "I don't want to talk about Hambleby. I want to talk
to your wife."

"You mustn't mind what 'e says," said Rose, when they were alone
together. "'E sometimes says things to me that make me fair jump."

"I didn't jump," said Jane, "did I?"

"No. You took it a deal better than I should have done."

It was odd, but Rose was ten times more at her ease since Tanqueray's
awful reference to Hambleby. And she seemed happier, too.

"You see," said Jane, "there wasn't much to take. Hambleby's only a man
in a book I'm writing."

"Oh--only a man in a book."

Rose looked depressed. There was a silence which even Jane found it
difficult to break. Then she had an inspiration.

"I'm supposed to be in love with him because I can't think or talk about
anything else."

"That's just like Mr. Tanqueray," said Rose.

"Only he isn't in love with the people in his books," said Jane.

"He must think a deal of 'em."

"He says he doesn't."

"Well--'e's always thinkin' when he isn't writin'."

There was trouble on Rose's face.

"Miss 'Olland--'ow many hours do _you_ sit at it?"

"Oh, it depends."

"'E's sittin' all day sometimes, and 'arf the night. And my fear is,"
said Rose, "'e'll injure 'is brain."

"It will take a good deal to injure it. It's very tough. He'll leave off
when he's tired."

"He hasn't left off for months and months."

Her trouble deepened.

"Did 'e always work that 'ard?"

"No," said Jane. "I don't think he ever did."

"Then w'y," said Rose, coming straight to her point, "is he doin' it
now?"

They looked at each other; and somehow Jane knew why he was doing it.
She wondered if Rose knew; if she suspected.

"He's doing it," she said, "because he _can_ do it. You've had a good
effect on him."

"Do you think, do you really think it's _me_!"

"I do indeed," said Jane, with immense conviction.

"And you think it doesn't hurt him?"

"No. Does him good. You should be glad when you see him writing."

"If," said Rose, "I _could_ see 'im. But I've bin settin' here thinkin'.
I lie awake sometimes at night till I'm terrified wonderin' wot's
'appenin', and whether 'is brain won't give way with 'im drivin' it. You
see, we 'ad a lodger once and 'e overworked 'is brain and 'ad to be sent
orf quick to the asylum. That's wot's frightened me."

"But I don't suppose the lodger's brain was a bit like Mr. Tanqueray's."

"That's wot I keep sayin' to myself. People's brains is different. But
there's been times when I could have taken that old book away from him
and hidden it, thinkin' that might be for his good."

"It wouldn't be for his good."

"No," said Rose, "I'm not that certain that it would. That's why I don't
do it."

She became pensive.

"Besides, it's 'is pleasure. Why, it's all the pleasure he's got."

She looked up at Jane. Her thoughts swam in her large eyes.

"It's awful, isn't it," said she, "not knowin' wot really is for
people's good?"

"I'm afraid we must trust them to know best."

"Well," said Rose, "I'll just let 'im alone. That's safest."

Jane rose.

"You mustn't worry," said she.

"I don't," said Rose. "He hates worryin'."

She looked up again into Jane's face as one beholding the calm face of
wisdom.

"You've done me good," said she.

Jane stooped and kissed her. She kissed Tanqueray's wife.

"Do you know," she said, "you are what I thought you would be."

Rose's eyes grew rounder.

"And what's that?"

"Something very sweet and nice."

Rose's face was a soft mist of smiles and blushes. "Fancy that," she
said.

"Why did you let her go away without telling me?" said Tanqueray,
half-an-hour later.

"I didn't think," said Rose. "We got talking."

"What did you talk about?"

She would not tell.




XVIII


She had known all the time that if she was not to go on thinking about
George Tanqueray she must see his wife. When she had once thoroughly
realized his wife it would be easier to give him up to her.

It was George who had tried to prevent her realizing Rose. He, for his
part, refused to be given up to Rose or in any way identified with her.
Nina was right. His marriage had made no difference to George.

But now that she realized Rose, it made all the difference to Jane. Rose
was realized so completely that she turned George out of the place he
persisted in occupying in Jane's mind. Jane had not allowed herself to
feel that there was anything to be sorry about in George's marriage. She
was afraid of having to be sorry for George, because, in that case,
there would be no end to her thinking about him. But if there was any
sorrow in George's marriage it was not going to affect George. She would
not have to be sorry about him.

Like Nina, Jane was sorry for the woman.

That little figure strayed in and out of Jane's mind without disturbing
her renewed communion with Hambleby.

Up till now she had contrived to keep the very existence of Hambleby a
secret from her publishers. But they had got wind of him somehow, and
had written many times inquiring when he would be ready? As if she could
tell, as if her object was to get him ready, and not rather to prolong
the divine moments of his creation. She would have liked to have kept
him with her in perpetual manuscript, for in this state he still seemed
a part of herself. Publicity of any sort was a profanation. When
published he would be made to stand in shop windows coarsely labelled,
offering himself for sale at four-and-six; he would go into the houses
of people who couldn't possibly appreciate him, and would suffer
unspeakable things at their hands. As the supreme indignity, he would be
reviewed. And she, his creator, would be living on him, profiting by his
degradation at percentages which made her blush. To be thinking of what
Hambleby would "fetch" was an outrage to his delicate perfection.

But she had to think of it; and after all, when she had reckoned it up,
he would not "fetch" so very much. She had failed to gather in one half
of the golden harvest. The serial rights of Hambleby lay rotting in the
field. George used to manage all these dreadful things for her. For
though George was not much cleverer than she he liked to think he was.
It was his weakness to imagine that he had a head for business. And in
the perversity of things he had really done better for her than he had
ever done for himself. That was the irony of it; when, if she could, she
would have taken her luck and shared it with him.

Anyhow, business without George had been very uninteresting; and
therefore she had not attended to it. There had been opportunities as
golden as you please, but she had not seized them. There had been
glorious openings for Hambleby, far-reaching prospects, noble vistas, if
only he had been born six months sooner. And when George said that
Hambleby would be popular, he was, of course, only tormenting her. He
never meant half of the unpleasant things he said.

It was now April. Hambleby waited only for the crowning chapter. The
arrangements for his publication had been made, all but the date, which
was left unsettled, in case at the last moment a new opening should be
found.

At four o'clock on an April afternoon Jane was meditating on her affairs
when the staircase bell rang somewhat imperiously. It sounded like
somebody determined to get in. A month ago she would have taken no
notice of it. Now she was afraid not to open her door lest Tanqueray
should be there.

It was not Tanqueray. It was Hugh Brodrick.

For a second she wondered at him, not taking him in. She had forgotten
that Brodrick existed. It was his eyes she recognized him by. They were
fixed on her, smiling at her wonder. He stood on the little square of
landing between the door and the foot of the staircase.

"Of course," he said. "You're just going out?"

"No, do come in."

"May I? I don't believe you know in the least who I am."

"I do, really. I'm very glad to see you."

He followed her up the stairs and into her sitting-room, the small
white-painted sitting-room, with its three straight windows looking on
the Square. He went to one of the windows and looked out.

"Yes," he said, "there is a charm about it."

He spoke as if his mind had been long occupied with this place she lived
in; as if they had disputed together many times as to the attraction of
Kensington Square, and he had been won over, at last, reluctantly, to
her view. It all strengthened the impression he gave of being absorbed
in her.

He turned to her.

"You like living here? All alone? Cut off from everybody?"

She remembered then how they had really discussed this question.

"I like it very much indeed."

"Well----" (He said it sadly.) "Do you write in this room? At that
table?"

"Yes."

He looked at the table as if he thought it all very interesting and very
incomprehensible and very sad. He looked at the books on the shelf close
to the table and read George Tanqueray's name on them. He frowned
slightly at the books and turned away.

She sat down. He did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another
where he could see her rather better. He was certainly a man who knew
his own mind.

"I've called," he said, "a great many times. But I've always missed
you."

"So at last you gave it up? Like everybody else."

"Does it look as if I'd given it up?"

She could not say it did.

"No," he said. "I never give anything up. In that I'm not like everybody
else."

He wasn't, she reflected. And yet somehow he ought to have been. There
was nothing so very remarkable about him.

He smiled. "I believe," he said, "you thought I was the man come to tune
the piano."

"Did I look as if I did?"

"A little."

"Do I now?" She was beginning to like Brodrick.

"Not so much. As it happens, I have come partly for the pleasure of
seeing you and partly--to discuss, if you don't mind, some business."

Jane was aware of a certain relief. If it was that he came for----

"I don't know whether you've heard that I'm bringing out a magazine?"

"Oh yes. I remember you were bringing it out----"

"I was thinking of bringing it out when I last met you. It may interest
you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. I'm going
in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. No politics."

"Won't that limit your circulation?"

"Of course it'll limit it. Still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go
in for politics."

"I see. Rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?"

He blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of
vaunting his own honesty.

"Oh, well, I don't know about that. Politics means my brother-in-law. If
I keep them out I keep him out, and run the thing my own way. I dare say
that's all there is in it."

Certainly she liked him. He struck her as powerful and determined. With
his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the
forlorn hope of literature.

"It's taken me all this time to get the capital together. But I've got
it."

"Yes. You would get it."

He looked up gravely inquiring.

"You strike me as being able to get things."

He flushed with pleasure. "Do I? I don't know. If I can get the authors
I want I believe I can make the magazine one of the big things of the
century." He said it quietly, as if inspired by caution rather than
enthusiasm. "_They_'ll make it--if I can get them."

"Are they so difficult?"

"The ones I want are. I don't want any but the best."

She smiled.

"It's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really
been tried before. There's room for it."

"Oh, oceans of _room_."

"And it will have all the room there is. Now's its moment. All the good
old magazines are dead."

"And gone to heaven because they were so good."

"Because they were old. My magazine will be young."

"There has been frightful mortality among the young."

"I know the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse
than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that
I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much as you."

She seemed to have hardly heard him.

"Have you asked Mr. Tanqueray?"

"Not yet. You're the first I've asked. The very first."

"You should have asked him first."

"I didn't want him first."

"You should have wanted him. Why" (she persisted), "did you come to me
before him?"

"Because you're so much more valuable to me."

"In what way?"

"Your name is better known."

"It oughtn't to be. If it's names you want----" She gave him a string of
them.

"Your name stands for more."

"And Mr. Tanqueray's? Does it not stand?"

He hesitated.

She insisted. "If mine does."

"I am corrupt," said Brodrick, "and mercenary and brutal."

"I wish you weren't," said she, so earnestly that he laughed.

"My dear Miss Holland, we cannot blink the fact that you have a name and
he hasn't."

"Or that my name sells and his doesn't. Is that it?"

"Not altogether. If I couldn't get you I'd try to get him."

"Would you? How do you know that you're going to get me?"

He smiled. "I don't. I only know that I'm prepared, if I may say so, to
pay for you."

"Oh," she said, "it isn't that."

He smiled again at her horror.

"I know it isn't that. Still----" He named a round sum, a sum so perfect
in its roundness that it took her breath away. With such a sum she could
do all that she wanted for her sister Effy at once, and secure herself
against gross poverty for years.

"It's more than we could give Mr. Tanqueray."

"Is it?"

"Much more."

"That's what's so awful," she said.

He noticed how she clenched her hands as she said it.

"It's not my fault, is it?"

"Oh--I don't care whose fault it is!"

"But you care?"

"Yes." She almost whispered it.

He was struck by that sudden drop from vehemence to pathos.

"He is a very great friend of yours?"

"Yes."

"And--he's just married, isn't he?"

"Yes. And he isn't very well off. I don't think he could afford----" she
said.

He coloured painfully as if she had suspected him of a desire to traffic
in Tanqueray's poverty.

"We should pay him very well," he said.

"His book" (she pressed it on him), "is not arranged for."

"And yours is?"

"Practically it is. The contract's drawn up, but the date's not
settled."

"If the date's not settled, surely I've still a chance?"

"And he," she said, "has still a chance if--I fail you?"

[Illustration: "And he," she said, "has still a chance if--I fail you?"]

"Of course--if you _fail_ me."

"And supposing that I hadn't got a book?"

"But you have."

"Supposing?"

"Then I should fall back on Mr. Tanqueray."

"Fall back on him!--The date is settled."

"But I thought----"

"_I_'ve settled it."

"Oh. And it can't be unsettled?"

"It can't--possibly."

"Why not?"

She meditated. "Because--it would spoil the chances of the book."

"I see. The chances of the book."

Their eyes met in conflict. It was as if they were measuring each
other's moral value.

"I should make you a bigger offer, Miss Holland," he said; "only I
believe you don't want that."

"No. Certainly I don't want that."

He paused. "Do you mind telling me if you've any other chance?"

"None. Not the ghost of one."

"So that, but for this all-important question of the date, I might have
had you?"

"You might have had me."

"I'm almost glad," he said, "to have lost you--that way."

"Which way?" said she.

At that moment a servant of the house brought in tea. She announced that
Mr. Nicholson was down-stairs and would like to see Miss Holland.

"Very well. You'll stay?" Jane said to Brodrick.

He did. He was, Jane reflected, the sort of man who stayed.

"Here's Mr. Brodrick," said she, as Nicky entered. "He's going to make
all our fortunes."

"His own, too, I hope," said Brodrick. But he looked sulky, as if he
resented Nicholson's coming in.

"Of course," he said, "they tell me the whole thing's a dream, a
delusion, that it won't pay. But I know how to make it pay. The reason
why magazines go smash is because they're owned by men with no business
connections, no business organization, no business capacity. I couldn't
do it if I hadn't the 'Telegraph' at my back. Practically I make the
paper pay for the magazine."

And he went into it, in his quick, quiet voice, expounding and expanding
his scheme, laying it down fairly and squarely, with lucidity but no
apparent ardour.

It was Nicky who was excited. Jane could see cupidity in Nicky's eyes as
Brodrick talked about his magazine. Brodrick dwelt now on the commercial
side of it which had no interest for Nicky. Yet Nicky was excited. He
wanted badly to get into Brodrick's magazine, and Brodrick wanted,
Brodrick was determined to keep him out. There was a brief struggle
between Nicky's decency and his desire; and then Nicky's desire and
Brodrick's determination fairly skirmished together in the open.
Brodrick tried heavily to keep Nicky off it. But Nicky hovered airily,
intangibly about it. He fanned it as with wings; when Brodrick dropped
it he picked it up, he sustained it, he kept it flying high. Every
movement intimated in Nicky's most exquisite manner that if Brodrick
really meant it, if he had positively surrendered to the expensive
dream, if he wanted, in short, to keep it up and keep it high, he
couldn't be off letting Nicky in.

Brodrick's shameless intention had been to out-stay Nicky. And as long
as Nicky's approaches were so delicate as to provoke only delicate
evasions, Brodrick stayed. But in the end poor Nicky turned desperate
and put it to him point-blank. "Was there, or was there not to be a
place for poets in the magazine?"

At that Brodrick got up and went.

"Nicky," said Jane, as the door closed on the retreating editor, "he
came for my book, and I've made him take George Tanqueray's instead."

"I wish," said he, "you'd make him take my poems. But you can't. Nobody
can _make_ Brodrick do anything he doesn't want to."

"Oh----" said Jane, and dismissed Brodrick. "It's ages since I've seen
you."

"I heard that you were immersed, and so I kept away."

"That was very good of you," said she.

It struck her when she had said it that perhaps it was not altogether
what Nicky would have liked her to say.

"I _was_ immersed," she said, "in Hambleby."

"Is he finished?"

"All but. I'm waiting to put a crown upon his head."

"Were you by any chance making it--the crown?"

"I haven't even begun to make it."

"I shan't spoil him then if I stay?"

"No. I doubt if anything could spoil him now."

"You've got him so safe?"

"So safe. And yet, Nicky, there are moments when I can hardly bear to
think of Hambleby for fear he shouldn't be all right. It's almost as if
he came too easily."

"He couldn't. All my best things come," said Nicky "--like _that_!"

A furious sweep of Nicky's arm simulated the onrush of his inspiration.

"Oh, Nicky, how splendid it must be to be so certain."

"It is," said Nicky solemnly.

After all, it argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so
destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so
futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his
greatness. For he _was_ certain. Nothing could annihilate the illusion
by which Nicky lived. But it was enough to destroy all certainty in
anybody else, and there were moments when the presence of Nicky had this
shattering effect on Jane. She could not have faced him until Hambleby
was beyond his power to slay.

But Nicky, so far from enlarging on his certainty, meditated with his
eyes fixed on the clock.

"You don't dine, do you," he said suddenly, "till half-past seven?"

"You'll stay, won't you?"

"I think I mustn't, thanks. I only wanted to know how long I had."

"You've really half-an-hour, if you _won't_ dine."

"I say, you're not expecting anybody else?"

"I didn't expect Mr. Brodrick. I've kept everybody out so long that
they've left off coming."

"I wonder," said he, still meditating, "if _I_'ve come too soon."

She held her breath. Nicky's voice was charged with a curious emotion.

"I knew," he went on, "it wasn't any use my coming as long as you were
immersed. I wouldn't for worlds do anything that could possibly injure
your career."

"Oh--my career----"

"The question is," he meditated, "would it?"

"Your coming, Nicky?"

"My not keeping away. I suppose I ought to be content to stand aside and
watch it, your genius, when it's so tremendous. I've no right to get in
its way----"

"You don't--you don't."

"I wouldn't. I always should be standing aside and watching. That," said
Nicky, "would be, you see, my attitude."

"Dear Nicky," she murmured, "it's a beautiful attitude. It
couldn't--your attitude--be anything but beautiful."

"Only, of course," he added, "I'd be there."

"But you are. You are there. And it's delightful to have you."

His face, which had turned very white, flushed, but not with pleasure.
It quivered with some sombre and sultry wave of pain.

"I meant," he said, "if I were always there."

His eyes searched her. She would not look at him.

"Nobody," she said, "can be--always."

"You wouldn't know it. You wouldn't see me--when you were immersed."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I always am, I always shall be--immersed."

"Won't there be moments?"

"Oh, moments! Very few."

"I wouldn't care how few there were," he said. "I know there can't be
many."

She understood him. There was nothing on earth like Nicky's delicacy. He
was telling her that he would accept any terms, the very lowest; that he
knew how Tanqueray had impoverished her; that he could live on moments,
the moments Tanqueray had left.

"There are none, Nicky. None," she said.

"I see this isn't one of them."

"All the moments--when there are any--will be more or less like this.
I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," said he. It was as if they were saying they were sorry he
could not dine.

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.

So, instead of insisting on her failure, he tried to diminish her
disturbing sense of it; and when she inquired if she had done her work
very badly, he smiled and said, No, she had done it much too well.

"Too well?" She flushed as she echoed him.

"Yes. You've corrected all Mr. Tanqueray's punctuation and nearly all
his grammar."

"But it's all wrong. Look there--and there."

"How do you know it's all wrong?"

"But--it's so simple. There are rules."

"Yes. But Mr. Tanqueray's a great author, and great authors are born to
break half the rules there are. What you and I have got to know is when
they _may_ break them, and when they mayn't."

A liquid film swam over Gertrude's eyes, deepening their shallows. It
was the first signal of distress.

"It's all right," he said. "I wanted you to do it. I wanted to see what
you could do." He considered her quietly. "It struck me you might
perhaps prefer it to your other duties."

"What made you think that?"

"I didn't think. I only wondered. Well----"

The next half-hour was occupied with the morning's correspondence, till
Brodrick announced that they had no time for more.

"It's only just past four," she said.

"I know; but----Is there anything for tea?" He spoke vaguely like a man
in a dream.

"What an opinion you have of my housekeeping," she said.

"Your housekeeping, Miss Collett, is perfection."

She flushed with pleasure, so that he kept it up.

"Everything," he said, "runs on greased wheels. I don't know how you do
it."

"Oh, it's easy enough to do."

"And it doesn't matter if a lady comes to tea?"

He took up a pencil and began to sharpen it.

"Is there," said Miss Collett, "a lady coming to tea?"

"Yes. And we'll have it in the garden. Tea, I mean."

"And who," said she, "is the lady?"

"Miss Jane Holland." Brodrick did not look up. He was absorbed in his
pencil.

"Another author?"

"Another author," said Brodrick to his pencil.

She smiled. The editor's attitude to authors was one of prolonged
amusement. Prodigious people, authors, in Brodrick's opinion. More than
once, by way of relieving his somewhat perfunctory communion with Miss
Collett, he had discussed the eccentricity, the vanity, the
inexhaustible absurdity of authors. So that it was permissible for her
to smile.

"You are not," he said, "expecting either of my sisters?"

He said it in his most casual, most uninterested voice. And yet she
detected an undertone of anxiety. He did not want his sisters to be
there when Miss Holland came. She had spent three years in studying his
inflections and his wants.

"Not specially to-day," she said.

Brodrick became manifestly entangled in the process of his thought. The
thought itself was as yet obscure to her. She inquired, therefore, where
Miss Holland was to be "shown in." Was she a drawing-room author or a
library author?

In the perfect and unspoken conventions of Brodrick's house the
drawing-room was Miss Collett's place, and the library was his. Tea in
the drawing-room meant that he desired Miss Collett's society; tea in
the library that he preferred his own. There were also rules for the
reception of visitors. Men were shown into the library and stayed there.
Great journalistic ladies like Miss Caroline Bickersteth were shown into
the drawing-room. Little journalistic ladies with dubious manners,
calling, as they did, solely on business, were treated as men and
confined strictly to the library.

Brodrick's stare of surprise showed Gertrude that she had blundered. He
had a superstitious reverence for those authors who, like Mr. Tanqueray,
were great.

"My dear Miss Collett, do you know who she is? The drawing-room, of
course, and all possible honour."

She laughed. She had cultivated for Brodrick's sake the art of laughter,
and prided herself upon knowing the precise moments to be gay.

"I see," she said. And yet she did not see. How could there be any
honour if he did not want his sisters to be there? "That means the best
tea-service and my best manners?"

He didn't know, he said, that she had any but the best.

How good they were she let him see when he presented Miss Holland on her
arrival, her trailing, conspicuous arrival. Gertrude had never given him
occasion to feel that his guests could have a more efficient hostess
than his secretary. She spoke of the pleasure it gave her to see Miss
Holland, and of the honour that she felt, and of how she had heard of
Miss Holland from Mr. Brodrick. There was no becoming thing that
Gertrude did not say. And all the time she was aware of Brodrick's eyes
fixed on Miss Holland with that curious lack of diffuseness in their
vision.

Brodrick was carrying it off by explaining Gertrude to Miss Holland.

"Miss Collett," he said, "is a wonderful lady. She's always doing the
most beautiful things, so quietly that you never knew they're done."

"Does anybody," said Jane, "know how the really beautiful things are
done?"

"There's a really beautiful tea," said Miss Collett gaily, "in the
garden. There are scones and the kind of cake you like."

"You see," Brodrick said, "how she spoils me, how I lie on roses."

"You'd better come," said Miss Collett, "while the scones are still
hot."

"While," said Jane, "the roses are still fresh."

