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The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair · English · Gutenberg #25971 · 874,089 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Creators: A Comedy

Author: May Sinclair

Illustrator: Arthur Ignatius Keller


        
Release date: July 4, 2008 [eBook #25971]
                Most recently updated: January 3, 2021

Language: English

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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 naif 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 in

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