He held the door open for her, and on the threshold she turned to Miss
Collett who followed her.

"Are you sure," said she, "that he's the horrid Sybarite you think
him?"

"I am," said Brodrick, "whatever Miss Collett thinks me. If it pleases
her to think I'm a Sybarite I've got to _be_ a Sybarite."

"I see. And when the rose-leaves are crumpled you bring them to Miss
Collett, and she irons them out, and makes them all smooth again, so
that you don't know they're the same rose-leaves?"

"The rose-leaves never are crumpled."

"Except by some sudden, unconsidered movement of your own?"

"My movements," said Brodrick, "are never sudden and unconsidered."

"What? Never?"

Miss Collett looked a little surprised at this light-handed treatment of
the editor.

And Jane observed Brodrick with a new interest as they sat there in the
garden and Miss Collett poured out tea. "Mr. Brodrick," she said to
herself, "is going to marry Miss Collett, though he doesn't know it."

By the end of the afternoon it seemed to her an inevitable consummation,
the marriage of Mr. Brodrick and Miss Collett. She could almost see it
working, the predestined attraction of the eternally compatible, the
incomparably fit. And when Brodrick left off taking any notice of Miss
Collett, and finally lured Jane away into the library on the flimsiest
pretence, she wondered what game he was up to. Perhaps in his innocence
he was blind to Miss Collett's adoration. He was not sure of Miss
Collett. He was trying to draw her.

Jane, intensely interested, advanced from theory to theory of Brodrick
and Miss Collett while Brodrick removed himself to the writing-table,
and turned on her a mysterious back.

"I want to show you something," he said.

She went to him. In the bared centre of the writing-table he had placed
a great pile of manuscript. He drew out his chair for her, so that she
could sit down and look well at the wonder.

Her heart leaped to the handwriting and to George Tanqueray's name on
the title-page.

"You've seen it?" he said.

"No. Mr. Tanqueray never shows his work."

From some lair in the back of the desk he swept forward a prodigious
array of galley proofs. Tanqueray's novel was in the first number of the
"Monthly Review."

"Oh!" she cried, looking up at him.

"I've pleased you?" he said.

"You have pleased me very much."

She rose and turned away, overcome as by some desired and unexpected
joy. He followed her, making a cushioned place for her in the chair by
the hearth, and seated himself opposite her.

"I was very glad to do it," he said simply.

"It will do you more good than Hambleby," she said.

"You know I did not think so," said he. And there was a pause between
them.

"Mr. Brodrick," she said presently, "do you really want a serial from
me?"

"Do I want it!"

"As much as you think you do?"

"I always," said he, "want things as much as I think I do."

She smiled, wondering whether he thought he wanted Miss Collett as much
as he obviously did.

"What?" he said. "Are you going to let me have the next?"

"I had thought of it. If you really do----"

"Have you had any other offers?"

"Yes; several. But----"

"You must remember mine is only a new venture. And you may do
better----"

It was odd, but a curious uncertainty, a modesty had come upon him since
she last met him. He had been then so absurd, so arrogant about his
magazine.

"I don't want to do better."

"Of course, if it's only a question of terms----"

It was incredible, Brodrick's depreciating himself to a mere question of
terms. She flushed at this dreadful thought.

"It isn't," she said. "Oh! I didn't mean _that_."

"You never mean that. Which is why I must think of it for you. I can at
least offer you higher terms."

"But," she persisted, "I should hate to take them. I _want_ you to have
the thing. That's to say I want _you_ to have it. You must not go paying
me more for that."

"I see," he said, "you want to make up."

She looked at him. He was smiling complacently, in the fulness of his
understanding of her.

"My dear Miss Holland," he went on, "there must be no making up. Nothing
of that sort between you and me."

"There isn't," she said. "What is there to make up for? For your not
getting me?"

He smiled again as if that idea amused him.

"Or," said she, "for my making you take Mr. Tanqueray?"

"You didn't _make_ me," he said. "I took him to please you."

"Well," she said; "and you'll take me now, to please me."

She rose.

"I must say good-bye to Miss Collett. How nice," she said, "Miss Collett
is."

"Isn't she?" said he.

He saw her politely to the station.

That evening he drank his coffee politely in the drawing-room with Miss
Collett.

"Do you know," he said, "Miss Holland thinks you're nice."

To his wonder Miss Collett did not look as if the information gave her
any joy.

"Did she say so?"

"Yes. Do you think _her_ nice?"

"Of course I do."

"What," said he, "do you really think of her?" He was in the habit of
asking Miss Collett what she thought of people. It interested him to
know what women thought, especially what they thought of other women.

It was in the spirit of their old discussions that she now replied.

"You can see she is a great genius. They say geniuses are bad to live
with. But I do not think she would be."

He did not answer. He was considering very profoundly the question she
had raised.

Which was precisely what Miss Collett meant that he should do.

As the silver-chiming clock struck ten she rose and said good-night. She
never allowed these sittings to be prolonged past ten. Neither did
Brodrick.

"And I am not to read any more proofs?" she said.

"Do you like reading them?"

She smiled. "It's not because I like it. I simply wanted to save you."

"You do save me most things."

"I try," she said sweetly, "to save you all."

He smiled now. "There are limits," he said, "even to your power of
saving me. And to my capacity for being saved."

The words were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not
aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for
the utterance of a divination not his own.

His secretary understood him better than he did himself. She had spent
three years in understanding him. And now, for the first time in three
years, her lucidity was painful.

She could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen.
Therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was
there.

"He did not mean anything," said Gertrude to herself. "He is not the
sort of man who means things." Which was true.




XX


Brodrick, living on Putney Heath, was surrounded by his family. It was
only fifteen minutes' walk from his front door to his brother John's
house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon; only five minutes from his back door
to Henry's house in Roehampton Lane. You went by a narrow foot-track
down the slope to get to Henry. You crossed the Heath by Wimbledon
Common to get to John. If John and Henry wanted to get to each other,
they had to pass by Brodrick's house.

Moor Grange was a half-way house, the great meeting-place of all the
Brodricks.

One fine warm Sunday in mid-May, about four o'clock, all the Brodricks
except Hugh were assembled on Hugh's lawn. There was Mr. John Brodrick,
the eldest brother, the head of the firm of Brodrick and Brodrick,
Electrical Engineers. There was Dr. Henry Brodrick, who came next to
John. He had brought Mrs. Heron, their sister (Mrs. Heron lived with
Henry, because Mr. Heron had run away with the governess, to the
unspeakable scandal of the Brodricks). There was Mrs. Louis Levine, who
came next to Mrs. Heron. There was Mrs. John Brodrick, not to be
separated from her husband, who, in a decorous dumbness and secrecy,
adored her; and Mr. Louis Levine, who owed his position among the
Brodricks to the very properly apparent devotion of his wife.

And there were children about. Eddy and Winny Heron, restless,
irrepressible in their young teens, sprawled at their mother's feet and
hung over her in attitudes of affection. One very small Levine trotted
to and fro on fat legs over the lawn. The other, too small to run, could
be seen in the background, standing in Gertrude Collett's lap and
trampling on her.

The Levines had come over from St. John's Wood, packed tight in their
commodious brand-new motor-car, the symbol of Levine's prosperity. So
that all Brodrick's family were at Putney this afternoon.

They were sitting in the delicate shadow of the lime-tree. Outside, the
lawn was drenched with light, light that ran quivering into the little
inlets and pools among the shadows. The cropped grass shone clear as
emerald, and all the garden showed clear-cut and solid and stable in its
propriety and order.

Still more distinct, more stable and more solid, more ineradicably fixed
in order and propriety, were the four figures of the Brodricks. Sitting
there, in a light that refused, in spite of the lime-tree, to lend
itself to any mystery or enchantment, they maintained themselves in a
positively formidable reality. All these Brodricks had firm,
thick-skinned faces in which lines came slowly, and were few but strong.
Faces, they were, of men who have lived in absolute sobriety and sanity,
untorn by any temptation to live otherwise; faces of women to whom
motherhood has brought the ultimate content.

Comfortably material persons, sitting in a deep peace, not to be rapt
from it by any fantasy, nor beguiled by any dream, they paid only in a
high morality their debt to the intangible.

This afternoon, in spite of themselves, they were roused somewhat from
the peace they sat in. They were expecting somebody.

"I suppose, when she arrives, we shall all have to sit at the lady's
feet," said Mrs. Levine.

"_I_'ve no objection," said the Doctor; "after what she's done."

"It was pretty decent of her," said Levine. He was dark, nervous and
solemn-eyed, a lean man of his race, and handsome. Sophy Brodrick had
not loved her husband when she married him. She adored him now, because
of the beauty that had passed from him into her children.

"I say, Uncle Louis, you _might_ tell me what she _did_ do," said Eddy
Heron.

"She got your Uncle Hughy out of a tight place, my boy."

"I say, what's _he_ been doing?"

Mr. Levine smiled inscrutably, while his wife shook her head at him.

"He's been going it, has he? Good old Uncle Hughy!"

Eddy's mother thought it would be nice if he and Winny went down the
Heath road to meet Uncle Hughy and Miss Holland. Whereupon Eddy embraced
his mother, being unable to agree with her.

"You really believe," said Mr. John Brodrick, who seemed anxious to be
sure of his facts before he committed himself, "you really believe that
if it had not been for this lady he'd have had to give it up?"

"Well," said Levine judicially, "she practically saved it. You see he
_would_ start it with George Tanqueray. And who cares about George
Tanqueray? That's what wrecked him. I told him at the time it was sheer
lunacy, but he wouldn't listen to me. _Why_" (Levine spoke in a small
excited voice with sudden high notes), "he hadn't subscriptions enough
to float the thing for twenty-four hours. As soon as he gets Miss
Holland they go up by leaps and bounds, and it's bin goin' steady ever
since. How long it'll keep goin's another thing."

"I understood Hugh to say," said John, "that the arrangements involved
some considerable sacrifice to the lady."

"Well, you see, he'd been a bit of an ass. He'd made her a ridiculous
offer, an offer _we_ simply couldn't afford, and we had to tell her so."

"And then," said Sophy, "you might as well mention that she gave it him
for what you _could_ afford."

"She certainly let him have it very cheap." He ruminated. "Uncommonly
cheap--considering what her figure is."

Eddy wanted to know what Miss Holland's figure had to do with his Uncle
Hughy. Winny, round-eyed with wonder, inquired if it was beautiful, and
was told that it was fairly beautiful, a tidy figure, a nice round
figure, like her Aunt Sophy's.

"That," said John, "was _very_ decent of her."

"Very," said the gentle lady, Mrs. John.

"It was splendid," said Mrs. Heron.

The Doctor meditated. "I wonder _why_ she did it," said the Doctor.

His brother-in-law explained. "Oh, she thought she'd let him in for
Tanqueray."

"Let him _in_?"

"Don't you see," said Mrs. Heron, "it was her idea of honour."

"A woman's idea of honour," said the Doctor.

"You needn't criticize it," said his sister Sophy.

"I don't," said the Doctor.

"I can tell you," said Levine, "what with her idea of honour and Hugh's
idea of honour, the office had a pretty rough time of it till they got
the business fixed."

"With Hugh's _ideas_," said John, "he's hardly likely to make this thing
pay, is he? Especially if he's going to bar politics."

He said it importantly. By a manner, by wearing spectacles, and brushing
his hair back in two semi-circles from his forehead, Mr. John Brodrick
contrived to appear considerably more important than he was.

"Ah, he's made a mistake there," said the Doctor.

"That's what _I_ tell him." Levine was more excited than ever.

"I should think he might be allowed to do what he likes," said Sophy.
"After all, it's _his_ magazine."

Mr. Levine's face remained supernaturally polite while it guarded his
opinion that it wasn't his brother-in-law's magazine at all. They had
disagreed about Tanqueray. They had disagreed about everything connected
with the magazine, from the make-up of the first number to the salary of
the sub-editor. They had almost quarreled about what Levine called "Miss
Holland's price." And now, when his wife said that it was Sunday--and if
they were going to talk business all the afternoon--she was told that
Hugh's magazine wasn't business. It was Hugh's game. (His dreadfully
expensive, possibly ruinous game.)

"Then," she said, "you might let him play it. I'm sure he works hard
enough on your horrid old 'Telegraph.'"

Sophy invariably stood up for her family against her husband. But she
would have stood up for her husband against all the world.

"Thank you, my pet." She stooped to the little three-year-old girl who
trotted to and fro, offering to each of these mysteriously, deplorably
preoccupied persons a flower without a stalk.

It was at this moment that Brodrick arrived from the station with Miss
Holland.

"Is it a garden-party?" Jane inquired.

"No," said Brodrick, "it's my family."

She came on with him over the lawn. And the group rose to its feet; it
broke up with little movements and murmurs, in a restrained, dignified
expectancy. Jane had the sense of being led towards some unaccountable
triumph and acclamation.

They closed round her, these unknown Brodricks, inaudibly stirred, with
some unspoken, incomprehensible emotion in the men's gaze and in the
women's touch. The big boy and girl shared it as they came forward in
their shyness, with affectionate faces and clumsy, abortive encounters
of the hand.

It was the whole Brodrick family moved to its depths, feeling as one. It
could only be so moved by the spectacle of integrity and honour and
incorruptible loyalty to It.

Still moved, it was surrounding Jane when a maid arrived with the
tea-table, and the white cloth waved a signal to Miss Collett across the
lawn. There was then a perceptible pause in the ovation as Brodrick's
secretary appeared.

Even across the lawn Jane could discern trouble in Miss Collett's face.
But Miss Collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time
she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile.
The smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance
of her hand. It implied that, if Miss Holland was to be set up in a high
place and worshipped, Miss Collett was anxious to observe the
appropriate ritual. Having observed it, she took, with her quiet,
inconspicuous assurance, the place that was her own. She gave but one
sign of her trouble when Dr. Brodrick was heard congratulating their
guest on the great serial which, said he, by "saving" the magazine, had
"saved" his brother. Then Gertrude quivered slightly, and the blood
flushed in her set face and passed as fierce heat passes through iron.

While they were talking Jane had opportunity to watch and wonder at the
firm, consolidated society that was Brodrick's family. These faces
proclaimed by their resemblance the material link. Mr. John Brodrick was
a more thick-set, an older, graver-lined, and grizzled Hugh, a Hugh who
had lost his sombre fixity of gaze. Dr. Henry Brodrick was a tall,
attenuated John, with a slightly, ever so slightly receding chin. Mrs.
Heron was Hugh again made feminine and slender. She had Hugh's features,
refined and diminished. She had Hugh's eyes, filled with some tragic
sorrow of her own. Her hair was white, every thread of it, though she
could not have been more than forty-five.

These likenesses were not so apparent at first sight in Mrs. Levine, the
golden, full-blown flower of the Brodricks. They had mixed so thoroughly
and subtly that they merged in her smoothness and her roundness. And
still the facial substance showed in the firm opacity of her skin, the
racial soul asserted itself in her poised complacence and decision.

"You don't know," she was saying, "how we're all sitting at your feet."

"We are indeed," said Mr. John Brodrick.

"Very much so," said the Doctor.

"Even little Cissy," said Hugh.

For little Cissy was bringing all her stalkless flowers to Jane; smiling
at her as if she alone possessed the secret of this play. Brodrick
watched, well-pleased, the silent traffic of their tendernesses.

The others were talking about Hambleby now. They had all read him. They
had all enjoyed him. They all wanted more of him.

"If we could only have had Hambleby, Miss Holland," said Levine. "It
wasn't my fault that we didn't get him."

Jane remembered that this was the brother-in-law whom Brodrick had
wanted to keep out. He had the air of being persistently, permanently
in.

"Of course it wasn't your fault," said she.

Levine then thought it necessary to say things about Jane's celebrity
till Brodrick cut him short.

"Miss Holland," he said, "doesn't like her celebrity. You needn't talk
about it."

John and Henry looked graver than ever, and Sophy made sweet eyes at
Jane. Sophy's eyes--when they looked at you--were very sweet. It was
through her eyes only that she apologized for her husband, whose own
eyes were manifestly incapable of apologizing for anything. The
Brodricks seemed to tolerate their brother-in-law; and he seemed, more
sublimely, to tolerate their tolerance.

Great efforts were now made to divert Levine from the magazine. Mr. John
Brodrick headed him off with motors and their makers; the Doctor kept
his half-resentful spirit moving briskly round the Wimbledon golf-links;
and Hugh, with considerable dexterity, landed him securely on the fiscal
question, where he might be relied upon to stay.

But it was the Baby who saw what was to be done if his parent was to be
delivered from his own offensiveness.

"Oh, look!" cried Winny. "Look at Baby. Making such a ducky angel of
himself."

The Baby, having sat down abruptly on the grass, was making a ducky
angel of himself by wriggling along it, obliquely, as he sat.

At the sight of him all the Brodricks instantaneously lost their
seriousness and sanity. He was captured and established as the centre of
the group. And, in the great act of adoration of the Baby, Levine was
once more united to his wife's family.

His wife's family, like his wife, could forgive anything to Louis Levine
because of the babies. It reserved its disapproval for Mrs. John
Brodrick who had never had any; who had never done anything that was
expected of her. Mrs. John looked as if she had cried a great deal
because of the things she had not done. She had small hazel eyes with
inflamed lids, and a small high nose that was always rather red. She was
well born, and she carried her low-browed, bird-like head among the
Brodricks with a solitary grace, and the motions of a dignified,
distinguished bird.

And now, in mute penitence and wistful worship, she prostrated herself
before their divinity, the Baby.

And in the middle of it all, with amazing smiles and chuckles, the Baby
suddenly renounced his family and held out his arms to Jane. And
suddenly all the Brodricks laughed. His mother laughed more than any of
them. She took the Baby, and set him at Jane's feet; and he sat there,
looking at Jane, as at some object of extraordinary interest and wonder
and fascination. And Brodrick looked at both of them with something of
the same naïf expression, and the Doctor, the attenuated, meditative
Doctor, looked at all three, but especially at his brother. Gertrude
Collett looked, now at Brodrick and now at Jane.

Brodrick did not see the Doctor or Gertrude either. It had just struck
him that Jane was not in the least like her portrait, _the_ portrait. He
was thinking, as Tanqueray had once thought, that Gisborne, R. A., was
an ass, and that if he could have her painted he would have her painted
as she looked now.

As he was trying to catch the look, Gertrude came and said it was the
Baby's tea-time, and carried him away. And the look went from Jane's
face, and Brodrick felt annoyed with Gertrude because she had made it
go.

Then Mrs. John came up and tried very hard to talk to Jane. She was
nervously aware that conversation was expected of her as the wife of the
head of the family, and that in this thing also she had failed him. She
was further oppressed by Miss Holland's celebrity, and by the idea she
had that Miss Holland must be always thinking of it and would not like
to see it thus obscured by any other interest.

And while Mrs. John sat beside her, painfully and pensively endeavouring
to converse, Jane heard Brodrick talking to Mrs. Levine.

"Where's Gertrude gone?" he said.

And Mrs. Levine answered, "She's indoors with the children."

Mrs. John was saying that Miss Holland must have known Hambleby; and
then again that no, that wasn't likely. That was what made it so
wonderful that she should know. Mrs. John could not have done it. She
recounted sorrowfully the number of things she could not do. And through
it all Jane heard the others talking about Gertrude.

"Gertrude looks very ill," said Mrs. Levine. "What's the matter with
her?"

"How should I know?" said Brodrick. "Ask Henry."

"Miss Collett," said the Doctor solemnly, "has not consulted me."

At this point Mrs. Heron delivered Jane from Mrs. John. She said she
wanted Miss Holland to see the sweet-peas in the kitchen garden.

And in the kitchen garden, among the sweet-peas, Mrs. Heron thanked Jane
on her own account for what she had done, while Jane kept on saying that
she had done nothing. All down the kitchen garden there was an alley of
sweet-peas with a seat at the end of it, and there they sat while Mrs.
Heron talked about her brother Hugh who had been so good to her and to
her children. This praise of Brodrick mingled with the scent of the
sweet-peas, so that Jane could never again smell sweet-peas in a hot
garden without hearing Brodrick's praise.

Mrs. Heron stopped abruptly, as if she could say no more, as if, indeed,
she had said too much, as if she were not used to saying such things.

"My brother thinks I may ask you to come and see me. Will you? Will you
come some day and stay with me?"

In spite of the voice that told her that she was being drawn, that this
family of Brodrick's was formidable, that she must be on her guard
against all arms, stretched out to her, before she knew what she was
doing Jane had said, Yes; she would be very glad.

Voices came to them then, and down the long alley between the sweet-peas
she saw Brodrick coming towards them with Miss Collett and Winny Heron;
and Jane was suddenly aware that it was getting late.

It was cold, too. She shivered. Miss Collett offered a wrap.

For a moment, in the hall of the house, Jane was alone with Brodrick's
secretary. Through the open door they could see Brodrick standing on the
lawn, talking to his sister. Mrs. Heron held him by one arm, Winny
dragged on the other.

"Those two seem devoted to Mr. Brodrick," said Jane.

"They ought to be," said Miss Collett, "with all he does for them. And
they are. The Brodricks are all like that." She looked hard at Jane. "If
you've done anything for them, they never forget it. They keep on paying
back."

Jane smiled.

"I imagine Mr. Hugh Brodrick would be quite absurd about it."

"Oh, _he_----" Gertrude raised her head. Her eyes adored him.

As if her pause were too profoundly revealing, she filled it up. "He'll
always give more than he gets. It isn't for _you_ he gives, it's for
himself. He likes giving. And when it comes to paying him back----."

"That's where he has you?"

"Yes."

And Jane thought, "My dear lady, if you wouldn't treat him quite so like
a god, he might have a chance to discover that he's mortal."

She would have liked to have said that to Miss Collett. She would have
liked to have taken Brodrick to the seat at the end of the alley and
have said to him, "It's all perfectly right. Don't be an idiot and miss
it. You can't do a better thing for yourself than marry her, and it's
the only way, you know, you can pay her back. Don't you see that you're
cruel to her? That it's you that's making her ill? She can't look pretty
when she's ill, but she'd be quite pretty if you made her happy."

But all she said was, "He's like that, is he?" And she went out to where
he waited for her.

"Have you _got_ to go?" he said.

She said, Yes, she was half expecting Nina Lempriere.

"The fiery lady?"

"Yes."

"You may as well stay. She won't be there," said Brodrick.

But Jane did not stay.

The whole family turned out on to the Heath to see them go. At the end
of the road they looked back and saw it there. Sophy Levine was holding
up the Baby to make him wave to Jane.

"Why did you tell them?" she said reproachfully to Brodrick.

"Because I wanted them to like you."

"Am I so disagreeable that they couldn't--without that?"

"I wanted you," he said, "to like _them_."

"I do like them."

He glanced at her sidelong and softly.

"Tell me," she said. "What have they done to look so happy, and so
perfectly at peace?"

"That's it. They haven't done anything."

"Not to do things--that's the secret, is it?"

"Yes," he said, "I almost think it is."

"I wonder," said she.




XXI


Brodrick was right. Nina was not there.

At the moment when Jane arrived, anxious and expectant, in Kensington
Square, Nina and Tanqueray were sitting by the window of the room in
Adelphi Terrace.

They were both silent, both immobile in the same attitude, bowed
forward, listening intently, the antagonistic pair made one in their
enchantment, their absorption.

A young man stood before Tanqueray. He stood a little behind Nina where
she sat in the window-seat. One shoulder leaned beside her against the
shutter. He was very tall, and as he stood there his voice, deep and
rhythmic, flowed and vibrated above them, giving utterance to the thing
that held them.

Nina could not see him where she sat. It was Tanqueray who kept on
looking at him with clear, contemplative eyes under brows no longer
irritable.

He was, Tanqueray thought, rather extraordinary to look at. Dressed in a
loosely-fitting suit of all seasons, he held himself very straight from
the waist, as if in defiance of the slackness of his build. His eyes,
his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their
dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high
cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils,
slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the
final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but
beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped,
pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening.
It had passed through strange climates. He had the look, this poet, of a
man who had left some stupendous experience behind him; who had left
many things behind him, to stride, star-gazing, on. His face revealed
him as he chanted his poems. Unbeautiful in detail, its effect as a
whole was one of extraordinary beauty, as of some marvellously pure
vessel for the spiritual fire. Beside him, it struck Tanqueray that Nina
showed more than ever a murky flame.

The voice ceased, but the two remained silent for a moment.

Then Tanqueray spoke one word, "Splendid!"

Nina turned her head and looked up at the poet. His eyes were still
following his vision. Her voice recalled him.

"Owen," she said, "will you bring the rest? Bring down all you've got."

Tanqueray saw as she spoke to him that there came again that betraying
tenderness about her mouth; as she looked at him, her eyes lifted their
hoods, revealing the sudden softness and surrender.

And as Tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man
were turned on him, rather than on Nina. They looked through him, as if
they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was going
on in Tanqueray's soul.

He said something inaudible to Nina and went out of the room with a
light, energetic stride.

"How can you stand his eyes?" said Tanqueray; "it's like being exposed
to the everlasting stare of God."

"It is, rather."

"What's his name again?"

"Owen Prothero."

"What do you know about him."

She told him what she knew. Prothero was, as Tanqueray saw, an unlicked
Celt. He had been, if Tanqueray would believe it, in the Indian Medical
Service, and had flung it up before he got his pension. He had been to
British Central Africa on a commission for investigating sleeping
sickness; he spoke of it casually as if it were the sort of thing you
naturally were on. He had volunteered as a surgeon in the Boer War. And
with it all he was what Tanqueray saw.

"And his address?" Tanqueray inquired.

"He lives here."

"Why shouldn't he?" He answered her challenging eyes. They shot light at
him.

"He is a great poet? I _was_ right?"

"Absolutely. He's great enough for anybody. How on earth did you get
hold of him?"

She was silent. She seemed to be listening for the sound of Prothero's
feet on the stair.

He was soon with them, bringing his sheaf of manuscript. He had brought
all he had got. The chanting began again and continued till the light
failed.

And as Tanqueray listened the restless, irritable devilry passed from
his face. Salient, thrust forward toward Prothero, it was the face of a
winged creature in adoration, caught suddenly into heaven, breasting the
flood of the supernal light. For Tanqueray could be cruel in his
contempt for all clevernesses and littlenesses, for all achievements
that had the literary taint; but he was on his knees in a moment before
the incorruptible divinities. He had the immortal's scent for
immortality.

When the chanting ceased they talked.

Tanqueray warned Prothero of the horrors of premature renown. Prothero
declared that he had none. Nobody knew his name.

"Good," said Tanqueray. "Celebrity's all very well at the end, when
you've done the things you want to do. It's a bad beginning. It doesn't
matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to
know you're celebrated till you're dead. But if you _will_ live in
London, your only chance is to remain obscure."

"There are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand
celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles
where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each
other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other.
Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat----"

"_Don't_, George!" cried Nina.

"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of
each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at
each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do
anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere?
Horrid used-up air that authors--beasts!--have breathed over and over
and over again."

"As if," said Nina, "_we_ weren't authors."

"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it
of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."

"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."

"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."

At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he
wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his
poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.

Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were.
He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There
were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of
immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on
immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things
most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance
for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired.
They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He
stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides
and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he
could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There
was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The
form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous
and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord.

It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still
more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that
Tanqueray could get it for him.

He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote
things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them
into letter-boxes. As to what became of them, Tanqueray had never seen
anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event.

He went away with Prothero's poems in his pocket.

Nina followed him and held him on the doorstep.

"You do believe in him?" she said.

"What's the good of _my_ believing in him? I can't help him. I can't
help myself. He's got to wait, Nina, like the rest of us. It won't hurt
him."

"It will. He can't wait, George. He's desperately poor. You must do
something."

"What can I do?"

"There are things," she said, "that people always do."

"I could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it."

"No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him
to meet that man of yours."

"What man?"

"That magazine man, Brodrick."

He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine!
Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane
about Prothero?"

"No."

A faint flame leaped in her face and died.

"You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could
even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?"

"I haven't seen her for six months."

"Is that your fault or hers?"

"Neither."

"He's had to wait, then, six months?"

There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.

"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to
the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and
then she has a way with her."

Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.

"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take
him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.

"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."

Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves,
was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He
lingered.

"I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of
me, and I can't blame him, poor devil."

"It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland."

"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."

He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She
would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her.
She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had
seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it
again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness,
was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So
amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good
deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.

Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of
his own youth.

He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew
more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a
family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a
hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after
year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left
her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.

It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London,
lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina
Lempriere.

The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner
room, preparing their supper.

There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the
medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long
intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains.
They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own
dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen
him.

He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his
perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild
places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid
of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the
fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let
him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would
sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that
up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.

He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed
state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He
was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could
live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got
work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently
open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the
problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style
and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.

It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver
than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.

She would have suggested his meeting Brodrick, but that the way to
Brodrick lay through Jane Holland. She remembered that the gods had
thrust Jane Holland between her and George Tanqueray; and she was
determined that they should put no woman between her and Owen Prothero.
She had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself.
The supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. It
dominated her desire to serve his interests. But she had not refused him
when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see George Tanqueray, the
only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any
sweep, any clearness of vision.

It was Tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that
vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. She
had no right to keep Owen to herself. He was too valuable.

His innocence had given a sting to her remorse. He had remained so
completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware
of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. Things came, he
seemed to say, or they didn't come. If you were wise you waited.

With his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs,
standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood
absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was
manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly
indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated
to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some
inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina as she entered.

She called him to the supper she had made ready for him. He swung round,
returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her.

He was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. It
was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the
outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred.

Nina began it. "Owen," she said, "how did George Tanqueray strike you?"

He paused before he spoke. "I think," he said, "I never in my life saw
anybody more on the look-out. It's terrible, that prowling genius,
always ready to spring."

"I know," she said, "he sees everything."

"No, Nina, he doesn't. He's a man whose genius has made away with one
half of his capacity for seeing. That's his curse! If your eyes are
incessantly looking out they lose the power of looking in."

"And yet, he's the only really great psychologist we've got. He and Jane
Holland."

"Yes, as they go, your psychologists. Tanqueray sees so much inside
other people that he can't see inside himself. What's worse, I shouldn't
think he'd see far inside the people who really touch him. It comes of
perpetually looking away."

"You don't know him. How can you tell?"

"Because I never look away."

"Can you see what's going on inside _me_?"

"Sometimes. I don't always look."

"Can you help looking?"

"Of course you can."

"You _may_ look. I don't think I mind your looking. Why," she asked
abruptly, "don't I mind?"

Her voice had an accent that betrayed her.

"Because there's nothing inside you that you're ashamed of."

She reddened with shame; shame of the fierce, base instinct that had
made her keep him to herself. She knew that nothing escaped him. He had
the keen, comprehending eyes of the physician who knows the sad secrets
of the body; and he had other eyes that saw inward, that held and drew
to confession the terrified, reluctant soul. She had an insane longing
to throw herself at his feet in confession.

"Yes," she said, "but there are _things_----And yet----"

He stopped her. "Nothing, Nina, if you really knew yourself."

"Owen--it's not that. It's not because I don't know myself. It's because
I know you. I know that, whatever there might be in me, whatever I did,
however low I sank--if I could sink--your charity would be there to hold
me up. And it wouldn't be your charity, either. I couldn't stand your
charity. It wouldn't even be understanding. You don't understand me. It
would be some knowledge of me that I couldn't have myself, that nobody
but you could have. As if whatever you saw you'd say, 'That isn't really
Nina.'"

"I should say, 'That's really Nina, so it's all right.'"

She paused, brooding on the possibilities he saw, that he was bound to
see, if he saw anything. Did he, she wondered, really see what was in
her, her hidden shames and insanities, the course of the wild blood that
he knew must flow from all the Lemprieres to her? She lived, to be sure,
the life of an ascetic and took it out in dreams. Yet he must see how
her savage, solitary passion clung to him, and would not let go. Did he
see, and yet did he not condemn her?

"Owen," she said suddenly, "do you mind seeing?"

"Sometimes I hate it. These aren't the things, you know, I want to see."

She lowered her eyes. Her nervous hand moved slowly to and fro along the
window-sill, measuring her next words.

"What--do you want--to see?"

He rose to his feet and looked at her. At her, not through her, and she
wondered, had he seen enough? It was as if he withdrew himself before
some thought that stirred in her, menacing to peace.

"I can't tell you," he said. "I can't talk about it."

Then she knew what he meant. He was thinking of his vision, his vision
of God.

He could not speak of it to her. She had never known him. This soul,
with which her own claimed kindred, was hidden from her by all the veils
of heaven.

"I know," she said. "Only tell me one thing. Was that what you went out
to India and Central Africa to see?"

That drew him.

"No. I went out not to see it. To get away from it. I meant to give
things their chance. That's why I went in for medicine. I wasn't going
to shirk. I wanted to be a man. Not a long-haired, weedy thing in a soft
hat."

"Was it any good?"

"Yes. I proved the unreality of things. I proved it up to the hilt. And
I _did_n't shirk."

"But you wanted to escape, all the time?"

"I didn't escape. I couldn't. I couldn't catch cholera, or plague, _or_
sleeping sickness. I couldn't catch anything."

"You tried?"

"Oh, yes, I gave _myself_ a chance. That was only fair. But it was no
use. I couldn't even get frightened."

"Owen--some people would say you were morbid."

"No, they wouldn't. They'd say I was mad. They _will_ say it when I've
published those poems."

"Did you mind my showing them to George Tanqueray?"

"No. But it's no use. Nobody knows my name."

"May I show them to Jane Holland?"

"Show them to any one you like. It'll be no use either."

"Owen--does it never occur to you that any human being can be of use?"

"No." He considered the point. "No, I can't say it ever does."

He stood before her, wrapped in his dream, removed from her, utterly
forgetful.

She had her moment of pain in contemplating him. He saw it in her face,
and as it were came back to her.

"Don't imagine," he said, "that I don't know what _you_'ve done. Now
that I do know you."

She turned, almost in anger. "I've done nothing. You don't know me." She
added, "I am going to write to Jane Holland."

When he had left her she sat a long while by the window, brooding on the
thing that had happened to her a second time.

She had fallen in love; fallen with the fatality of the Lemprieres, and
with the fine precipitate sweep of her own genius. And she had let
herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for
loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces.
Owen's nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences
of her sex. They were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and
disembodied.

She knew that in his way, his remote and disembodied way, he cared for
her. She knew that in whatever place he held her she was alone there.
She was the only woman for whom as yet he had cared. His way was not
Tanqueray's way. It was a way that kept her safe. She had sworn that
there were to be no more George Tanquerays; and there were none. She had
done with that.

Not but that she was afraid of Owen. She had taken possession of him in
fear, a secret, unallowed possession, a holding with hands invisible,
intangible. For she had wisdom, the sad wisdom of the frustrate; it, and
the insight of her genius, told her that Owen would not endure a tie
less spiritual than friendship. She knew George Tanqueray's opinion of
her. He was justified.

But though she sacrificed so far to spirit, it was her flesh and blood
that shrank from the possible communion of Owen Prothero and Jane
Holland. For Jinny, as Tanqueray said, had a way with her; and she knew
Jinny's way. Jinny would take Owen Prothero from her as she had taken
George, not deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she was
Jinny and had a way. Besides, Jane could do for him what she with her
bare genius could not do, and that thought was insupportable to Nina.
Yesterday she had been everything to him. Tomorrow Jane would be as
much, or more.

And there were other women. They would be as ready as she to take
possession. They would claim his friendship, and more than she had
claimed, as the reward of having recognized him. There was no reason why
she should give Owen up, and hand him over to them. And this was what
she would do if she wrote that letter to Jane Holland.

She rose, and went to her desk and wrote it.




XXII


Jane answered at once. If Nina would bring Prothero to Kensington on
Friday at four o'clock he would meet Hugh Brodrick.

But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about
women's drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you
harm. He wanted to hold on to what he'd got. It was tricky; it came and
went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up
with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.

Nina assured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was,
she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian
jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden
him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the manuscript,
should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or
three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly,
were all about God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. Owen
Prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she
said, to handicap him.

Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she
proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson.
Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were
very far from appreciating him. He knew a multitude of little men on
papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about
singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it,
might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote
for the papers.

The reading was fixed for Friday at four o'clock. Tanqueray, who
detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero's sake. His
letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the
others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally.
She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things
were going badly at the moment.

Laura, however, was the first to arrive.

"Who is this man of Nina's?" said she.

"I don't know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."

She showed her Nina's letter.

Laura's face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly
indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.

"But why God?" was her profane comment.

"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."

Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to
believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her
arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George
Tanqueray.

Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro
Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.

He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to
banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt,
impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here
to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow
Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for
Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray,
too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was
always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him.
There was Brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland
had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott
Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small
thing and an easy thing for her to do.

It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank,
in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his
little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the
unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does
not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women.
He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.

And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected
in the sorrow of this thought.

Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had
been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could
also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with
the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be
pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And
from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he
could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he
could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on
concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had
threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial
co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to
do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he
hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.

As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with
resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.

And Jane, who knew what passed in Brodrick's mind, was downcast in her
turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him,
that she was always trying to get at him.

Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the
manuscript. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of
the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at
Tanqueray over Nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her;
Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they
could look at Jane.

It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero's poems
of the Vision of God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane,
absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; to
Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to
Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the
mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.

They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul's mortal
terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul,
of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine
consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of God.

Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was
dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude of extreme depression.
His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a
sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to
himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by
Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his
desire, sublimely renouncing.

Brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his
lowering brows, looked up at Jane's, gathering from them her judgment of
Owen Prothero. Prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and
Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a
gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and
troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a
creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp
flame of the spirit.

It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers
for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader's
voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.

Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul
surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away
into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.

And Laura, who did not believe in God, Laura sat motionless, her small
insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over
her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange
softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face
of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes
were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared
at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.

She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came
forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his
own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had
sunk into. Everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating
passage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic
and curt.

Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "He
_is_ great," said poor Nicky.

"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."

Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and
Jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him.

Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she
turned eastwards with Nina.

"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.

"It depends," said Nina. "He's seen George."

"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know
him."

Nina's face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten
look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it
said.

"He hasn't got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was
overwrought. "He's got to be heard. You've heard him."

"It's because I've heard him that I want to see him."

Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The
small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen
suffering, its despondency, its doubt.

Nina was stung by compassion.

"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.

"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't."

"All right. You shall. I'll make him come."




XXIII


Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from
George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused
to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the
autumn, at their own and not Prothero's expense.

How the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and Tanqueray was
careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance
of Jinny's way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray's hands, had been
meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray
vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They
had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared
to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland
must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every
other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger
of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their
enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr.
Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public
that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional
opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss
Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them.
They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own
sake, she would reconsider it.

Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.

"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you're paying
for Prothero's poems?"

To that Jinny had replied, "It's what I wanted to do, and there wasn't
any other way."

Owen Prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. His
innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made
and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created
for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to
incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his
innocence. Tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant;
Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met
Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had
not met him.

It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey
of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this
incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept
Nina's unlicked Celt outside women's drawing-rooms.

She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than
not, at Tanqueray's rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray's wife did not
count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and
she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it
was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray's wife.

One afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She
approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy
little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.

But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across,
obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before
the door.

Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the
house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the
little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs.
Tanqueray.

She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the
doctor was.

"Don't go, Jinny," he said.

She searched his face.

"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"

He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She
recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from
him.

"Oh, dear me, no," he said.

"May I see her--afterwards?"

"Of course you may see her. But"--he smiled--"if you'll come up-stairs
you'll see Prothero."

She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high
above Rose and her movements and her troubles.

He paused at the door.

"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of
you."

"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"

"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."

"George, is he really there?"

"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away
from you."

"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."

He laughed and they went in.

The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at
some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct
of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the
singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of
the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by
the guile she judged dishonourable.

Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the
doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.

They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that
had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and
vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that
they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.

It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was
obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow
now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed
through strange climates.

It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she
knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that
must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself
secretly defining it. Tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain
and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she
had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of
his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his
singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion.
When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently
nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an
incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable
distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made
swift by hunger.

Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also
suggested the thing she at last said.

"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."

Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had
been.

"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out
for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint
and----"

She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"

"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"

"It's natural," she pleaded.

"Natural? It's one of the most unnatural marriages I've ever come
across. It's a crime against nature for a man like Tanqueray to have
taken that poor little woman--who is nature pure and simple--and condemn
her to----"

She drew back visibly. "I know. He doesn't see it," she said.

"He doesn't see anything. He doesn't even know she's there. How can he?
His genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of
it outside his own imagination. That's where you are with your great
realists."

She gazed at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so
estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact.

"You mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?"

He shrugged his shoulders at her reference.

"He would have more room," he said, "that would be all. He could at any
rate afford to take more risks."

They were silent again.

"I believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. I shall have to go."

Jane turned her head. The sounds he heard so distinctly were inaudible
to her.

They proved to be footsteps on the staircase, footsteps that could never
have been Rose's nor yet Tanqueray's. They paused heavily at the door.
Some one was standing there, breathing.

A large woman entered very slowly, and Jane arrived, also slowly, at the
conclusion that it must be Mrs. Eldred, George's wife's aunt.

Mrs. Eldred acknowledged her presence and Prothero's by a vague movement
of respect. It was not till Prothero had gone that she admitted that she
would be glad to take a chair. She explained that she was Rose's aunt,
and that she had never been up them stairs before and found them tryin'.

Jane expressed sorrow for that fact and for Rose's illness.

Mrs. Eldred sighed an expository sigh.

"She's frettin' an' she's worritin'. She's worritin' about 'Im. It isn't
natch'ral, that life 'E leads, and it's tellin' on 'er."

"Something's telling on her."

Mrs. Eldred leaned forward and lowered her voice. "It's this way, miss.
'E isn't properly a 'usban' to 'er."

"You shouldn't say that, Mrs. Eldred. He's very fond of her."

"Fond of 'er I dare say 'E may be. But 'E neglec's 'er."

"You shouldn't say that, either."

"Well, miss, I can't 'elp sayin' it. Wot else _is_ it, when 'E shuts
'imself up with 'is writin' all day long and 'alf the night, and she
a-settin' and a-frettin'?"

She looked round the room, apparently recognizing with resentment the
scene of Tanqueray's perpetual infidelity.

"But," said Jane, "he'd be away as much if he was in business."

"'Ef 'E was in business there'd be the evenin's to look forward to. And
there'd be 'is Saturdays and Sundays. As it is, wot is there for her to
look forward to?"

"At any rate she knows he's there."

"It's knowin' that 'E's there wot does it. It's not as if she 'ad a
'ouse to look after, or a little baby to take 'er mind orf of 'im."

"No, it isn't."

A sound of yapping came faintly up from the ground-floor.

"That's Joey," said Mrs. Eldred tearfully, "'er Pom as she was so fond
of. I've brought 'im. And I've brought Minny too."

"Minny?" Jane had not heard of Minny.

"The cat, miss. They'll keep 'er company. It's but right as she should
'ave them."

Jane assented warmly that it was but right.

"It's not," Mrs. Eldred continued, "as if she came reg'lar, say once in
a week, to see 'er uncle and me. She'll go to Camden Town and set with
that poor old Mr. Gunning. Give Rose any one that's ill. But wot is that
_but_ settin'? And now, you see, with settin' she's ill. It's all very
well when you're brought up to it, but she isn't. Rose'd be well if she
'ad a 'ouse and did the work in it. And 'E won't let 'er 'ave it. 'E
won't 'ear of 'er workin', 'E says."

"Well, naturally, he wouldn't like to see his wife working."

"Then, miss, 'E should 'ave married a lady 'as wouldn't want to work.
That's wot 'E should have done. We were always against it from the
first, 'er uncle and me was. But they was set, bein' young-like."

Mrs. Eldred's voice ceased suddenly as Tanqueray entered. Jane
abstained from all observation of their greeting. She was aware of an
unnatural suavity in Tanqueray's manner. He carried it so far as to
escort Mrs. Eldred all the way down to the ground-floor sitting-room
where Rose was.

He returned with considerable impetus to Jane.

"Well, Jinny, so you've seen my aunt-in-law?"

"I have," said Jinny contumaciously, "and I like her."

"What do you think? She's brought a dog on a chain and a beast of a cat
in a basket."

Jinny abstained from sympathy, and Tanqueray grew grave.

"I wish I knew what was the matter with Rose," he said. "She doesn't
seem to get much better. The doctor swears it's only liver; but he's a
silly ass."

"Tanks, there's nothing the matter really, except--the poor little bird
wants to build its nest. It wants sticks and straws and feathers and
things----"

"Do you mean I've got to go and find a beastly house?"

"Let her go and find it."

"I would in a minute--only I'm so hard up."

"Of course you'll be hard up if you go on living in rooms like this."

"That's what she says. But when she talks about a house she means that
she'll do all the work in it."

"Why not?" said Jane.

"Why not? I married her because I wasn't going to have her worked to
death in that damned lodging-house of her uncle's."

"You married her because you loved her," said Jane quietly.

"Well--of course. And I'm not going to let my wife cook my dinner and
make my bed and empty my slops. How can I?"

"She'll die if you don't, George."

"Die?"

"She'll get horribly ill. She's ill now because she can't run about and
sweep and dust and cook dinners. She's dying for love of all the
beautiful things you won't let her have--pots and pans and
carpet-sweepers and besoms. You don't want her to die of an unhappy
passion for a besom?"

"I don't want to see her with a besom."

Jane pleaded. "She'd look so pretty with it, George. Just think how
pretty she'd look in a little house, playing with a carpet-sweeper."

"On her knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor----"

"You'd have a woman in to scrub."

"Carrying the coals?"

"_You'd_ carry the coals, George."

"By Jove, I never thought of that. I suppose I could." He pondered.

"You see," he said, "she wants to live at Hampstead."

"You can't cut her off from her own people."

"I'm not cutting her off. She goes to see them."

"She'll go to see them if you live at Hampstead. If you live here
they'll come and see you. For she'll be ill and they'll have to."

Tanqueray looked at her, not without admiration.

"Jinny, you're ten times cleverer than I."

"In some things, Tanks, I am. And so is that wife of yours."

"She's--very sensible. I suppose it's sensible to be in love with a
carpet-sweeper."

She shook her head at him.

"Much more sensible than being in love with _you_."

His eyes evaded her. She rose.

"Oh, Tanks, you goose. Can't you see that it's you she's in love
with--and that's why she _must_ have a carpet-sweeper?"

With that she left him.

He followed her to the doorstep where he turned abruptly from her
departure.

Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just
set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from
her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast,
scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other
hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the
saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient
to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face
as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and
gravity. A slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how Rose
had suffered from the sedentary life.

All this Tanqueray saw as he entered. It held him on the threshold,
unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog,
who resented his intrusion.

Rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face.

"Oh, George," she said, "don't make me send them away. Let me keep
them."

"I suppose you must keep them if you want them."

"I never said I wanted them. Aunt _would_ bring them. She thought they'd
be something to occupy my mind, like."

Tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of Rose
having a mind.

Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not
laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now.

"The doctor--'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now,
for Joey's sake."

"Poor Joey."

He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous
hind-legs, straining to lick his hand.

"His hair doesn't come on, Rose----"

"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air
backwards----"

"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right,
anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."

"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."

She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized
Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not
beautiful.

"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."

It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child
at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.

"I may keep him, too?"

At that he kissed her.

By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could
only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical
industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of
ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very
miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and
with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about
him like this and destroyed his peace.

It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house
indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was
everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and
pressure of life.

It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was
indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not
in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it
remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could
afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray,
could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was
suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat.

Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was
the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same
reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it
enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. It reproduced
reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's
place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things
that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room.

Yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. He
approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion,
but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own
violence. If he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had
on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his
mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn
him into it.

Rose had not drawn him in. She had done nothing assailing and
destructive. She was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man
bent on solitude could have selected. The little thing had never got in
his way. She was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to
the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of
his senses. Up till now he would hardly have known that he was married;
it had been so easy to ignore her.

But to-day she had been forced on his attention. The truth about Rose
had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by Prothero, by the
doctor, by Mrs. Eldred and by Jane. It was the same naked truth that in
his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness
to the British public. His genius knew no other law but truth to Nature,
trust in Nature, unbroken fidelity to Nature. And now it was Nature that
arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in Rose. His
genius had made Rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable
lust and impulse to create.

Eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. Through his window
he heard the front door open and Rose's little feet on the pavement, and
Rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "Puss--Puss--Puss.
Minny--Min--Min--Minny. Puss--Puss--Puss."

He sighed. He had realized for the first time that he was married.




XXIV


Nina kept her promise, although Prothero protested that he saw no reason
why he should be taken to see Laura Gunning. He was told that he need
not be afraid of Laura. She was too small, Nina said, to do him any
harm. Refusing to go and see Laura was like refusing to go and see a
sick child. Ultimately, with extreme unwillingness, he consented.

Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in
Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and
space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of
Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as
Papa.

It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy;
for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and
now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but
Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her
diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation
in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the
least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were
things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand
facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to
the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty
pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.

And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she
drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would
turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had
not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They
were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.

It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty
had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test,
justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in
her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing.
For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to
her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not
have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden
Town.

It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still
more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity.
There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that
stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window.
There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of
the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's
writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the
fireplace. That was all.

Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly
ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.

Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an
atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or
spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold
self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four
walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret.
Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense
of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof,
drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to
cling.

Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments
of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the
old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and
then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching,
an immovable, perpetual fear.

Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy,
childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat,
slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment
before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.

He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she
gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the
fragile thing.

He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of
her, that she couldn't do him any harm.

He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad;
the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features
cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood,
their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw
all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it
slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead,
the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.

And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it
evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of
his fear.

She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own
folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She
might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in
her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing,
pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fierce
concentration, saw that she was virginity reduced to its last and most
exquisite simplicity.

They had said nothing to each other. Laura, in the wonderful hour of his
coming, could find nothing to say to him. He noticed that she and Nina
talked in low, rapid voices, as if they feared that at any moment the
old man might awake.

Then Laura arose and began to get tea ready, moving very softly in her
fear.

"You'd better let me cut the bread and butter," said Prothero.

Laura let him.

Nina heard them talking over the bread and butter while Laura made the
tea. She saw that his eyes did not follow her about the room, but that
they rested on her when she was not looking.

"You were hard at work when we came," he was saying.

Laura denied it.

"If I may say so, you look as if you'd been at it far too long."

"No. I'm never at it long enough. The bother is getting back to where
you were half-an-hour ago. It seems to take up most of the time."

"Then I oughtn't--ought I--to take up any of it?"

"Oh, please," said Laura, "take it. _I_ can't do anything with it."

She had the air of offering it to him like bread and butter on a plate.

"Time," she said, "is about all we've got here. At any rate there will
be time for tea." She examined the cupboard. "It looks as if time were
about all we were going to have for tea." She explored the ultimate
depth of the cupboard. "I wonder if I could find some jam. Do you like
jam?"

"I adore it."

That was all they said.

"Need you," said Nina to Prothero, "spread the butter quite so thick?"
Even in her agony she wondered how much, at the rate he was spreading
it, would be left for the Kiddy's supper.

"He shall spread it," said the Kiddy superbly, "as thick as ever he
likes."

They called Nina to the table. She ate and drank; but Laura's tea
scalded her; Laura's bread and butter choked her; she sickened at it;
and when she tried to talk her voice went dry in her throat.

And in his chair by the fireside, the old man dropped from torpor to
torpor, apart and unaware of them. When he waked they would have to go.

"Do you think," said Laura, "I'd better wake Papa?"

That was a question which this decided little person had never been able
to decide for herself. It was too momentous.

"No," said Nina, "I think you'd better not."

It was then that Mr. Gunning waked himself, violently; starting and
staring, his pale eyes round with terror; for his sunstroke had made him
dream dreams.

Laura gave an inarticulate murmur of compassion. She knelt by him, and
held his hands in hers and stroked them.

"What is it, Papa dear, have you had a little dream? Poor darling," she
said, "he has such horrid ones."

Mr. Gunning looked about him, still alarmed, still surrounded as in his
dream, by appalling presences. He was a little man, with a weak,
handsome face, worn and dragged by emotion.

"What's all this? What's all this?" he reiterated, until out of the
throng of presences he distinguished dimly a woman's form. He smiled at
it. He was almost wide awake now.

"Is it Rose?" he said.

"No, Papa. It's Nina."

Mr. Gunning became dejected. If it had been Rose she would have sat
beside him and talked to him a little while.

He was perfectly wide awake now; he had seen Prothero; and the sight of
Prothero revived in him his one idea. His idea was that every man who
saw Laura would want to pick the little thing up and carry her away from
him. He was haunted by the fear of losing Laura. He had lost everything
he had and had forgotten it; but a faint memory of disaster persisted in
his idea.

"What are you going to do with my little girl?" he said. "You're not
going to take her away? I won't have that. I won't have that."

"Isn't he funny?" said Laura, unabashed. And from where she knelt, there
on the verge of her terror, she looked up at the young man and laughed.
She laughed lest Prothero should feel uncomfortable.

Nina had risen for departure, and with a slow, reluctant movement of his
long body, Prothero rose too. Nina could have sworn that almost he bowed
his head over Laura's hand.

"May I come and see you again some day?" he said. And she said she would
be very glad.

That was all.

Outside in the little dull street he turned to Nina.

"It wasn't fair, Nina; you didn't tell me I was going to have my heart
wrung."

"How could I know," she said fiercely, "what would wring your heart?"

He looked away lest he should seem to see what was in her.

But she knew he saw.




XXV


Three weeks passed. Prothero had been four times to see Miss Gunning. He
had been once because she said he might come again; once because of a
book he had promised to lend her; once because he happened to be
passing; and once for no reason whatsoever. It was then borne in on him
that what he required was a pretext. Calling late one evening he caught
Miss Gunning in the incredible double act of flinging off a paragraph
for the papers while she talked to Mr. Gunning.

His pretext, heaven-sent, unmistakable, stared him in the face. He could
not write paragraphs for the papers (they wouldn't take his paragraphs),
but he could talk to Mr. Gunning. It was not so difficult as he would
have at first supposed. He had already learnt the trick of it. You took
a chair. You made a statement. Any statement would do. You had only to
say to Mr. Gunning, "Isn't that so?" and he would bow and assure you,
with a solemn courtesy, that it was, and sit up waiting patiently for
you to do it again; and you went on talking to Miss Gunning until he
showed signs of restlessness. When you had done this several times
running he would sink back in his chair appeased. But Prothero had
discovered that if you concentrated your attention on Mr. Gunning, if
you exposed him to a steady stream of statements, he invariably went to
sleep; and while he slept Laura wrote.

And while Laura wrote, Owen could keep on looking at her as much as he
liked.

From where he sat his half-closed eyes could take in rather more than a
side view of Laura. He could see her head as it bent and turned over her
work, showing, now the two low waves of its dark hair, now the flat
coils at the back that took the beautiful curve of Laura's head. From
time to time she would look up at him and smile, and he would smile
back again under his eyelids with a faint quiver of his moustache.

And Laura said to herself, "He is rather ugly, but I like him."

It was not odd that she should like him; but what struck her as amazing
was the peace that in his presence settled on Papa. Once he had got over
the first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see
Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head
thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of
continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had
happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and
vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of
opulence people had come to see him; now they only came to see Laura.
They were always the same people, Miss Holland and Miss Lempriere and
Mr. Tanqueray. They did no positive violence to the illusion; in their
way they ministered to it. They took their place among the company of
brilliant and indifferent strangers whom he had once entertained with
cold ceremony and a high and distant courtesy. They stayed for a short
time by his chair, they drifted from it into remote corners of the room,
they existed only for each other and for Laura. Thus one half of his
dream remained incomprehensible to Mr. Gunning. He did not really know
these people.

But he knew Mr. Prothero, who took a chair beside him and stayed an hour
and smoked a pipe with him. He had known him intimately and for a long
time. His figure filled the dark and empty places in the illusion, and
made it warm, tangible and complete. And because the vanished smokers,
the comrades of the days of opulence, had paid hardly any attention to
Laura, therefore Mr. Gunning's mind ceased to connect Prothero with his
formidable idea.

Laura, who had once laughed at it, was growing curiously sensitive to
the idea. She waited for it in dreadful pauses of the conversation; she
sat shivering with the expectation of its coming. Sooner or later it
would come, and when it did come Papa would ask Mr. Prothero his
intentions, and Mr. Prothero, having of course no intentions, would go
away and never have anything to do with them again.

Prothero had not yet asked himself his intentions or even wondered what
he was there for, since, as it seemed, it was not to talk to Laura.
There had been opportunities, moments, pauses in the endless procession
of paragraphs, when he had tried to draw Laura out; but Laura was not to
be drawn. She had a perfect genius for retreating, vanishing from him
backwards, keeping her innocent face towards him all the time, but
backing, backing into her beloved obscurity. He felt that there were
things behind her that forbade him to pursue.

Of the enchantment that had drawn her in the beginning, she had not said
a word. When it came to that they were both silent, as by a secret
understanding and consent. They were both aware of his genius as a thing
that was and was not his, a thing perpetually present with them but
incommunicable, the very heart of their silence.

One evening, calling about nine o'clock, he found her alone. She told
him that Papa was very tired and had gone to bed. "It is very good of
you," she said, "to come and sit with him."

Prothero smiled quietly. "May I sit with _you_ now?"

"Please do."

They sat by the fireside, for even in mid-June the night was chilly. A
few scattered ashes showed at the lowest bar of the grate. Laura had
raked out the fire that had been lit to warm her father.

Papa, she explained, was not always as Mr. Prothero saw him now. His
illness came from a sunstroke.

He said, yes; he had seen cases like that in India.

"Then, do you think----"

She paused, lest she should seem to be asking for a professional
opinion.

"Do I think? What do I think?"

"That he'll get better?"

He was silent a long time.

"No," he said. "But he need never be any worse. You mustn't be afraid."

"I _am_ afraid. I'm afraid all the time."

"What of?"

"Of some awful thing happening and of my not having the nerve to face
it."

"You've nerve enough for anything."

"You don't know me. I'm an utter coward. I can't face things. Especially
the thing I'm afraid of."

"What is it? Tell me." He leaned nearer to her, and she almost
whispered.

"I'm afraid of his having a fit--epilepsy. He _might_ have it."

"He might. But he won't. You mustn't think of it."

"I'm always thinking of it. And the most--the most awful thing is
that--I'm afraid of _seeing_ it."

She bowed her head and looked away from him as if she had confessed to
an unpardonable shame.

"Poor child. Of course you are," said Prothero. "We're all afraid of
something. I'm afraid, if you'll believe it, of the sight of blood."

"You?"

"I."

"Oh--but you wouldn't lose your head and run away from it."

"Wouldn't I?"

"No. Or you couldn't go and be a doctor. Why," she asked suddenly, "did
you?"

"_Because_ I was afraid of the sight of blood. You see, it was this way.
My father was a country doctor--a surgeon. One day he sent me into his
surgery. The butcher had been thrown out of his cart and had his cheek
cut open. My father was sewing it up, and he wanted me--I was a boy
about fifteen at the time--to stand by with lumps of cotton-wool and mop
the butcher while he sewed him up. What do you suppose I did?"

"You fainted?--You were ill on the spot?"

"No. I wasn't on the spot at all. I ran away."

A slight tremor passed over the whiteness of her face; he took it for
the vibration of some spiritual recoil.

"What do you say to that?"

"I don't say anything."

"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a
hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."

"They might have known," she said.

"They might have known what?"

"That you were different."

"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept
rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put
it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a
skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd
got to prove that I _was_ a man--that I wasn't different after all."

"Well--you proved it."

"If I did my father never knew it."

"And your mother?" she said softly.

"I believe she knew."

"But wasn't she glad to know you were different?"

"I never let her know, really, how different I was."

"You kept it to yourself?"

"It was the only way to keep it."

"Your genius?"

"If you choose to call it that."

"The thing," she said, "that made you different."

"You see," he said, "they didn't understand that _that_ was where I was
most a coward. I was always afraid of losing it. I am now."

"You couldn't lose it."

"I have lost it. It went altogether the time I was working for my
medical. I got it back again out in India when I was alone, on the edge
of the jungle, when there wasn't much cholera about, and I'd nothing to
do but think. Then some officious people got me what they called a
better berth in Bombay; and it went again."

She was uncertain now whether he were speaking of his genius, or of
something more than it.

"You see," he continued, "you go plodding on with your work for months
and never think about it; and then you realize that it's gone, and
there's the terror--_the_ most awful terror there is--of never getting
back to it again. Then there'll be months of holding on to the fringe of
it without seeing it--seeing nothing but horrors, hearing them, handling
them. Then perhaps, when you've flung yourself down, tired out, where
you are, on the chance of sleeping, it's there. And nothing else
matters. Nothing else is."

She knew now, though but vaguely and imperfectly, what he meant.

"And the next day one part of you goes about among the horrors, and the
other part remains where it got to."

"I see."

Obscurely and with difficulty she saw, she made it out. The thing he
spoke of was so inconceivable, so tremendous that at times he was afraid
of having it, at times afraid of never having it again. And because, as
he had said, the fear of not having it was worse than any fear, he had
to be sure of it, he had to put it to the test. So he went down into
life, into the thick of it, among all the horrors and the terrors. He
knew that if he could do that and carry his vision through it, if it
wasn't wiped out, if he only saw it once, for a moment afterwards, he
would be sure of it. He wasn't really sure of it until then, not a bit
surer than she was now.

No; he was always sure of it. It was himself he was not sure of; himself
that he put to the test.

And it was himself that he had carried through it. He had lived face to
face with all the corporeal horrors; he had handled them, tasted them,
he, the man without a skin, with every sense, every nerve in him
exposed, exquisitely susceptible to torture. And he had come through it
all as through a thing insubstantial, a thing that gave way before his
soul and its exultant, processional vision of God.

"The absurd thing is that after all I haven't grown a skin. I'm _still_
afraid of the sight of blood."

"So I suppose _I_ shall go on being afraid."

"Probably. But you won't turn tail any more than I should. _You_ never
ran away."

"There are worse things than running away. All the things that go on
inside you, the cruel, dreadful things; the cowardices and treacheries.
Things that come of never being alone. I have to sit up at night to be
alone."

"My child, you mustn't. It's simply criminal."

"If I didn't," she said, "I should never get it in."

He understood her to be alluding thus vaguely to her gift.

"I know it's criminal, with Papa depending on me, and yet I do it.
Sometimes I'm up half the night, hammering and hammering at my own
things; things, I mean, that won't sell, just to gratify my vanity in
having done them."

"To satisfy your instinct for perfection. God made you an artist."

She sighed. "He's made me so many things besides. That's where the
misery comes in."

"And a precious poor artist you'd be if he hadn't, and if the misery
didn't come in."

She shook her head, superior in her sad wisdom. "Misery's all very well
for the big, tragic people like Nina, who can make something out of it.
Why throw it away on a wretched, clever little imp like me?"

"And if _you_'re being hammered at to satisfy an instinct for perfection
that you're not aware of----?"

She shook her head again.

"I'm certainly not aware of it. Still, I can understand that. I mean I
can understand an instinct for perfection making shots in the dark and
trying things too big for it and their not coming off. But--look at
Papa."

She held her hands out helplessly. The gesture smote his heart.

"If Papa had been one of its experiments--but he wasn't. It had got him
all right at first. You've no idea how nice Papa was. You've only to
look at him now to see how nice he is. But he was clever. Not very
clever," (she wasn't going to claim too much for him), "but just clever
enough. He used to say such funny, queer, delicious things. And he can't
say them any more."

She paused and went on gathering vehemence as she went.

"And to go and spoil a thing like that, the thing you'd made as fine as
it could be, to tear it to bits and throw the finest bits away--it
doesn't look like an Instinct for Perfection, does it?"

"The finest bits aren't thrown away. It's what you still have with you,
what you see, that's being thrown away--broken up by some impatient,
impetuous spiritual energy, as a medium that no longer serves its
instinct for perfection. Do you see?"

"I see that you're trying to make me happier about Papa. It's awfully
nice of you."

"I'm trying to get you away from a distressing view of the human body.
To you a diseased human body is a thing of palpable horror. To me it is
simply a medium, an unstable, oscillating medium of impetuous spiritual
energies. We're nowhere near understanding the real function of disease.
It probably acts as a partial discarnation of the spiritual energies.
It's a sign of their approaching freedom. Especially those diseases
which are most like death--the horrible diseases that tear down the body
from the top, destroying great tracts of brain and nerve tissue, and
leaving the viscera exuberant with life. And if you knew the mystery of
the building up--why, the growth of an unborn child is more wonderful
than you can conceive. But, if you really knew, that would be nothing to
the secret--the mystery--the romance of dissolution."

His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the
darkness that wrapped her.

"If you could see _through_ it you'd understand, you'd see that this
body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium,
transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to
the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual
germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any
of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside
what we give."

Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I
understand."

"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how
before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in
nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the
whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our
body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts,
infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to
minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable
forces, and that we--_we_--unmake the work of millions of æons in a
moment, that we charge it with _our_ will, _our_ instincts, _our_
memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by
spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ
of us--so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when
they scatter, is the seed of _our_ universe, flung heaven knows where."

For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know,"
she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of
intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and
I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to
know how you know about it."

A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and
incommunicable.

"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and
it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."

"What won't I tell you?"

"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"

"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."

"I can only see that they've gone."

"And I can only see that they exist more exquisitely, more intensely
than ever. Too intensely for your senses, or his, to be aware of them."

"Ah----"

"And I should say the same of a still-born baby that I had never seen
alive, or of a lunatic whom I had not once seen sane."

"How do you know?" she reiterated.

"I can't tell you."

"You can't tell me anything, and your very face shuts up when I look at
it."

"I can't tell you anything," he said gently. "I can only talk to you
like an intoxicated medical student, and it's time for me to go."

She did not seem to have heard him, and they sat silent.

It was as if their silence was a borderland; as if they were both
pausing there before they plunged; behind them the unspoken, the
unspeakable; before them the edge of perilous speech.

"I'm glad I've seen you," she said at last.

He ignored the valediction of her tone.

"And when am I to see you again?" he said.

This time she did not answer, and he had a profound sense of the pause.

He asked himself now, as they stood (he being aware that they were
standing) on the brink of the deep, how far she had ever really accepted
his preposterous pretext? Up till now she had appeared to be taking him
and his pretext simply, as they came. Her silence, her pause had had no
expectation in it. It evidently had not occurred to her that the deep
could open up. That was how she had struck him, more and more, as never
looking forward, to him or to anything, as being almost afraid to look
forward. She regarded life with a profound distrust, as a thing that
might turn upon her at any time and hurt her.

He rose and she followed him, holding the lamp to light the stairway. He
turned.

"Well," he said, "have you seen enough of me?"

They were outside the threshold now, and she stood there, one arm
holding her lamp, the other stretched across the doorway, as if she
would keep him from ever entering again.

"Or," said he, "may I come again? Soon?"

"Do," she said, "and bring Nina with you."

She set her lamp on the floor at the stairhead, and backed, backed from
him into the darkness of the room.




XXVI


It was the twenty-seventh of June, Laura's birthday. Tanqueray had
proposed that they should celebrate it by a day on Wendover Hill. For
the Kiddy's increasing pallor cried piteously for the open air.

Nina was to bring Owen Prothero; and Jane, in Prothero's interests, was
to bring Brodrick; and Tanqueray, Laura insisted, was to bring his wife.

Rose had counted the days, the very hours before Laura's birthday. She
had plenty to do for once on the morning of the twenty-seventh, making
rock cakes and cutting sandwiches and packing them beautifully in a
basket. Over-night she had washed and ironed the white blouse she was to
wear. The white blouse lay on her bed, wonderful as a thing seen in a
happy dream. Rose could hardly permit herself to believe that the dream
would come true, and that Tanqueray would really take her.

It all depended on whether Laura could get off. Getting Laura off was
the difficulty they encountered every time she had a birthday.

So uncertain was the event that Nina and Prothero called at the house in
Albert Street before going on to the station. They found Tanqueray, and
Rose in her white blouse, waiting outside on the pavement. They heard
that Jane Holland was in there with Laura, bringing pressure to bear on
the obstinate Kiddy who was bent on the renunciation of her day.

Jane's voice on the landing called to them to come up-stairs. Without
them it was impossible, she said, to get Laura off.

The whole house was helping, in a passionate publicity; for every one in
it loved Laura. Mr. Baxter, the landlord, was on the staircase, bringing
Laura's boots. The maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the
landing, brushing Laura's skirt. A tall girl was standing by the table
in the sitting-room. She had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue
eyes under masses of light hair. She was Addy Ranger, the type-writer on
the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she
could do. She was sewing buttons on Laura's blouse while Jane brought
pressure upon Laura. "Of course you're going," Jane was saying. "It's
not as if you had a birthday every day."

For Laura still sat at her writing-table, labouring over a paragraph,
white lipped and heavy eyed. Shuffling all over the room and round about
her was Mr. Gunning. He was pouring out the trouble that had oppressed
him for the last four years.

"She won't stop scribbling. It's scribble--scribble--scribble all day
long. If I didn't lie awake to stop her she'd be at it all night. I've
caught her--in her nightgown. She'll get out of her bed to do it."

"Papa, dear, you know Miss Lempriere and Mr. Prothero?"

His mind adjusted itself instantly to its vision of them. He bowed to
each. He was the soul of courtesy and hospitality, and they were his
guests; they had come to luncheon.

"Lolly, my dear, have you ordered luncheon?--You must tell Mrs. Baxter
to give us a salmon mayonnaise, and a salad and lamb cutlets in aspic.
And, Lolly! Tell her to put a bottle of champagne in ice."

For in his blessed state, among the fragments of old splendours that
still clung to him, Mr. Gunning had preserved indestructibly his sense
of power to offer his friends a bottle of champagne on a suitable
occasion, and every occasion now ranked with him as suitable.

"Yes, darling," said Laura, and dashed down a line of her paragraph.

He shuffled feebly toward the door. "I have to see to everything
myself," he said. "That child there has no more idea how to order a
luncheon than the cat. There should be," he reverted, "lamb cutlets in
aspic. I must see to it myself."

He wandered out of the room and in again, driven, by his dream.

"Oh," cried Laura, "somebody else must have my birthday. _I_ can't have
it. I must sit tight and finish my paragraph."

"You'll spoil it if you do," said Prothero.

"Besides spoiling everybody's day," said Jane judiciously.

That brought Laura round. She reflected that, if she sat tight from ten
that evening till two in the morning, she could save their day.

But first she had to finish her paragraph and then to hide it and lock
it up. Then she put the pens and ink on a high shelf out of Mr.
Gunning's reach. He had been known to make away with the materials of
Lolly's detestable occupation when he got the chance. He attributed to
it that mysterious, irritating semblance of poverty in which they moved.

He smiled at her, a happy, innocent smile.

"_That's_ right, _that's_ right. Put it away, my dear, put it away."

"Yes, Papa," said Laura. She took the blouse from Addy Ranger, and she
and Jane Holland disappeared with it into a small inner room. From the
voices that came to him Prothero gathered that Jane Holland was
"buttoning her up the back."

"Don't say," cried Laura, "that it won't meet!"

"Meet? It'll go twice round you. You don't eat enough."

Silence.

"It's no good," he heard Jane Holland say, "not eating. I've tried
both."

"I," said Laura in a voice that penetrated, "over-eat. Habitually."

"I must go," said Mr. Gunning, "and find my hat and stick." His idea now
was that Laura was going to take him for a walk.

Addy Ranger began to talk to Prothero. He liked Addy. She had an amusing
face with a long nose and wide lips, restless and cynical. She confided
to him the trouble of her life, the eternal difficulty of finding
anywhere a permanent job. Addy's dream was permanence.

Then they talked of Laura.

"Do you know what _her_ dream is?" said Addy. "To be able to afford
wine, and chicken, and game and things--for him."

"When you think of her work!" said Nina. "It's charming; it's finished,
to a point. How on earth does she do it?"

"She sits up half the night to do it," said Prothero; "when he isn't
there."

"And it's killing her," said Addy, who had her back to the door.

Mr. Gunning had come in again and he heard her. He gazed at them with a
vague sweetness, not understanding what he heard.

Then Laura ran in among them, in a tremendous hurry. She wasn't ready
yet. It was a maddening, protracted agony, getting Laura off. She had
forgotten to lock the cupboard where the whisky was (a shilling's worth
in a medicine bottle); and poor Papa might find it. Since he had had his
sunstroke you couldn't trust him with anything, not even with a jam-pot.
Then Addy, at Laura's request, rushed out of the room to find Laura's
hat and her handkerchief and her gloves--not the ones with the holes in
them. And then Laura looked at her hands.

"Oh," she cried, "_look_ at my poor hands. I can't go like that. I
_hate_ an inky woman."

And she dashed out to wash the ink off.

And then the gloves found by Addy had all holes in them. And at that
Laura stamped her foot and said, "Damn!"

The odds against Laura's getting off were frightful.

But she was putting on her hat. She was really ready just as Tanqueray's
voice was heard calling on the stairs, "You must hurry up if you want to
catch that train." And now they had to deal seriously with Mr. Gunning,
who stood expectant, holding his hat and stick.

"Good-bye, Papa dear," said she.

"Am I not to come, too?" said Mr. Gunning.

"Not to-day, dear."

She was kissing him while Jane and Nina waited in the open doorway.
Their eyes signed to her to be brave and follow them. But Laura
lingered.

Prothero looked at Laura, and Mr. Gunning looked at Prothero. His
terrible idea had come back to him at the sight of the young man,
risen, and standing beside Laura for departure.

"Are you going to take my little girl away from me?" he said.

"Poor little Papa, of course he isn't. I'm going with Jane, and Nina.
You know Nina?"

"And who," he cried, "is going to take me for my walk?"

He had her there. She wavered.

"Addy's coming in to give you your tea. You like Addy." (He bowed to
Miss Ranger with a supreme courtesy.) "And I'll be back in time to see
you in your little bed."

She ran off. Addy Ranger took Mr. Gunning very tenderly by the arm and
led him to the stairs to see her go.

Outside on the pavement Tanqueray gave way to irritation.

"If," said he, "it would only please Heaven to take that old gentleman
to itself."

"It won't," said Nina.

"How she would hate us if she heard us," said Jane.

"There ought to be somebody to take care of 'im," said Rose, moved to
compassion. "'E might go off in a fit any day. She can't be easy when
'e's left."

"He _must_ be left," said Tanqueray with ferocity.

"Here she is," said Jane.

There she was; and there, too, was her family. For, at the sight of
Laura running down-stairs with Prothero after her, Mr. Gunning broke
loose from Addy's arm and followed her, perilously followed her. Addy
was only just in time to draw him back from the hall door as Prothero
closed it.

And then little Laura, outside, heard a cry as of a thing trapped, and
betrayed, and utterly abandoned.

"I can't go," she cried. "He thinks I'm leaving him--that I'm never
coming back. He always thinks it."

"You know," said Nina, "he never thinks anything for more than five
minutes."

"I know--but----"

Nina caught her by the shoulder. "You stupid Kiddy, you must forget him
when he isn't there."

"But he _is_ there," said Laura. "I can't leave him."

Between her eyes and Prothero's there passed a look of eternal patience
and despair. Rose saw it. She saw how it was with them, and she saw what
she could do. She turned back to the door.

"You go," she said. "I'll stay with him."

From the set of her little chin you saw that protest and argument were
useless.

"I can take care of him," she said. "I know how."

And as she said it there came into her face a soft flame of joy. For
Tanqueray was looking at her, and smiling as he used to smile in the
days when he adored her. He was thinking in this moment how adorable she
was.

"You may as well let her," he said. "She isn't happy if she can't take
care of somebody."

And, as they wondered at her, the door opened and closed again on Rose
and her white blouse.




XXVII


They found Brodrick waiting for them at the station. Imperturbable, on
the platform, he seemed to be holding in leash the Wendover train whose
engines were throbbing for flight.

Prothero suffered, painfully, the inevitable introduction. Tanqueray had
told him that if he still wanted work on the papers Brodrick was his
man. Brodrick had an idea. On the long hill-road going up from Wendover
station Prothero, at Tanqueray's suggestion, tried to make himself as
civil as possible to Miss Holland.

Tentatively and with infinite precautions Jane laid before him
Brodrick's idea. The War Correspondent of the "Morning Telegraph" was
coming home invalided from Manchuria. She understood that his place
would be offered to Mr. Prothero. Would he care to take it?

He did not answer.

She merely laid the idea before him to look at. He must weigh, she said,
the dangers and the risks. From the expression of his face she gathered
that these were the last things he would weigh.

And yet he hesitated. She looked at him. His eyes were following the
movements of Laura Gunning where, well in front of them, the marvellous
Kiddy, in the first wildness of her release from paragraphs, darted and
plunged and leaped into the hedges.

Jane allowed some moments to lapse before she spoke again. The war, she
said, would not last for ever; and if he took this berth, it would lead
almost certainly to a regular job on the "Telegraph" at home.

He saw all that, he said, and he was profoundly grateful. His eyes, as
they turned to her, showed for a moment a film of tears. Then they
wandered from her.

He asked if he might think it over and let her know.

"When," she said, "can you let me know?"

"I think," he said, "probably, before the end of the day."

The day was drawing to its end when the group drifted and divided.
Brodrick, still imperturbable, took possession of Jane, and Prothero,
with his long swinging stride, set off in pursuit of the darting Laura.

Tanqueray, thus left behind with Nina, watched him as he went.

"He's off, Nina. Bolted." His eyes smiled at her, suave, deprecating,
delighted eyes and recklessly observant.

"So has Jane," said Nina, with her dangerous irony.

Apart from them and from their irony, Prothero was at last alone with
Laura on the top of Wendover Hill. She had ceased to dart and to plunge.

He found for her a hidden place on the green slope, under a tree, and
there he stretched himself at her side.

"Do you know," he said, "this is the first time I've seen you out of
doors."

"So it is," said she in a strange, even voice.

She drew off her gloves and held out the palms of her hands as if she
were bathing them in the pure air. Her face was turned from him and
lifted; her nostrils widened; her lips parted; her small breasts heaved;
she drank the air like water. To his eyes she was the white image of
mortal thirst.

"Is it absolutely necessary for you to live in Camden Town?" he said.

She sat up very straight and stared steadily in front of her, as if she
faced, unafraid, the invincible necessity.

"It is. Absolutely." She explained that Baxter, her landlord, had been
an old servant of Papa's, and that _the_ important thing was to be with
people who would be nice to him and not mind, she said, his little ways.

He sighed.

"Do you know what I should do with you if I could have my way? I should
turn you into a green garden and keep you there from nine in the morning
till nine at night. I should make you walk a mile with me twice a
day--not too fast. All the rest of the time you should lie on a couch on
a lawn, with a great rose-bush at your head and a bed of violets at your
feet. I should bring you something nice to eat every two hours."

"And how much work do you suppose I should get through?"

"Work? You wouldn't do _any_ work for a year at least--if I had my way."

"It's a beautiful dream," said she. She closed her eyes, but whether to
shut the dream out or to keep it in he could not say.

"I don't want," she said presently, "to lie on a couch in a garden with
roses at my head and violets at my feet, as if I were dead. You don't
know how tre--_mend_--ously alive I am."

"I know," he said, "how tremendously alive you'd be if I had my way--if
you were happy."

She was still sitting up, nursing her knees, and staring straight in
front of her at nothing.

"You don't know what it's like," she said; "the unbearable pathos of
Papa."

"It's your pathos that's unbearable."

"Oh don't! Don't be nice to me. I shall hate you if you're nice to me."
She paused, staring. "I was unkind to him yesterday. I see how pathetic
he is, and yet I'm unkind. I snap like a little devil. You don't know
what a devil, what a detestable little devil I can be."

She turned to him, sparing herself no pain in her confession.

"I was cruel to him. It's horrible, like being cruel to a child." The
horror of it was in her stare.

"It's your nerves," he said; "it's because you're always frightened." He
seemed to meditate before he spoke again. "How are you going on?"

"You see how."

"I do indeed. It's unbearable to think of your having to endure these
things. And I have to stand by and see you at the end of your tether,
hurt and frightened, and to know that I can do nothing for you. If I
could have my way you would never be hurt or frightened any more."

As he spoke something gave way in her. It felt like a sudden weakening
and collapse of her will, drawing her heart with it.

"But," he went on, "as I can't have my way, the next best thing is--to
stand by you."

She struggled as against physical faintness, struggled successfully.

"Since I can't take you out of it," he said, "I shall come and live in
Camden Town too."

"You couldn't live in Camden Town."

"I can live anywhere I choose. I shouldn't _see_ Camden Town."

"You couldn't," she insisted. "And if you could I wouldn't let you."

"Why not?"

"Be_cause_--it wouldn't do."

He smiled.

"It would be all right. I should get a room near you and look after your
father."

"It wouldn't do," she said again. "I couldn't let you."

"I can do anything I choose. Your little hands can't stop me."

She looked at him gravely. "Why do you choose it?"

"Because I can choose nothing else."

"Ah, why are you so good to me?"

"Be_cause_"--he mocked her absurd intonation.

"Don't tell me. It's because you _are_ good. You can't help it."

"No; I can't help it."

"But--" she objected, "I'm so horrid. I don't believe in God and I say
damn when I'm angry."

"I heard you."

"You said yourself I wanted violets to sweeten me and hammers to soften
me--you think I'm so bitter and so hard."

"You know what I think of you. And you know," he said, "that I love
you."

"You mustn't," she whispered. "It's no good."

He seemed not to have heard her. "And some day," he said, "I shall marry
you. I'd marry you to-morrow if I'd enough money to buy a hat with."

"It's no use loving me. You can't marry me."

"I know I can't. But it makes no difference."

"No difference?"

"Not to me."

"If you could," she said, "I wouldn't let you. It would only be one
misery more."

"How do you know what it would be?"

"I won't even let you love me. That's misery too."

"You don't know what it is."

"I do know, and I don't want any more of it. I've been hurt with it."

With a low cry of pity and pain he took her in his arms and held her to
him.

She writhed and struggled in his clasp. "Don't," she cried, "don't touch
me. Let me alone. I can't bear it."

He turned her face to his to find the truth in her eyes. "And yet," he
said, "you love me."

"No, no. It's no use," she reiterated; "it's no use. I won't have it. I
won't let you love me."

"You can't stop me."

"I can stop you torturing me!"

She was freed from his arms now. She sat up. Her small face was sullen
and defiant in its expression of indomitable will.

"Of course," he said, "you can stop me touching you. But it makes no
difference. I shall go on caring for you. It's no use struggling and
crying against that."

"I shall go on struggling."

"Go on as long as you like. It doesn't matter. I can wait."

She rose. "Come," she said. "It's time to be going back."

He obeyed her. When they reached the rise on the station road they
turned and waited for the others to come up with them. They looked back.
Their hill was on their left, to their right was the great plain, grey
with mist. They stood silent, oppressed by their sense of a sad and
sudden beauty. Then with the others they swung down the road to the
station.

Before the end of the day Brodrick heard that his offer was accepted.




XXVIII


It was Tanqueray who took Laura home that night. Prothero parted from
her at the station and walked southwards with Nina Lempriere.

"Why didn't you go with her?" she said.

"I couldn't have let you walk home by yourself."

"As if I wasn't always by myself."

Her voice defied, almost repelled him; but her face turned to him with
its involuntary surrender.

He edged himself in beside her with a sudden protective movement, so
that his shoulders shielded her from the contact of the passers by. But
the pace he set was terrific.

"You've no idea, Owen, how odd you look careering through the streets."

"Not odder than you, do I? _You_ ought to be swinging up a
mountain-side, or sitting under an oak-tree. That's how I used to see
you."

"Do you remember?"

"I remember the first time I ever saw you, fifteen years ago. I'd gone
up the mountain through the wood, looking for wild cats. I was beating
my way up through the undergrowth when I came on you. You were above me,
hanging by your arms from an oak-tree, swinging yourself from the upper
ledge down on to the track. Your hair--you had lots of hair, all
tawny--some of it was caught up by the branches, some of it hung over
your eyes. They gleamed through it, all round and startled, and there
were green lights in them. You dropped at my feet and dashed down the
mountain. I had found my wild cat."

"I remember. You frightened me. Your eyes were so queer."

"Not queerer than yours, Nina. Yours had all the enchantment and all the
terror of the mountains in them."

"And yours--yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a
human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd
forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."

"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."

"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press
on you and hurt you?"

They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses,
houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the
mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some
naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.

"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there--you and I could
go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would
simply disappear."

They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before
them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate
framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a
hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The
buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.

"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.

"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."

"Isn't it--horrible?"

"No," he said. "It isn't."

They plunged down a steep side-street off the Strand, and turned on to
their terrace. He let her in with his latchkey and followed her
up-stairs. He stopped at her landing.

"May I come in?" he said. "Or is it too late?"

"It isn't late at all," said she. And he followed her into the room.

He did not see the seat she offered him, but stood leaning his shoulders
against the chimney-piece. She knew that he had something to say to her
that must be said instantly or not at all. And yet he kept silence.
Whatever it was that he had to say it was not an easy thing.

"You'd like some coffee?" she said curtly, by way of breaking his dumb
and dangerous mood.

He roused himself almost irritably.

"Thanks, no. Don't bother about it."

She left him and went into the inner room to make it. She was afraid of
him; afraid of what she might have to hear. She had the sense of things
approaching, of separation, of the snapping of the tense thread of time
that bound them for her moment. It was as if she could spin it out by
interposing between the moment and its end a series of insignificant
acts.

Through the open doors she saw him as he turned and wandered to the
bookcase and stood there, apparently absorbed. You would have said that
he had come in to look for a book, and that when he had found what he
wanted he would go. She saw him take her book, "Tales of the Marches,"
from its shelf and open it.

She became aware of this as she was about to lift the kettle from the
gas-ring burning on the hearth. Her thin sleeve swept the ring. She was
stooping, but her face was still raised; her eyes were fixed on
Prothero, held by what they saw. The small blue jets of the ring
flickered and ran together and soared as her sleeve caught them. Nina
made no sound. Prothero turned and saw her standing there by the hearth,
motionless, her right arm wrapped in flame.

He leaped to her, and held her tight with her arm against his breast,
and beat out the fire with his hands. He dressed the burn and bandaged
it with cool, professional dexterity, trembling a little, taking pain
from her pain.

"Why didn't you call out?" he said.

"I didn't want you to know."

"You'd have been burnt sooner?"

He had slung her arm in a scarf; and, as he tied the knot on her
shoulder, his face was brought close to hers. She turned her head and
her eyes met his.

"I'd have let my whole body burn," she whispered, "sooner than
hurt--your hands."

His hands dropped from her shoulder. He thrust them into his pockets out
of her sight.

She followed him into the outer room, struggling against her sense of
his recoil.

"If you had a body like mine," she said, "you'd be glad to get rid of it
on any terms." She wondered if he saw through her pitiable attempt to
call back the words that had flung themselves upon him.

"There's nothing wrong with your body," he answered coldly.

"No, Owen, nothing; except that I'm tired of it."

"The tiredness will pass. Is that burn hurting you?"

"Not yet. I don't mind it."

He stooped and picked up the book he had dropped in his rush to her. She
saw now that he looked at it as a man looks at the thing he loves, and
that his hands as they touched it shook with a nervous tremor.

She came and stood by him, without speaking, and he turned and faced
her.

"Nina," he said, "why did you write this terrible book? If you hadn't
written it, I should never have been here."

"That's why, then, isn't it?"

"I suppose so. You _had_ to write it, and I _had_ to come."

"Yes, Owen," she said gently.

"You brought me here," he said.

"I can't understand it."

"Can't understand what?"

"The fascination I had for you."

He closed the book and laid it down.

"You were my youth, Nina."

He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now
withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that
forbade her to touch him.

"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for
it."

"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."

"No. They _are_ me. They are what I was. Your people are not people,
they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."

"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.

"You don't know me. You don't remember me. But I know and remember you.
You asked me once how I knew. That's how. I've been where you were."

He paused.

"If my youth were here, Nina, it would be at your feet. As it is, it
rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like
an unhappy ghost."

It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not
gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.

Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.

She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.

He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got
to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.

She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow.
Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.

He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to
between them.

She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her
feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself
down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of
circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were
gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.

At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched
out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut
their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the
burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily
distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen
laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be
wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all
passion of flesh and blood.

In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the
skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze
and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated;
eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had
carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a
lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was
incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant
energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She
lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable,
not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing
was accomplished.

Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came
to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.

"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."

She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was
sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice
between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago
when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his
desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura
Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself;
behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.

She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that
had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she
had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her
nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual
appeal. Her passion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its
own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration,
sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt
that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of
her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to
him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any
one of them would kill her.

She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her
experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray
had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality
of passion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the
nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the
unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.

Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with
it, he had not drawn it; he had had compassion on the beast. And this
terrible compassion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day
it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she
preferred a brutality like Tanqueray's which would have made short work
of her.

As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the
throat of the beast.

She was now at the end of Owen's last day. He had come and gone. She had
endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was
inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her
flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside
her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his
service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised
her courage.

"It'll hurt like hell," he had said, "before it's done with you. But
when it hurts most it's healing."

That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she
could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back,
above hers.

Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of
his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street.
The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her passion.

The beast was falling now upon Laura's image and destroying it. It hated
Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and
virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast,
though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that
other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known
Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray's devilry. It had pursued
Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it
back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen's feet and under the pity
of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura's
little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed,
unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.

The sound of Owen's feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She
sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with
him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses
streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She
had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging,
rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow,
lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the
troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her,
like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.

It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.

She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen's door,
and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of
fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.

His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He
stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut
her in.

"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad
perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarrassment or
surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.

"You're ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I'll come to you."

"I'm not ill and I'm not mad. Please shut that door."

He shut it.

"Won't you sit down?"

She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself.
Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with
his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.

Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of
the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of
surgical instruments lay in a litter of manuscripts. A drawer, pulled
from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at
her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he
had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few
new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed
beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her
hand and felt the stuff.

"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.

He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing
ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.

"You don't want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"

"Because I have to. It's the only thing, you see, there is to do."

"If it wasn't for me you wouldn't have to. If you die out there it will
be my doing."

"Won't it be the proprietors of the 'Morning Telegraph' who'll be
responsible--if I die?"

"I set them on to you."

"Did you? I rather hoped they'd pitched on me because I was the best man
for the job."

"The best man--to die?"

"War correspondents don't die. At least they don't set out with that
intention."

"You _will_ die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."

"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"

"I care--because they die."

Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality's desire. Having
uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.

"Why shouldn't I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That
ends it."

She rose.

"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come
and tell a man she cares for him."

"Why not?" he said simply.

"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more
like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why
shouldn't I tell you? You know it--as God knows it."

"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."

"Owen--shall I ever be where you are now?"

"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.

[Illustration: 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
lust 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.

"I say, Mummy, don't you like her awfully?"

"Of course I like her," said Mrs. Heron, smiling at her son.

"Why do you like me?" said Jane, whose vision of Owen Prothero was again
obscured by Winny's hair.

"Why do we like anybody?" said Mrs. Heron, with her inassailable
reserve.

"You can't get out of it that way, Mum. You don't just go liking
anybody. You like jolly few. We're an awful family for not liking
people. Aren't we, Gee-Gee?"

"I didn't know it," said Miss Collett.

"Oh, but Gee-Gee's thinking of Uncle Hugh," said Winny.

Miss Collett's face stiffened. She _was_ thinking of him.

"Uncle Hugh? Why, he's worse than any of us. With
women--ladies--anyhow."

"Eddy, dear!" said Eddy's mother.

"Well, have you ever seen a lady Uncle Hugh could really stand--except
Miss Holland?"

Gertrude bent so low over her work that her face was hidden.

"I say! look at that kid. Can't you take your hair out of Miss Holland's
face? She doesn't want your horrid hair."

"Yes, I do," said Jane. She was grateful for the veil of Winny's hair.

They had not arrived suddenly, the five of them, at this intimacy. It
had developed during the last fortnight, which Jane, fulfilling a
promise, had spent with Dr. Brodrick and Mrs. Heron.

Jane had been ill, and Brodrick had brought her to his brother's house
to recover. Dr. Henry had been profoundly interested in her case. So had
his sister, Mrs. Heron, and Mr. John Brodrick and Mrs. John, and Sophy
Levine and Gertrude Collett, and Winny and Eddy Heron.

Since the day when they had first received her, the Brodricks had
established a regular cult of Jane Holland. It had become the prescribed
event for Jane to spend every possible Sunday at Putney Heath with the
editor of the "Monthly Review." Her friendship with his family had
advanced from Sunday to Sunday by slow, well-ordered steps. Jane had no
illusions as to its foundation. She knew that Brodrick's family had
begun by regarding her as part of Brodrick's property, the most
eligible, the most valuable part. It was interested in contemporary
talent merely as a thing in which Brodrick had a stake. It had hardly
been aware of Jane Holland previous to her appearance in the "Monthly
Review." After that it had been obliged to recognize her as a power
propitious to the editor's ambition and his dream. For though his family
regarded the editor of the "Monthly Review" as a dreamer, a fantastic
dreamer, it was glad to think that a Brodrick should have ambition,
still more to think that it could afford a dream. They had always
insisted upon that, there being no end to the things a Brodrick could
afford. They had identified Jane Holland with his dream and his
ambition, and were glad again to think that he could afford her. As for
her dreadful, her conspicuous celebrity, the uncomfortably staring fact
that she was Jane Holland, Jane was aware that it struck them chiefly as
reflecting splendour upon Brodrick. But she was aware that her unique
merit, her supreme claim, was that she had done a great thing for
Brodrick. On that account, if she had been the most obscure, the most
unremarkable Jane Holland, they would have felt it incumbent on them to
cherish her. They had incurred a grave personal obligation, and could
only meet it by that grave personal thing, friendship.

How grave it was, Jane, who had gone into it so lightly, was only just
aware. This family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was
awful, as Eddy had observed, for not liking people. It was bound, in its
formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. She had felt that she had
disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her.

She had not been a week in Dr. Brodrick's house before she discovered
that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. They were
sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and
no family visible about her. They refused to regard Nina and Laura as a
family, or the flat in Kensington Square as in any reasonable sense a
home. Jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the
things that she had missed.

And in being sorry for Jane Holland they had lost sight of her
celebrity. They had not referred to it since the day, three months ago,
when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. They
were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it
was as an alien that she moved among them still.

It was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really
sorry for her. They seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as
a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. They were
anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them
her personal charm. They betrayed their opinion that her charm existed
in spite rather than because of it.

Thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, Jane in the houses of the
Brodricks had found peace. She was secure from all the destroyers, from
the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the
dreadful literary taint. Brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the
literary taint. The worst that could be said of Brodrick was that he
would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was
clean.

It was in Hugh Brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most
profound. Hugh was not gregarious. Tanqueray could not have more
abhorred the social round. He had come near it, he had told her, in his
anxiety to know _her_, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped
out of it.

She knew where she was with him. In their long, subdued confidences he
had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the
most important fact in his social life. And that, again, not because of
her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic
moral quality in her. He did not intimate that he found her charming.
Jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and Brodrick's monstrous
sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. She would not have
had him different. It was because of _his_ moral quality, his sincerity,
that she had liked him from the first.

Most certainly she liked him. If she had not liked him she would not
have come out so often to Roehampton and Wimbledon and Putney. She could
not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the
things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done
for him, but for her own sake. That was what she had wanted, to be liked
for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman.

Unlike Tanqueray, Brodrick not only allowed her, he positively
encouraged her to be a woman. Evidently, in Brodrick's opinion she was
just like any other woman. He could see no difference between her and,
well, Gertrude Collett. Gertrude, Jane was sure, stood to Brodrick for
all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. Why he required so
much of Jane's presence when he could have Gertrude Collett's was more
than Jane could understand. She was still inclined to her conjecture
that he was using her to draw Miss Collett, playing her off against Miss
Collett, stinging Miss Collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that
admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. That was why Jane felt so safe with
him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with
her. He was not in love with her. He was not even, like Tanqueray, in
love with her genius.

If she had had the slightest doubt about his attitude, his behaviour on
the day of her arrival had made it stand out sharp and clear. She had
dined at Moor Grange, and Caro Bickersteth had been there. Caro had
insisted on dragging Jane's genius from its temporary oblivion, and
Brodrick had turned silent and sulky, positively sulky then.

And in that mood he had remained for the two weeks that she had stayed
at Roehampton. He had betrayed none of the concern so evidently felt for
her by Eddy and Winny and Gertrude Collett and Mrs. Heron and the
doctor. They had all contended with each other in taking care of her, in
waiting on her hand and foot. But Brodrick, after bringing her there;
after, as she said, dumping her down, suddenly and heavily, on his
family, Brodrick had refused to compete; he had hung back; he had
withdrawn himself from the scene, maintaining his singular sulkiness and
silence.

She forgave him, for of course he was disturbed about Gertrude Collett.
If he wanted to marry Gertrude, why on earth couldn't he marry her and
have done with it? Jane thought.

In order to think better she had closed her eyes. When she opened them
again she found Brodrick seated in an opposite chair, quietly regarding
her. She was alone with him. The others had all gone.

"I wasn't asleep," said Jane.

"I didn't suppose you were," said Brodrick; "if you were reading
Prothero."

Brodrick's conscience was beginning to hurt him rather badly. There were
moments when he connected Jane's illness with Prothero's departure. He,
therefore, by sending Prothero away, was responsible for her illness.

"If you want to read," he said, "I'll go."

"I don't want to read. I want to talk."

"About Prothero?"

"No, not about Mr. Prothero. About that serial----"

"What serial?"

"My serial. Your serial," said she.

Brodrick said he wasn't going to talk shop on Sunday. He wanted to
forget that there were such things as serials.

"I wish _I_ could forget," said she.

She checked the impulse that was urging her to say, "You really ought to
marry Gertrude."

"I wish you could," he retorted, with some bitterness.

"How can I?" she replied placably, "when it was the foundation of our
delightful friendship?"

Brodrick said it had nothing whatever to do with their friendship.

"Well," said Jane, "if it wasn't that it was Hambleby."

At that Brodrick frowned so formidably that Jane could have cried out,
"For goodness' sake go and marry her and leave off venting your bad
temper upon me."

"It had to be something," said she. "Why shouldn't it be Hambleby? By
the way, George Tanqueray was perfectly right. I was in love with him. I
mean, of course, with Hambleby."

"You seem," said Brodrick, "to be in love with him still, as far as I
can make out."

"That's why," said Jane, "I can't help feeling that there's something
wrong with him. George says you never really know the people you're in
love with."

There was a gleam of interest now in Brodrick's face. He was evidently,
Jane thought, applying Tanqueray's aphorism to Gertrude.

"It doesn't make any difference," he said.

"I should have thought," said she, "it would have made _some_."

"It doesn't. If anything, you know them rather better."

"Oh," said she, "it makes _that_ difference, does it?"

Again she thought of Gertrude. "I wonder," she said pensively, "if you
really know."

"At any rate I know as much as Tanqueray."

"Do I bore you with Tanqueray?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"You don't deny his genius?"

"I don't deny anybody's genius," said Brodrick furiously.

Jane looked at him.

"I don't think it's nice of you," said she, "to talk that way to me when
I've been so ill."

"You've no right to be ill," said Brodrick, with undiminished rancour.

"I have," said Jane. "A perfect right. I can be as ill as ever I
please."

She looked at him again and caught him smiling surreptitiously under his
heavy gloom.

"I mean," he said, "you needn't be. You wouldn't be if you didn't work
so hard."

She crumpled her eyelids like one who fails to see.

"If I didn't what?"

"Work so hard."

He really wanted to know whether it was that or Prothero. First it had
been Tanqueray, and she had got over Tanqueray. Now he could only
suppose that it was Prothero. He would have to wait until she had got
over Prothero.

"I like that," said she, "when it's your serial I'm working on."

"Do you mean to tell me," said Brodrick, "that it's that?"

"I was trying to tell you, but you wouldn't let me talk about it. Not
that I wanted to talk about it when the bare idea of it terrifies me.
It's awful to have it hanging over me like this."

"Forget it. Forget it," he said.

"I can't. I'm afraid."

"Afraid of what?"

"Of not being able to finish it--of letting you down."

He turned and looked at her intently.

"That's why you've been killing yourself, is it?"

She did not answer.

"I didn't know. I didn't think," he said. "You should have told me."

"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I ought never to have tried."

"Why did you?" His sulkiness, his ferocity, was gone now; he was
gentleness itself.

"Because I wanted to please you."

There was an inarticulate murmur from Brodrick, a happy sound.

"Well," he said, "you shan't go on."

"But what can we do?"

"We'll do something. There are plenty of things that can be done."

"But--there's the magazine."

"I don't care," said the editor, "if the abominable thing goes smash."

"What? You can contemplate it's going smash?"

"I can't contemplate your being worried like this."

"It's people that worry me," she said--"if I only could have peace!"

She sketched for him as she had sketched for Tanqueray the horrors
brought on her by her celebrity.

"That's London," he said, as Tanqueray had said. "You should live out of
it."

"Nothing comes to me in the country."

He pondered a long time upon that saying.

"You wouldn't call this country, would you?" he said at last.

"Oh dear me, no."

"Well--what would you think of Putney or Wimbledon as a compromise?"

"There can't be any compromise."

"Why not? It's what we all have to come to."

"Not I. I can only write if I'm boxed up in my funny little square, with
the ash-trees weeping away in the middle."

"I don't wonder," said Brodrick, "that they weep."

"You think it's so terrible?"

"Quite terrible."

She laughed. "Do you remember how you came to see me there?"

"Yes. And how you took me for the man come to tune the piano."

He smiled, remembering it. A bell rang, summoning them, and he took no
notice. He smiled again; and suddenly a great shyness and a terror
overcame her.

"Don't you really think," said he, "that this sort of thing is nicer?"

"Oh, incomparably nicer. But isn't it getting rather cold?"

His face darkened. "Do you want to go in?"

"Yes."

They rose and went together into the house.

In the hall, through the open door of the drawing-room, she could see
the table laid for tea, and Gertrude sitting at it by herself, waiting
for them. His sister and the children had gone. Somehow she knew that he
had made them go. They would come back, he explained, with the carriage
that was to take her to the station, and they would say good-bye to her
before she went.

He evaded the drawing-room door and led the way into his library; and
she knew that he meant to have the last hour with her alone.

She paused on the threshold. She knew that if she followed him she would
never get away.

"Aren't we going," said she, "to have tea with Miss Collett?"

"Would you rather?"

"Much rather," said she.

"Very well, just as you like," he said stiffly.

He was annoyed again. All through tea-time he sulked, while Jane
sustained a difficult conversation with Miss Collett.

Miss Collett had lost much of her beautiful serenity. She was still a
charming hostess, but there was a palpable effort about her charm. She
looked as if she were beginning to suffer from the strain of Brodrick in
his present mood.

What Brodrick's mood was, or was beginning to be, Jane could no longer
profess to be unaware. While she talked thin talk to Gertrude about the
superiority of Putney Heath to Wimbledon Park, and of Brodrick's house
to the houses of the other Brodricks, she was thinking, "This woman was
happy in his house before I came. He would have been happy with her if
I hadn't come. It would be kinder of me if I were to keep out of it, and
let her have her chance."

And when she had said good-bye to Mrs. Heron and the children, and found
herself in the doctor's brougham, shut up all alone with Brodrick, she
said to herself that it was for the last time. When she let him take her
back to Kensington Square, when she let him sit with her there for ten
minutes in the half-darkness, she said to herself that it was for the
last time. And when he rose suddenly, almost violently, for departure,
she knew it was for the last time.

"It was good of you," she said, "to bring me home."

"Do you call _this_ a home?" said Brodrick.

"Why not? It's all I want."

"Is it?" he said savagely, and left her.

He was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for
the last time.

As long as Brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her,
murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it
and let the poor woman have her chance.

But when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that
she could not keep out of it. She was being drawn in again, into the
toils of life. When it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being
drawn. She was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off
from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten
tendernesses. In the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been
living with were all about her. She felt again the brushing of Winny's
hair over her cheek. She heard Winny's mother saying that she liked her.
She saw Brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had
watched her when he thought she was asleep.

And when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "Don't be drawn," the
other answered, "Whether I'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't
got a chance."




XXX


It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have
calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so
consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's.
Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She
had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want?

The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet
hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to
disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful
serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her
position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so
fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance.
Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to
stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John
Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship
to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not
wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not
have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for
the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had
urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married
the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any
other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept
Gertrude on.

He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would
try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably
entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But
Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that
she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a
Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme,
he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her.
If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer
recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on
him. He could not have stood her if she had been.

Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even
look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly
pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of
all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she
heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where
the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into
that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in
it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was
understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.

By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the
place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the
sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him.
Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him.
She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot
to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's
correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the
coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.

She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of
Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had
managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion
that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude
Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the
consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to
spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably
breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out,
had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on
the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the
editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to
coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have
Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the
place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of
missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.

He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more
than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more
intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should
marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his
housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.

And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent,
veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to
Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the
perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She
desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible,
inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the
perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had
told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save
Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense;
to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she
saved him from having to keep a secretary.

For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick.
Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she
with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret
paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated
itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If
Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity,
Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained
indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred
influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging,
intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for
the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her
state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for
three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a
sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and
boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal
renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were
fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three
years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in
flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His
attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.

It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a
trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it,
the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her
innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck
her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and
became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that
Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She
sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This
unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her
world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the
unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the
perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.

She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was
rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly
on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a
perversion of interest and desire in all that concerned Miss Holland.
Thus she found herself positively looking forward to Miss Holland's
coming, actually absorbed in thinking of her, wondering where she was,
and what she was doing when she was not there.

It ended in wonder; for Brodrick was the only person who could have
informed her, and he had grown curiously reticent on the subject of Jane
Holland. He would say that she was coming, or that she was not coming,
on such or such a day. That was all. Her coming on some day or the other
was a thing that Gertrude had now to take for granted. She tried to
discuss it eagerly with Brodrick; she dwelt on it with almost
affectionate solicitude; you would have said that Brodrick could not
have desired it more than she did.

In the last two weeks Gertrude found something ominous in Brodrick's
silence and sulkiness. And on this Sunday, the day of Jane's departure,
she was no longer able to ignore their significance. Very soon he would
come to her and tell her that he did not want her; that she must go;
that she must make room for Miss Holland.

That night, after Brodrick had returned from taking Jane Holland home,
his secretary came to him in the library. She found him standing by the
writing-table, looking intently at something which he held in his hand,
something which, as Gertrude appeared to him, he thrust hastily into a
drawer.

"May I speak to you a moment?" she said.

"Certainly."

He turned, patient and polite, prepared to deal, as he had dealt before,
with some illusory embarrassment of Gertrude's.

"You are not pleased with me," she said, forcing the naked statement
through hard lips straight drawn.

"What makes you think so?"

"Your manner has been different."

"Then what you mean is that you are not pleased with my manner. My
manner is unfortunate."

He was almost oppressively patient and polite.

"Would it not be better," she said, "for me to go?"

"Certainly not. Unless you want to."

"I don't say that I want to. I say it might be better."

Still, with laborious, weary patience, he protested. He was entirely,
absolutely satisfied. He had never dreamed of her going. The idea was
preposterous, and it was her own idea, not his.

She looked at him steadily, with eyes prepared to draw truth from him by
torture.

"And there is no reason?" she said. "You can think of no reason why it
would be better for me to go?"

He hesitated a perceptible instant before he answered her.

"There is no reason," he said; and having said it, he left the room.

He had paused to gather patience in exasperation. Gertrude interpreted
the pause as the impressive stop before the final, irrevocable decision;
a decision favourable to her continuance.

She was not appeased by it. Her anxiety rather had taken shape,
resolving itself into a dreadful suspicion as to the relations between
Brodrick and Miss Holland.

He was not thinking of marrying Miss Holland. But there was something
between them, something which by no means necessitated her own
departure, which indeed rendered superfluous any change in the
arrangements she had made so perfect. It was not likely that Brodrick,
at his age, should desire to change them. He might be in love with Jane
Holland. He was wedded to order and tranquillity and peace. And she
never would be. There was wild, queer blood in her. Her writings proved
her lawless, defiant, contemptuous of propriety. She had, no doubt,
claimed the right of genius to make its own rules.

Gertrude's brain, which had been passive to the situation, now worked
with uncontrolled activity. She found herself arguing it out. If it were
so, whatever was, or had been, or would be between them, it was
transitory. It would run its course and period, and she would remain,
and he would return to her. She had only to wait and serve; to serve and
wait. It seemed to her then that her passion rose above theirs, white
with renunciation, a winged prayer, a bloodless, bodiless longing,
subtler than desire, sounding a poignant spiritual cry.

And all the time she knew that her suspicion was not justified. Jane
Holland was honest; and as for him, she was not even sure that he cared
for her.

Every instinct in her was now subdued to the craving to be sure, to know
how far the two were going or had gone. Whatever was between them, it
was something that Brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her
sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand.

Up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and
shutting. She saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel
path outside. He was not coming back.

She opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing
that was the sign and symbol of their secret. She found lying there,
face downwards, a portrait of Jane Holland, a photograph of the painting
by Gisborne. She took it in her hand and looked at the queer,
half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if
she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully,
stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision
of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the
transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment,
triumphant, exultant and alive.

She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned
from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with
her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain.




XXXI


Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself
that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she
faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had
foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into
Brodrick's house.

She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt
that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not
admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease
to be.

She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained
unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct
of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it.

Every Brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority,
knew that grave things were expected of him. It was expected of him,
first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of
infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the
preservation of the race of Brodricks in its perfection. As it happened,
in the present generation of Brodricks, not one of them had done what
was expected of them, except Sophy. John had fallen in love with a
fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she
had borne him no children. Henry, who should have known better, had
fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died
before he could marry her at all. And because of his love for her he had
remained unmarried. Frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left
her for the governess. And now Hugh, with his Jane Holland, bid fair to
be similarly perverse.

For every Brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober
satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. Each one
believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. His
actions defied prediction. He felt it as an impertinence that anybody,
even a Brodrick, should presume to conjecture how a Brodrick would, in
any given circumstances, behave. He held it a special prerogative of
Brodricks, this capacity for accomplishing the unforeseen. Nobody was
surprised when the unforeseen happened; for this family made it a point
of honour never to be surprised. The performances of other people,
however astounding, however eccentric, appeared to a Brodrick as the
facilely calculable working of a law from which a Brodrick was exempt.
Whatever another person did, it was always what some Brodrick had
expected him to do. Even when Frances's husband ran away with the
governess and broke the heart Frances had set on him, it was only what
John and Henry and Sophy and Hugh had known would happen if she married
him. If it hadn't happened to a Brodrick, they would hardly have blamed
Heron for his iniquity; it was so inherent in him and predestined.

So, when it seemed likely that Hugh would marry Jane Holland, the
Brodricks were careful to conceal from each other that they were
unprepared for this event. They discussed it casually, and with less
emotion than they had given to the wild project of the magazine.

It was on a Sunday evening at the John Brodricks', shortly after Jane
had left Putney.

"It strikes me," said John who began it, "that one way or another Hugh
is seeing a great deal of Miss Holland."

"My dear John, why shouldn't he?" said Frances Heron.

"I'm not saying that he shouldn't. I'm saying that one way or another,
he does."

"He has to see her on business," said Frances.

"_Does_ he see her on business?" inquired John.

"He says he does," said Frances.

"Of course," said the Doctor, "he'd _say_ he did."

"Why," said Sophy, "does he say anything at all? That's the suspicious
circumstance, to my mind."

"He's evidently aware," said the Doctor, "that something wants
explaining."

"So it does," said Sophy; "when Hugh takes to seeing any woman more than
once in five months."

"But she's the last woman he'd think of," said Frances.

"It's the last woman a man thinks of that he generally ends by
marrying," said John.

"If he'd only think of her," said the Doctor, "he'd be safe enough."

"I know. It's his not thinking," said John; "it's his dashing into it
with his eyes shut."

"Do you think," said Frances, "we'd better open his eyes?"

"If you do that," said Levine, "he'll marry her to-morrow."

"Yes," said the Doctor; "much better encourage him, give him his head."

"And fling her at it?" suggested Sophy.

"Well, certainly, if we don't want it to happen, we'd better assume that
it will happen."

"Supposing," said Frances presently, "it did happen--what then?"

"My dear Frances, it would be most undesirable," said John.

"By all means," said Levine, "let us take the worst for granted. Then
possibly he'll think better of it."

The family, therefore, adopted its characteristic policy of assuming
Hugh's intentions to be obvious, of refusing to be surprised or even
greatly interested.

Only the Doctor, watching quietly, waited for his moment. It came the
next evening when he dropped in to dine with Hugh. He turned the
conversation upon Jane Holland, upon her illness, upon its cause and her
recovery.

"I shouldn't be surprised," said he, "if some time or other she was to
have a bad nervous break-down."

Hugh laughed. "My dear Henry, you wouldn't be surprised if everybody had
a bad nervous break-down. It's what you're always expecting them to
have."

Henry said he _did_ expect it in women of Miss Holland's physique, who
habitually over-drive their brains beyond the power of their body. He
became excessively professional as he delivered himself on this head.

It was his subject. He was permitted to enlarge upon it from time to
time, and Hugh was not in the least surprised at his entering on it now.
It was what he had expected of Henry, and he said so.

Henry looked steadily at his brother.

"I have had her," said he, "under very close observation."

"So have I," said Hugh. "You forget that she is an exceptional woman."

"On the contrary, I think her so very exceptional as to be quite
abnormal. Geniuses generally are."

"I don't know. For a woman to live absolutely alone, as she does, and
thrive on it, and turn out the work she does--It's a pretty fair test of
sanity."

"That she should have chosen to do so is itself abnormal."

"It's not a joyous or a desirable life for her, if that's what you
mean," said Hugh.

But that was not what the Doctor meant, and he judged it discreet to
drop the discussion at that point.

And, as for several weeks he saw and heard no more of Miss Holland, he
judged that Hugh had begun to think, and that he had thought better of
it.

For the Doctor knew what he was talking about. When a Brodrick meant to
marry, he did not lose his head about a woman, he married sanely,
soberly and decorously, for the sake of children. It was so that their
father had married. It was so that John--well, John had been a little
unfortunate. It was so that he, the Doctor----

He stopped short in his reflections, remembering how it was that he had
remained unmarried. Like every other Brodrick he had reserved for
himself the privilege of the unexpected line.




XXXII


Every year, about the middle of August, Brodrick's family dispersed for
the summer holidays. Every year, about the middle of September, its
return was celebrated at a garden-party given by the Levines.

Brodrick's brother-in-law lived with an extreme simplicity in one of
those square white houses in St. John's Wood, houses secluded behind
high, mysterious walls, where you entered, as by secret, through a
narrow door.

The party had streamed through this door, over the flagged path and
through the house, into the small, dark, green garden at the back, a
garden that seemed to guard, like the house, its secret and its mystery.
There, on this yearly festival, you were certain to find all the
Brodricks, packed rather tight among a crowd of Levines and their
collaterals from Fitzjohn's Avenue, a crowd of very dark, very
large-eyed, very curly-haired persons, persons attired with sobriety,
almost with austerity, by way of protest against the notorious excesses
of their race.

And with them there was always, on this occasion, a troop of little boys
and girls, dark, solemn-eyed little boys and girls, with incredibly
curly hair, and strange, unchildlike noses.

Moving restlessly among them, or grouped apart, you came upon friends of
the Brodricks and Levines, and here and there a few journalists,
conspicuously tired young men who toiled nocturnally on the "Morning
Telegraph."

This year it was understood that the party would be brilliant. The young
men turned up in large numbers and endeavoured to look for the occasion
a little less tired than they were. All the great writers on the
"Monthly Review" had been invited and many of them came.

Caro Bickersteth was there; she came early, and Sophy Levine, in a
discreet aside, implored her to give her a hand with the authors.
Authors, Sophy intimated, were too much for her, and there would be a
lot of them. There was Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning, and Jane
Holland, of course----

"Of course," said Caro, twinkling.

"And Mr. Tanqueray."

At that name Caro raised her eyebrows and remarked that Sophy was a
lucky lady to get Him, for He never went anywhere. Then Caro became
abstracted, wondering why George Tanqueray was coming, and to this
particular show.

"Will his wife be here?" she inquired.

"Dear me," said Sophy, "I never asked her. You don't somehow think of
him as married."

"I doubt," said Caro; "if he thinks so of himself. There never was a man
who looked it less."

Most singularly unattached he looked, as he stood there, beside Nina
Lempriere and Laura Gunning, drawn to them, but taking hardly more
notice of them than of any Brodrick or Levine. He was watching Jinny as
she moved about in the party. She had arrived somewhat conspicuously,
attended by Brodrick, by Winny Heron and by Eddy, with the two elder
little Levines clinging to her gown.

Jane was aware that Nina and Laura were observing her; she was aware of
a shade of anxiety in their concentration. Then she knew that Tanqueray
was there, too, that he was watching her, that his eyes never left her.

He did not seek her out after their first greeting. He preferred to
stand aside and watch her. He had arrived later and he was staying late.
Jane felt that it would become her not to stay. But Brodrick would not
let her go. He took possession of her. He paraded her as his possession
under Tanqueray's eyes; eyes that were fixed always upon Jane,
vigilantly, anxiously, as if he saw her caught in the toils.

An hour passed. The party dwindled and dissolved around them. The
strangers were gone. The hordes of Levines had scattered to their houses
in Fitzjohn's Avenue. The little Levines had been gathered away by their
nurses from the scene. Only Brodrick and his family remained, and Jane
with them, and Tanqueray who kept on looking at the two while he talked
vaguely to Levine.

Brodrick's family was not less interested or less observant. It had
accepted without surprise what it now recognized as inevitable. It could
no longer hope that Hugh would cease from his insane pursuit of Jane
Holland, after making the thing thus public, flourishing his intentions
in the face of his family. With a dexterity in man[oe]uvre, an audacity,
an obstinacy that was all his own, Hugh had resisted every attempt to
separate him from Miss Holland. He only let go his hold when Sophy
Levine, approaching with an admirable air of innocence in guile,
announced that Baby was being put to bed. She suggested that Jane might
like to see him in his--well, in his perfection. It was impossible,
Sophy maintained, for anybody not to desire above all things to see him.

Up-stairs in the nursery, Winny and Mrs. Heron were worshipping Baby as
he lay on the nurse's lap, in his perfection, naked from his bath. Sophy
could not wait till he was given up to her. She seized him, in the
impatience of maternal passion. She bent over him, hiding her face with
his soft body.

Presently her eyes, Sophy's beautiful, loving eyes, looked up at Jane
over the child's shoulder, and their gaze had guile as well as love in
it. Jane stood before it motionless, impassive, impenetrable.

Winny fell on her knees in a rapture.

"Oh, Miss Holland!" she cried. "Don't you love him?"

Jane admitted that she rather liked him.

"She's a wretch," said Sophy. "Baby duckums, she says she rather likes
you."

Baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of Jane's moderation.

"Oh, don't you want," said Winny, "don't you want to kiss his little
feet? Wouldn't you love to have him for your very own?"

"No, Winny, I shouldn't know what to do with him."

"Wouldn't you?" said Mrs. Heron.

"Feel," said Winny, "how soft he is. He's got teeny, teeny hairs, like
down, golden down, just there, on his little back."

Jane stooped and stroked the golden down. And at the touch of the
child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she
drew back, as one who feels, for the first time, the touch of life,
terrible and tender.

"Oh, Jane," said Sophy, "what are you made of?"

"I wonder----" said Mrs. Heron.

Jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and
that Sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. She continued in her
impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile.

"She looks," said Sophy, "as if she knew a great deal. And she doesn't
know, Baby dear, she doesn't know anything at all."

"Wait," said Mrs. Heron, "till she's got babies of her own. Then she'll
know."

"I know now," said Jane calmly.

"Not you," said Sophy almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing
away to his bed beside her own. Winny and the nurse followed her. Jane
was alone with Frances Heron.

"No woman," said Frances, "knows anything till she's had a child."

"Oh, you married women!"

"Even a married woman. She doesn't know what her love for her husband is
until she's held his child at her breast. And she may be as stupid as
you please; but she knows more than you."

"I know what she knows--I was born knowing. But if I were married, if I
had children, I should know nothing, nothing any more."

Frances was silent.

"They--they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing--not
even them."

"Don't you want them to press?"

"It doesn't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they wouldn't let
me see."

"They'd make you feel," said Frances.

"Feel? I should think they would. I should feel _them_, I should feel
for them, I should feel nothing else besides."

"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."

"Do you think I don't?" said Jane.

"Well, there are some things--I don't see how you can--without
experience."

"Experience? Experience is no good--the experience you mean--if you're
an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you,
twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know
women--artists--who have never got over their experience, women who'll
never do anything again because of it."

"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do
very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a
light of sword-play in her eyes.

"I do say it--if they're thinking of their genius."

"Would you say it to Hugh?"

The thrust flashed sharp and straight.

"Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.

Sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. They held her at
parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable.
Their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved.

Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home,
he said. He wanted to talk to her. They could walk through Regent's Park
towards Baker Street.

They had left the Levines' some way behind them when he turned to her.

"Jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?"

"What are you doing in it yourself, George?"

"I? I came to see you. I was told you would be there. You know, you _do_
let yourself in for people."

"Do I?"

"You do. And these Brodricks aren't your sort. No good can come of your
being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.

"They're kind to me," she pleaded.

"Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for
that fellow and his magazine."

"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he'd rather his magazine
smashed than I did."

"And you believed him?"

"I believed him."

"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."

His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil.
"Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.

"Do I like him? Yes."

"Why do you like him?"

"I think, perhaps, because he's good."

"That's how he has you, is it?"

He paused.

"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."

"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."

"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."

He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the
gravel measured the moments of his thought.

"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he
paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."

"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs.
Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments
when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth
living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because
you're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend
to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need,
the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know
that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary,
passing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's
temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do.
Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly
falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."

He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.

"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."

"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."

"That's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself."

It was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her.

"Think--think, before you're drawn in."

"I am thinking," she said.

Tanqueray's voice insisted. "It's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly
easy to get out."

"And if I don't want," she murmured, "to get out----?"

He looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw
in her.

"It's your confounded Jinniness!"

At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it, as
a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.

"It'll always tug you one way and your genius another. I'm only asking
you which is likely to be stronger?"

"Do I know, George? Do _you_ know?"

"I've told you," he said. "I think I do."




XXXIII


Three weeks later, one afternoon in October, Jane found herself going at
a terrific pace through Kensington Gardens. Brodrick had sent word that
he would see her at five o'clock, and it wanted but a few minutes of
that hour.

When Tanqueray sounded his warning, he did not measure the effect of the
illumination that it wrought. The passion he divined in her had had a
chance to sleep as long as it was kept in the dark. Now it was wide
awake, and superbly aware of itself and of its hour.

After she had parted from him Jane saw clearly how she had been drawn,
and why. There was no doubt that the folly had come upon her; the folly
that Tanqueray told her she would think divine. She not only thought it
divine, she felt it to be divine with a certainty that Tanqueray himself
could not take away from her.

Very swiftly the divine folly had come upon her. She could not say
precisely at what moment, unless it were three weeks ago, when she had
stood dumb before the wise women, smitten by a mortal pang, invaded by
an inexplicable helplessness and tenderness. It was then that she had
been caught in the toils of life, the snares of the folly.

For all its swiftness, she must have had a premonition of it. That was
why she had tried so desperately to build the house of life for Brodrick
and Miss Collett. She had laboured at the fantastic, monstrous
fabrication, as if in that way only she could save herself.

She had been afraid of it. She had fought it desperately. In the teeth
of it she had sat down to write, to perfect a phrase, to finish a
paragraph abandoned the night before; and she had found herself
meditating on Brodrick's moral beauty.

She knew it for the divine folly by the way it dealt with her. It made
her the victim of preposterous illusions. The entire district round
about Putney became for her a land of magic and of splendour. She could
not see the word Putney posted on a hoarding without a stirring of the
spirit and a beating of the heart. When she closed her eyes she saw in a
vision the green grass plots and sinuous gravel walks of Brodrick's
garden, she heard as in a vision the silver chiming of the clock, an
unearthly clock, measuring immortal hours.

The great wonder of this folly was that it took the place of the
creative impulse. Not only did it possess her to the exclusion of all
other interests, but the rapture of it was marvellously akin to the
creative ecstasy.

It drove her now at a furious pace through the Gardens and along the
High Street. It caused her to exult in the face of the great golden
October sunset piled high in the west. It made her see Brodrick
everywhere. The Gardens were a green paradise with the spirit of
Brodrick moving in them like a god. The High Street was a golden road
with Brodrick at the end of it. The whole world built itself into a
golden shrine for Brodrick. He was coming to see her at five o'clock.

He was not there, in her room, when she arrived. But he had been there
so often that he pervaded and dominated the place, as Tanqueray had once
dominated and pervaded it. He had created such a habit, such a
superstition of himself that his bodily presence was no longer necessary
to its support. There was a chair by the fireplace, next the window. She
could not see it now without seeing Brodrick, without seeing a look he
had, when, as he sat there silent, his eyes had held her, covered her,
caressed her. There were times when he had the gestures and the manner
of a man sitting by his own fireside, taking her and all that she
signified for granted, establishing between them a communion in which
the poignant, ultimate things were not said because they were so
profoundly felt.

She caught herself smiling now at the things she was going to say to
him.

Her bell rang with the dreadful, startling noise that made her heart
leap in her breast.

He came in slowly like a man preoccupied with grave business of his own.
And at the sight of him Jane's heart, which had leaped so madly, dragged
in her breast and drew the tide of her blood after it.

He took her hand, but not with any eagerness. His face was more than
ever sombre, as if with some inward darkness and concern. He turned from
her and became interested in finding a suitable place for his hat. (Jane
noticed that it was a new one.) Then he sat down and remained seated.

He let her get up and cross the room and ring the bell for herself, so
fixed was he in his dream. Only, as her gown brushed him in her passing
back, he was aware of it and shrank. She heard him draw in a hard
breath, and when she looked at him again she saw the sweat standing on
his forehead.

"You've hurried," she said.

"I haven't," said Brodrick. "I never hurry."

"Of course not. You never do anything undignified."

That was not one of the things that she had meant to say.

"Never," said Brodrick, "if I can help it." And he wiped his forehead.

Jane caught herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden
melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in
the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick,
she felt, ridiculously, for Brodrick's hat.

It was, of course, ridiculous, that she, Jane Holland, should feel a
passion for a man's hat, a passion that brought her heart into her
mouth, so that she could not say any of the things that she had thought
of.

Brodrick's hat on an arm-chair beside him was shining in the firelight.
On his uncomfortable seat Brodrick lowered and darkened, an incarnate
gloom.

"How happy your hat looks," said Jane, smiling at it again.

"I'm glad it amuses you," said Brodrick.

Jane made tea.

He rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. He sat down
again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there
as an offering to the hat. Then, with an immense, sustained politeness,
he began to talk.

Now that Hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition
was almost satisfied.

It was so much so, Jane said, that she was tired of hearing about
Hambleby. Whereupon Brodrick inquired with positively formidable
politeness, how the new serial was getting on.

"Very well," said Jane. "How's the 'Monthly Review'?"

Brodrick intimated that the state of the "Monthly Review" was prosperity
itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from Mr. Prothero?

Jane said that she had had a long letter from Mr. Prothero the other
day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for Mr.
Prothero at home. Brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not
think of any appointment more suitable for Mr. Prothero than the one he
had already got for him.

Then there was a silence, and when Jane with competitive urbanity
inquired after Brodrick's sisters, Brodrick's manner gave her to
understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and
personal. And while she was wondering what she could say next Brodrick
took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never
hurried.

Jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place
where his hat had been. And her heart drew its doors together and shut
them against Brodrick.

She had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of
the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front door; and then,
under her windows, his feet on the pavement of the Square. She went to
the window, and stared at the weeping ash-trees in the garden and
thought of how Brodrick had said that it was no wonder that they wept.
And at the memory of his voice she felt a little pricking, wounding pain
under her eyelids, the birth-pang of unwilling tears.

There were feet, hurrying feet on the pavement again, and again the bell
cried out with its nervous electric scream. Her staircase door was
opened quickly and shut again, but Jane heard nothing until Brodrick
stood still in the room and spoke her name.

She turned, and he came forward, and she met him, holding her head high
to keep back her tears. She came slowly, with shy feet and with fear in
her eyes, and the desire of her heart on her lips, lifting them like
wings.

He took her two hands, surrendered to his, and raised and kissed them.
For a moment they stood so, held together, without any movement or any
speech.

"Jinny," he said thickly, and she looked down and saw her own tears,
dreadful drops, rolling off Brodrick's hands.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her hands struggled in his, and for pity he let them go.

"You can't be more surprised at me than I am myself," said she.

"But I'm not surprised," said Brodrick. "I never am."

And still she doubted.

"What did you come back for?"

"This, of course."

He had drawn her to the long seat by the fireplace.

"Why did you go away," she said, "and make me cry?"

"Because, for the first time in my life, I was uncertain."

"Of yourself?" Doubt, dying hard, stabbed her.

"I am never uncertain of myself," said Brodrick.

"Of what, then?"

"Of you."

"But you never told me."

"I've been trying to tell you the whole time."

Yet even in his arms her doubt stirred.

"What are you going to do now?" she whispered.

"_You're_ going to marry me," he said.

He had been certain of it the whole time.

"I thought," she said an hour later, "that you were going to marry
Gertrude."

"Oh, so that was it, was it? You were afraid----"

"I wasn't afraid. I knew it was the best thing you could do."

"The best thing I could do? To marry Gertrude?"

"My dear--it would be far, far better than marrying me."

"But I don't want," said he, "to marry Gertrude."

"Of course, _she_ doesn't want to marry you."

"I never supposed for a moment that she did."

"All the same, I thought it was going to happen."

"If it was going to happen," he said, "it would have happened long ago."

She insisted. "It would have been nicer for you, dear, if it had."

"And when I'd met you afterwards--you think _that_ would have been
nicer--for all three of us?"

His voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. But he
could see things plainly. It was with the certainty, the terrible
lucidity of passion that he saw himself. The vision was disastrous to
all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long
tradition of the Brodricks. But he saw true.

Jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him.

"And is it really," she said, "as bad as that?"

"It always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing
you want. Luckily for me I've only really wanted one thing."

"One thing?"

"You--or a woman like you. Only there never was a woman like you."

"I see. _That's_ why you care for me?"

"Does it matter why?"

"Not a bit. I only wondered."

He looked at her almost as if he also wondered. Then they were silent.
Jane was content to let her wonder die, but Brodrick's mind was still
groping in obscurity. At last he seemed to have got hold of something,
and he spoke.

"Of course, there's your genius, Jinny. If I don't say much about it,
you mustn't think I don't care."

"Do you? There are moments when _I_ hate it."

Her face was set to the mood of hatred.

"Hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it."

"I wouldn't marry it, if I didn't think I could look after it."

"You needn't bother. It can look after itself."

She paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the
pattern of the sofa-cover.

"Did you think I cared for it so frightfully?" she said.

"I know you did."

"I care for it still." She turned to him with her set face. "But I could
kill it if it came between you and me."




XXXIV


Jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that
even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her
capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in
himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there
fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of
her adoration.

For the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible,
audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible
on some verge between creation and oblivion. This withdrawal had once
been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against
it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing
vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its
disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover
it.

She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as
the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of
terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life.
That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh
Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible,
had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had
ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no
longer moved her.

Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing
had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to
the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful,
adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall
called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon,
found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had
taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked
tenderly in passing.

And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered,
red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched
in the poignant, tender light of it.

That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was
not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She
marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things
ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and
immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the
production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely
acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state
was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock.
She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how
odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the
quarters.

She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett.
She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She
had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had
listened humbly while Gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of
the sacred Books. She had stood like a child, breathless with attention,
when Gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed
her the little squat god in his shrine.

She played with this house of Brodrick's like a child, making believe
that she adored the little squat god and respected all the paraphernalia
of his service. She knew that Gertrude doubted her seriousness and
sincerity in relation to the god.

And all the time she was overcome by the pathos of Gertrude who had been
so serious and so sincere, who was leaving these things for ever. But
though she was sorry for Gertrude, her heart exulted and cried out in
her, "Do you think He cares for the little squat god? He cares for
nothing in the world but me!"

All would have been well if Brodrick had not committed the grave error
of asking to look at the Books, just to see that she had got them all
right. Like Gertrude he doubted.

She brought them to him; presenting first the Book marked "Household."
He turned from the beginning of this Book to the end. The pages of
Gertrude's housekeeping looked like what they were, a perfect and simple
system of accounts. Jinny's pages looked like a wild, straggling lyric,
flung off in a rapture and meticulously revised.

Brodrick smiled at it--at first.

"At any rate," said she, "it shows how hard I've tried."

For all answer he laid before her Gertrude's flawless work.

"Is it any use trying to bring it up to Gertrude's standard?" she said.
"Wouldn't it be better just to accept the fact that she was wonderful?"

(He ignored the suggestion.)

"I suppose you never realized till now how wonderful that woman was?"

Brodrick said gravely he would have to go into it to see.

Brodrick, going in deeper, became very grave. It seemed that each week
Jane's expenditure overlapped her allowance with appalling regularity.
It was the only regularity she had.

"Have you any idea, Jinny, how it goes?"

She shook her head sadly.

"If it's gone, it's gone. Why should we _seek_ to know?"

"Just go into it with me," he said.

She went into it and emerged with an idea.

"It looks," said Jinny, "as if I ate more than Gertrude. Do I?"

Still abstracted, he suggested the advisability of saving.

"Can it be done?" said Jinny.

"It can," said Brodrick, "because Gertrude did it."

"Must I do it?"

"Not if it bothers you. I was only saying it can be done."

"And you'd like it?"

"Well--I should like to know where I am."

"But--darling--It's _so_ much better not to."

He sighed. So did Jinny.

"I can see," she said, "what I've done. I've crumpled _all_ the
rose-leaves, and you'll never be able to lie on them any more."

Then she had another idea.

"Hugh! It's just occurred to me. Talk of saving! I've been saving all
the time like fury. I save you Gertrude's salary."

At this Brodrick became angry, as Jane might have seen, only she was too
entirely taken up with her discovery to look at him.

"Here I have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant,
and thinking how incompetent I am and how much more advantageous it
would have been for you to have married Gertrude. And I come lots
cheaper. I really do. Wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it
before?"

He was very angry, but he had to smile. Then by way of correction he
reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. Didn't she
think it was about time to haul them up?

She didn't. She didn't like the poor things to feel that they were
driven. She liked to see happy faces all around her.

"But they're so unpunctual--those faces," Brodrick said. And while they
_were_ on the subject there was the clock. The clock that Gertrude
always used to wind, that Brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that
Jinny never by any chance wound at all.

"I'm happier," said Jane, "when it's not wound."

"But why----" His face was one vast amazement.

"Because," she said, "it chimes. And it strikes the quarters."

He had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock.

She seemed incorrigible. Then, miraculously, for two months all went
well, really well.

It was not for nothing that Hambleby sold and was selling. The weekly
deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to Jane; but she made it up
secretly. Secretly, she seemed to save.

But Brodrick found that out and stopped it. Jane was not allowed, and
she knew it, to use her own income for the house or for anything else
but herself and her people. It wasn't for that he had married her.
Besides, he objected to her method. It was too expensive.

Jane was disposed to argue the matter.

"Don't you see, dear, that it's the price of peace? Peace is the most
expensive thing on this earth--any stupid politician will tell you that.
If you won't pay for peace, what will you pay for?"

"My dear child, there used to be more peace and considerable less pay
when Miss Collett did things."

"Yes. But she was wonderful."

(Her lips lifted at the corners. There was a flash of irony in her tone,
this time.)

"Not half so wonderful as you," he said.

"But--Hugh--angel--as long as it's _me_ who pays----"

"That's what I won't have--your paying."

"It's for _my_ peace," she said.

"It certainly isn't for mine," said Brodrick.

She considered him pensively. She knew that he didn't care a rap about
the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness--in other people.

"Poor darling--how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves
crumpled under him. Irritating him."

She came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled.

"I told you at the time you ought to have married Gertrude. What on
earth possessed you to go and marry me?"

He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.

The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and
finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough
to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in
triumph.

"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it
shows that I _can_ save when I give my mind to it."

He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.

As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing,
desperately, because of her divine folly.

In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed
to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of
nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be
greater than Hambleby.

She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly
concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar,
unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense
was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.

She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She
spoke of it to Brodrick.

They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on
the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.

"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"

He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a
misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."

"Yes, all day long."

"It's not as if I bothered you--I say, _they_ don't bother you, do
they?"

She understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent
incursions of his family.

"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."

"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."

"What is it then?"

"Only that everything's different. I'm different."

He regarded her for a long time. She _was_ different. It was part of her
queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see
nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life.
It was his miracle on her.

He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear
his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.

"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once
or twice since he had known her it had meant that.

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden
slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his
flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for
Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden
towards the house.

Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of
estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.




XXXV


This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was
sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and
happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or
propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some
wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He
could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been
confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.

In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who
watched him.

The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets
following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light;
stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light,
divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so
radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her
thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw
herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had
worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fashion and the colour of it,
and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. She was writing, this solitary
woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. Jane found
herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger,
admiring as she would have admired a stranger. The solitary woman knew
nothing of Hugh Brodrick or of his house at Putney, and cared less; she
had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. That seemed to Jane
most curious.

Then suddenly she was aware that she, Jane Brodrick, and this woman,
Jane Holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. For a moment her
memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so
that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became
strange to her and empty of all significance. As for her own presence
in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious
wonder at its reality. What she felt was a shock of surprise, of
spiritual dislocation. She was positively asking herself, "What am I
doing here?"

The wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain.

But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In
any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it
would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other
her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent
disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked
about the genius of Jane Holland.

For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon
her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed
her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed
to own.

She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her
book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with
expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it
appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said,
"there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her
charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal
strength.

It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches,"
showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn
her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to
create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from
Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen
Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And
in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that
the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that
the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable
virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code
and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and
brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick
wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the
mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was
hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the
element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done
violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible
will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young
impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved
divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that
beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection;
further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a
frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place;
there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of
course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that
she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they
reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an
unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate
corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had
finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly
came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.

And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received
money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again
for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful
day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work
endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine
would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever made. It
was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that
this time she would achieve popularity. It was just the sort of
terrible, ironic thing that happened. If it did happen she would not be
able to look George Tanqueray in the face.

The date of the Event was fixed now, the fifteenth of July. It was like
death. She had never thought of it as a personal experience so long as
its hour remained far-off in time. But the terror of it was on her, now
that the thing was imminent, that she could count the hours.

The day came, the Birthday, as Brodrick called it, of the Great Book. He
had told Tanqueray long ago that it was the biggest thing she had done
yet. He bore himself, this husband of Jane's, with an air of triumphant
paternity, as if (Tanqueray reflected) he had had a hand in it. He had
even sent Tanqueray an early copy. Tanqueray owned that the fellow was
justified. He thought he could see very plainly Brodrick's hand, his
power over the infatuated Jinny.

By way of celebrating the fifteenth he had asked Tanqueray to dinner.

The Levines were there and the John Brodricks, Dr. Henry Brodrick and
Mrs. Heron. But for the presence of the novelist, the birthday dinner
was indistinguishable, from any family festival of Brodricks. Solemn it
was and ceremonial, yet intimate, relieved by the minute absurdities,
the tender follies of people who were, as Tanqueray owned, incomparably
untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not
married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had
contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of
his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness in
the man.

And only the supreme levity of innocence could have devised and
accomplished this amazing celebration. It took, Tanqueray said to
himself, a mind like Brodrick's to be unaware of Jinny's tragedy, to be
unaware of Jinny.

He himself was insupportably aware of her, as she sat, doomed and
agonizing, in her chair at the head of Brodrick's table.

They had stuck him, of course, at her left, in the place of honour.
Unprofitable as he was, they acknowledged him as a great man. He was
there on the ground and on the sanction of his greatness. Nobody else,
their manner had suggested, was great enough to be set beside Jinny in
her splendid hour. His stature was prized because it gave the measure of
hers. He was there also to officiate. He was the high priest of the
unspeakable ritual. He would be expected presently to say something, to
perform the supreme and final act of consecration.

And for the life of him he could not think of anything to say. The
things he thought could not be said while he sat there, at Brodrick's
table. Afterwards, perhaps, when he and she were alone, if she insisted.

But she would not insist. Far from it. She would not expect him to say
anything. What touched him was her utter absence of any expectation, the
candour with which she received his silence as her doom.

The ceremony was growing more and more awful. Champagne had been
brought. They were going--he might have foreseen it--they were going to
drink to the long life of the Book.

John Brodrick rose first, then Henry, then Levine. They raised their
glasses. Jane's terrified eyes met theirs.

"To the Book!" they said. "To the Book!" Tanqueray found himself gazing
in agony at his glass where the bubbles danced and glittered, calling
him to the toast. For the life of him he could not rise.

Brodrick was drinking now, his eyes fixed upon his wife. And Tanqueray,
for the life of him, could not help looking at Jane, to see how she
would take it.

She took it well. She faced the torture smiling, with a courage that was
proof, if he had wanted proof, of her loyalty to Brodrick. Her smile
trembled as it met Brodrick's eyes across the table, and the tenderness
of it went to Tanqueray's heart. She held out her glass; and as she
raised it she turned and looked full in Tanqueray's face, and smiled
again, steadily.

"To the Book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You can drink now,
George."

He met her look.

"Here's to you. You immortal Jinny."

Lucid and comprehending, over the tilted glass his eyes approved her,
adored her. She flushed under the unveiled, deliberate gaze.

"Didn't I get you out of that nicely?" she said, an hour later, outside
in the darkening garden, as she paced the terrace with him alone. The
others, at Brodrick's suggestion, had left them to their communion.
Brodrick's idea evidently was that the novelist would break silence only
under cover of the night.

"Yes," he said. "It was like your sweetness."

"You can't say," she continued, "that I'm not appreciated in my family."

Through the dark, as her face flashed towards him, he saw the little
devil that sat laughing in her eyes.

"You needn't be afraid to talk about it," she said. "And you needn't lie
to me. I know it's a tragedy."

He had never lied to her. It was not in him to fashion for her any
tender lie.

"It's worse than a tragedy. It's a sin, Jinny. And that's what I would
have saved you from. Other people can sin and not suffer. You can't.
There's your tragedy."

She raised her head.

"There shall be no more tragedies."

He went on as if he had not heard her. "It wouldn't have mattered if it
had been bad all through. But neither you nor I, Jinny, have ever
written, probably we never shall write, anything to compare with the
beginning of that book. My God! To think that there were only six
months--six months--between that beginning and that end."

She smiled, saying to herself, "Only six months. Yes. But what months!"

"You've killed a masterpiece," he said, "between you."

"Do you mean Hugh?" she said. "What had he to do with it?"

"He married you."

"My crime was committed before he married me."

"Exactly." She was aware of the queer, nervous, upward jerk of his
moustache, precluding the impermissible--"When you were in love with
him."

Her face darkened as she turned to him.

"Let's talk about Nina's book. George--there isn't anybody like her. And
I knew, I knew she'd do it."

"Did you know that she did it before she saw Prothero."

"I know."

"And that she's never written a line since?"

"When she does it will be immense. Because of him."

"Possibly. She hasn't married him."

"After all, George, if it comes to that, you're married too."

"Yes. But I married a woman who can't do me any harm."

"Could anybody."

She stood still there, on the terrace, fronting him with the scorn of
her question.

He did not answer her at first. His face changed and was silent as his
thought. As they paced up and down again he spoke.

"I don't mind, Jinny; if you're happy; if you're really content."

"You see that I am."

Her voice throbbed. He caught the pure, the virginal tremor, and knew it
for the vibration of her soul. It stirred in him a subtle, unaccountable
pang.

She paused, brooding.

"I shall be," she said, "even if I never do anything again."

"Nothing," he assured her, "can take from you the things you have done.
Look at Hambleby. He's enough. After all, Jinny, you might have died
young and just left us that. We ought to be glad that, as it is, we've
got so much of you."

"So much----"

Almost he could have said she sighed.

"Nothing can touch Hambleby or the genius that made him."

"George--do you think it'll ever come back to me?"

She stood still again. He was aware now, through her voice, of
something tense, something perturbed and tormented in her soul. He
rejoiced, for it was he who had stirred her; it was he who had made her
feel.

"Of course," he said, "it'll come back. If you choose--if you let it.
But you'll have to pay your price."

She was silent. They talked of other things. Presently the John
Brodricks, the Levines and Mrs. Heron came out into the garden and said
good-night, and Tanqueray followed them and went.

She found Hugh closeted with Henry in the library where invariably the
doctor lingered. Brodrick made a sign to his brother-in-law as she
entered.

"Well," he said, "you've had your talk."

"Oh yes, we've had it."

She lay back in her seat as if exhausted by hard physical exercise,
supporting the limp length of her arms on the sides of the chair.

The doctor, after a somewhat prolonged observation of her posture,
remarked that she should make a point of going to bed at ten.

Brodrick pleaded the Birthday of the Book. And at the memory of the
intolerable scene, and of Tanqueray's presence in it, her agony broke
out.

"Don't talk about it. I don't want ever to hear of it again."

"What's he been saying to you?" said Brodrick.

"He'd no need to say anything. Do you suppose I don't know? Can't you
see how awful it is for me?"

Brodrick raised the eyebrows of innocence amazed.

"It's as if I'd brought something deformed and horrible into the
world----"

The doctor leaned forward, more than ever attentive.

"And you _would_ go and drag it out, all of you, when I was sitting
there in shame and misery. And before George Tanqueray--How could you?"

"My dear Jinny----"

Brodrick was leaning forward too now, looking at her with affectionate
concern.

Her brother-in-law rose and held out his hand. He detained hers for an
appreciable moment, thoughtfully, professionally.

"I think," he said, "really, you'd better go to bed."

Outside in the hall she could hear him talking to Hugh.

"It's physical, it's physical," he said. "It won't do to upset her. You
must take great care."

The doctor's voice grew mysterious, then inaudible, and she heard Hugh
saying he supposed that it was so; and Henry murmured and mumbled
himself away. Outside their voices still retreated with their footsteps,
down the garden path, and out at the terrace gate. Hugh was seeing Henry
home.

When he came back he found Jane in the library, sitting up for him. She
was excited and a little flushed.

"So you've had _your_ talk, have you?" she said.

"Yes."

He came to her and put his hands on her forehead.

"Look here. You ought to have gone to bed."

She took his hand and drew him to her.

"Henry doesn't think I'm any good," she said.

"Henry's very fond of you."

She shook her head.

"To Henry I'm nothing but a highly interesting neurotic. He watches me
as if he were on the look-out for some abnormal manifestation, with that
delightful air he has of never being surprised at anything, as if he
could calculate the very moment."

"My dear----"

"I'm used to it. My people took me that way, too. Only they hadn't a
scientific turn of mind, like Henry. They didn't think it interesting;
and they haven't Henry's angelic patience and forbearance. I was the
only one of the family, don't you know, who wasn't quite sane; and
yet--so unlike Henry--they considered me rather more responsible than
any of them. I couldn't get off anything on the grounds of my insanity."

All the time, while thus tormenting him, she seemed profoundly occupied
with the hand she held, caressing it with swift, nervous, tender
touches.

"After all," she said, "I haven't turned out so badly; even from Henry's
point of view, have I?"

He laughed. "What is Henry's point of view?"

She looked up at him quickly. "You know, and I know that Henry didn't
want you to marry me."

The uncaptured hand closed over hers, holding it tighter than she
herself could hold.

"No," she said. "I'm not the sort of woman Henry _would_ want you to
marry. To please Henry----"

"I didn't marry to please Henry."

"To please Henry you should have married placable flesh and blood, very
large and handsome, without a nerve in her body. The sort of woman who
has any amount of large and handsome flesh-and-blood children, and lives
to have them, thrives on them. That's Henry's idea of the right woman."

He admitted that it had once been his. He had seen his wife that was to
be, placable, as Jinny said, sane flesh and blood, the mother of perfect
children.

"And so, of course," said Jinny, "you go and marry me."

"Of course," said Brodrick. He said it in the voice she loved.

"Why didn't you marry her? _She_ wouldn't have bothered your life out."
She paused. "On the other hand, she wouldn't have cared for you as I do.
That sort of woman only cares for her children."

"Won't you care for them, Jinny?"

"Not as I care for you," said Jinny.

And to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and
cried.




XXXVI


Tanqueray's book was out. Times and seasons mattered little in a case so
hopeless. There was no rivalry between George Tanqueray and his
contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce
him in the same month as Jane Holland. They handled any work of his with
the apathy of despair.

He himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the
modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. The
perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or
great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would
not be recognized. He did not suppose for a moment that it would be.
_His_ tide would never turn.

His first intimation that it was turning came from Jane, in a pencil
note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review.
"Poor George," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. But it's
coming--it's come. You needn't think you're going to be so very
posthumous, after all." He marvelled that Jinny should attach so much
importance to the printed word.

But Jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the
tides. It looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected
it, as if (as dear Jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being
posthumous. Not only was he aware that this book of his was a
masterpiece, but other people were aware. There was one man, even
Tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion
carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would
be placed. And lesser men followed, praising him; some with the
constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating
their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered
unwillingly under judicial pressure. And there were others, lesser
still, men who had hated Tanqueray. They postured now in attitudes of
prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims
of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of English
letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. They would, if
they could, have passed him by.

It was Caro Bickersteth who said of Tanqueray that he played upon the
imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts.

And so it went on. One took off a conventional hat to Mr. Tanqueray's
sincerity; and one complained of "Mr. Tanqueray's own somewhat undraped
attitude toward the naked truth," observing that truth was not nearly so
naked as "Mr. Tanqueray would have us think." Another praised "his large
undecorated splendour." They split him up into all his attributes and
antitheses. They found wonder in his union of tenderness and brutality.
They spoke of "the steady beat of his style," and his touch, "the
delicate, velvet stroke of the hammer, driven by the purring dynamo."
Articles appeared ("The Novels of George Tanqueray;" "George Tanqueray:
an Appreciation;" "George Tanqueray: an Apology and a Protest"); with
the result that his publishers reported a slight, a very slight
improvement in his sales.

Besides this alien tribute there was Caro Bickersteth's large column in
the "Morning Telegraph," and Nicky's inspired eulogy in the "Monthly
Review." For, somehow, by the eternal irony that pursued him, Nicky's
reviews of other people could get in all right, while his own poems
never did and never would. And there was the letter that had preceded
Jinny's note, the letter that she wrote to him, as she said, "out of the
abyss." It brought him to her feet, where he declared he would be glad
to remain, whether Jinny's feet were in or out of the abyss.

Rose revived a little under this praise of Tanqueray. Not that she said
very much about it to him. She was too hurt by the way he thrust all his
reviews into the waste-paper basket, without showing them to her. But
she went and picked them out of the waste-paper basket when he wasn't
looking, and pasted all the good ones into a book, and burnt all the
bad ones in the kitchen fire. And she brought the reviews, and made her
boast of him to Aunt and Uncle, and told them of the nice sum of money
that his book had "fetched," this time. This was all he had been waiting
for, she said, before he took a little house at Hampstead.

For he had taken it at last, that little house. It was one of a terrace
of three that stood high above the suburb, close to the elm-tree walk
overlooking the West Heath. A diminutive brown-brick house, with jasmine
climbing all over it, and a little square of glass laid like a mat in
front of it, and a little garden of grass and flower-borders behind.
Inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did Rose
want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? But there was a
beautiful study for Tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a
kitchen for Rose below.

Rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that
Tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to Laura Gunning's room
in Camden Town, while Rose's dining-room recalled vividly Mrs.
Henderson's dining-room at Fleet.

Though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about
getting the furniture all in. The awful thing was moving Tanqueray and
his books. It was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his
birthday. And in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was
hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, Tanqueray
announced that he had asked some people to dine that night.

"Wot, a dinner-party?" said Rose (she was trying not to cry).

"No, not a party. Only six."

"Six," said Rose, "_is_ a dinner-party."

"Twenty-six might be."

Rose sat down and looked at him and said, "Oh dear, oh dear." But she
had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of anticipation.

Then Tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and
said it was his birthday. He always did ask people to dine on his
birthday. There would only be the Brodricks and Nicky and Nina Lempriere
and Laura Gunning--No, Laura Gunning couldn't come. That, with
themselves, made six.

"Well----" said Rose placidly.

"I can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. But I thought it would
be so nice to have them in our own house. When it's my birthday."

She smiled. She was taking it all in. In her eyes, for once, he was like
a child, with his birthday and his party. How could she refuse him
anything on his birthday? And all through the removal he had been so
good.

Already she was measuring spaces with her eye.

"It'll 'old six," she said--"squeezin'."

She sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the
dinner.

"There must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint,
an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow."

"Oh Lord, no. Give 'em bread and cheese. They're none of 'em greedy."

"I'll give you something better than that," said Rose; "on your
birthday--the idea!"

Dinner was to be at eight o'clock. The lateness of the hour enabled Mr.
and Mrs. Eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the
dishing-up. They had softened towards Tanqueray since he had taken that
little house. That he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle
of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.

The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse
with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush
of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so
handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his
beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his
birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like
that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought
would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the
dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet
in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The
dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his
friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out,
laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said
that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that
she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner,
she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose
became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came
she felt that she could talk a little.

For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear,
patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left
strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was
talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had
been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?

"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up
on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me,
and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the
little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my
legs?"

Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room.
But you should see 'is study."

He bowed an ear that did not hear her.

"Nicky did me well," said Tanqueray.

"I told you all the time," said Jane, "that Nicky knew."

"'E couldn't do anything without 'is study."

"Ah?" Nicky returned to the little woman, all attention.

"Aren't you proud of him? Isn't it splendid how he's brought them round?
How they're all praising him?"

"So they'd ought to," Rose said. "'E's worked 'ard enough for it. The
way 'e works! He'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if
'e could get fair hold of a word----"

They had all stopped talking to Tanqueray and were listening to
Tanqueray's wife.

"Then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and
again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a
marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. And the study
and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think."

Nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her;
and Rose became aware that George's forehead was lowering upon her from
the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence.

After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was
that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was
her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much
had suddenly become dreadful to her.

Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over,
when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in
it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's
awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had
something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in
some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of
him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a
married woman.

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul,
a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

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.

At four o'clock she rose wearily and began to get tea ready. Nina was
coming to tea that afternoon. It was something to look forward to,
something that would stave off the pressure and the pain.

Her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end
of it. She did not see, herself, now, any more than Nina or Jane or
Tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. She did not know how, for
instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. For the last
six months she had not written any paragraphs. Even if Papa had not made
it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it
were giving out. She had lost her job. She was living precariously on
translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any
head at all. She would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be
forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. She
did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there
were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor Papa.

The doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. The dreams
were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. She
hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the
slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and
more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed.

The dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. She had been told
that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. She knew what
that meant. Her fear might take shape any day or any night.

Last night she had moved her bed into his room.

The doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. There
should be, he said, an attendant for the night. To be on the look-out
night and day were too much for any woman. She should husband her
strength, for she would want it. She was in for a very long strain. For
the old man's bodily health was marvellous. He might last like that for
another ten years, and, with care, for longer.

Nina had been drawn apart into the inner room to receive this account of
Mr. Gunning. She was shocked by the change she found in her little
friend. The Kiddy was very thin. Her pretty, slender neck was wasted,
and her childlike wrists were flattened to the bone. A sallow tint was
staining her whiteness. Her hair no longer waved in its low curves; it
fell flat and limp from the parting. Her eyes, strained, fixed in their
fear, showed a rim of white. Her mouth was set tight in defiance of her
fear. Nina noticed that there was a faint, sagging mark on either side
of it.

"Kiddy," she said, "how _will_ you----?"

"I don't know. My brain's all woolly and it won't think."

Laura closed her eyes; a way she had when she faced terror.

"Nina, it was horrible yesterday. I caught myself wishing----Oh no, I
don't; I didn't; I couldn't; it was something else, not me. It couldn't
have been me, could it?"

"No, Kiddy, of course it couldn't."

"I don't know. I feel sometimes as if I could be awful. Yesterday, I did
a cruel thing to him. I took his newspaper away from him."

She stared, agonized, as if her words were being wrenched from her with
each turn of a rack.

"I hid it. And he cried, Nina, he cried."

Her sad eyes fastened on Nina's; they clung, straining at the hope they
saw in Nina's pity.

"I can't think how I did it. I couldn't stand it, you know--the
rustling."

"Kiddy," said Nina, "you're going to pieces."

Laura shook her head. "Oh no. If I could have peace; if I could only
have peace, for three days."

"You must have it. You must go away."

"How can I go and leave him?"

"Tank's wife would come."

"Three days." It seemed as if she were considering it, as if her mind,
drowning, snatched at that straw.

She let it go. "No. It's no use going away. It would make no
difference."

She turned her face from Nina. "In some ways," she said, "it's a good
thing I've got Papa to think of."

Nina was silent. She knew what Laura meant.




XXXVIII


They had preserved as by a compact a perpetual silence on the subject of
Owen Prothero. But always, after seeing Laura, Nina had forced herself
to write to him that he might know she had been true to her trust.

To-night she wrote: "I have done all I can for you, or, if you like, for
Laura. She's at the breaking point. If you think there's anything you
can do for her yourself you'd better do it and lose no time."

She wrote brutally; for mixed with her jealousy there was a savage anger
with Owen as the cause of Laura's suffering. She hated the Kiddy, but
she couldn't bear to see her suffer.

There were two days yet before the mail went; but she posted her letter
at once, while her nerve held out. The thing done, she sat up till
midnight brooding over it. It had taken all her nerve. For she did not
want Prothero to come back, and that letter would bring him. Bodily
separation from Owen had not killed her; it had become the very
condition of her life; for there was a soul of soundness in her. Her
blood, so vehement in its course, had the saving impetus of recoil.

She dreaded its dominion as the whipped slave dreads the lash.

Latterly she had detached herself even spiritually from Owen. She
remembered what she had been before, without him, and what, without him,
she had possessed. Her genius was a thing utterly removed from her, a
thing that belonged to Owen rather than to her, since he had said it was
his youth. She thought of it tenderly, as of a thing done for and
departed; for it was so that she had come to think of Owen's youth. She
was not like Jane, she felt no hatred of it and no jealousy. It had not
given her cause. It had not stood in her way. It had not struggled in
her against her passion. If it had, she knew that she would have swept
it aside and crushed it. It had lain always at the mercy of her
passions; she had given it to her passions to destroy, foreseeing the
destruction. But now she relented. She felt that she would save