Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought
It was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed. It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture, violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its utterance. But she was sorry for it. She hated to see it suffer.
It raised its head.
"Doesn't it look, Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can be saddled with? It's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. We go after it like a man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights when he isn't a coward or a fool. And because we fight we're done for. And then, when we're down, the woman in us turns and rends us. But if we got what we wanted we'd be just like any other woman. As long," she added, "as we wanted it."
She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather like a man, on Jane.
"It's borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn't meant to matter. She's simply the victim of the Will-to-do-things. It puts the bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. It's like a whip laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside."
She paused in her vehemence.
"Jinny—have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?"
Jane stirred in her corner. "I suppose," she said, "if it's any good I'll have to pay for it."
"You'll have to pay for it with everything you've got and with everything you haven't got and might have had. With a genius like yours, Jinny, there'll be no end to your paying. You may make up your mind to that."
"I wonder," said Jane, "how much George will have to pay?"
"Nothing. He'll make his wife pay. You'd have paid if he'd married you."
"I wonder. Nina—he was worth it. I'd have paid ten times over. So would you."
"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."
She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina's feet, and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.
"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me. You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"
Her murky face cleared suddenly.
"Look here," she said. "I believe, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But I know it means that for you and me."
XIV
August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.
Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves. They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it, vanished when they went.
She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.
Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking, this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way." When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite. And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington Gardens."
He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.
So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.
She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So she hardened it.
She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look. This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody she knew.
At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in the Gardens, where she walked.
One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.
Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.
And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's wail.
"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute—I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again—I wonder if he knew I was like that."
The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings, to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.
There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.
Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.
He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban, adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby; the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency of Hambleby.
Heavens, what a book he would be.
Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.
And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so possessed by the furious impulse to be born.
Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.
But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray. Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning.
That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.
"Do you like him?" said Jane.
"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary taint.
"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"
"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with him?"
"Not a thing."
If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura spoke again.
"How George would have loved him."
Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were dead.
Nina broke their silence.
"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"
They did not answer.
"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"
"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Sussex," said Jane.
"And where's she?"
"Wherever he is, I imagine."
"I gave her six months, if you remember."
"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."
"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."
"He might write. It isn't like him not to."
"No," said Jane, "it isn't like him." She rose. "Good-bye, I'm going."
She went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that blurred the splendour of Hambleby.
"Perhaps," Laura continued, "he thinks we want to drop him. You know, if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think."
"If," said Nina, "he thought about it at all."
"He'd think about Jinny."
"If he'd thought about Jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl."
It was then that Laura had her beautiful idea. She was always having them.
"It was Jinny he thought about. He thought about nothing else. He gave Jinny up for her own sake—for her career. You know what he thought about marrying."
She was in love with her idea. It made George sublime, and preserved Jinny's dignity. But Nina did not think much of it, and said so. She sat contemplating Laura a long time. "Queer Kiddy," she said, "very queer Kiddy."
It was her tribute to Laura's moral beauty.
"I say, Infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?"
"Why shouldn't I be? I'm human," said the Infant.
"I doubt it. You're such a calm Kiddy. I'd like to know how it takes you."
"It doesn't take me at all. I don't give it a chance."
"It doesn't give you a chance, when it comes, my child."
"Yes, it does. There's always," said the Infant, speaking slowly, "just—one—chance. When you feel it coming."
"You don't feel it coming."
"I do. You asked me how it takes me. It takes me by stages. Gradual, insidious stages. In the first stage I'm happy, because it feels nice. In the second I'm terrified. In the third I'm angry and I turn round and stamp. Hard."
"Ridiculous baby. With those feet?"
"When those feet have done stamping there isn't much left to squirm, I can tell you."
"Let's look at them."
Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity of her feet.
"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."
"It wasn't half as difficult as it looks."
"You're a wonderful Kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you may thank your stars you don't."
"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn't for Papa. Papa's a perfect safeguard against passion. I know beforehand that as long as he's there, passion isn't any good. You see," she explained, "it's so simple. I wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with Papa. And nobody would marry me if he had to."
"I see. Is it very bad?"
"Pretty bad. He dreams and dreams and dreams."
"Won't that ever be better?"
Laura shook her head.
"It may be worse. There are things—that I'm afraid of."
"What things, Kiddy, what things?"
"Oh! I don't know——"
"How on earth do you go on?"
"I shut my eyes. And I sit tight. And I go."
"Poor Kiddy. You give me a pain."
"I'm quite happy. I'm working like ten horses to get things done while I can." She smiled indomitably. "I'm glad Tanks didn't care for me. I couldn't have let him in for all these—horrors. As for his marrying—I didn't want you to have him because he wouldn't have been good for you, but I did want Jinny to."
"And you don't mind—now?"
"There are so many things to mind. It's one nail driving out another."
"It's all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin," said Nina. She drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed her.
"Oh, don't! Don't be sorry for me. I'm all right."
She broke from Nina's hand that still caressed her.
"I am, really," she said. "I like Jinny better than anybody in the world except you and Tanks. And I like Nina better than all the Tankses that ever were."
("Nice Kiddy," Nina whispered into Laura's hair.)
"And now Tanks is married, he can't take you away from me."
"Nobody else can," said Nina. "We've stuck together. And we'll stick."
XV
The creation of Hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters. Jane Holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of George Tanqueray. Her celebrity, by removing her from Tanqueray, had cut the ground from under her feet. So far from being uplifted by it, she had felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was celebrated and George Tanqueray was not. It was Tanqueray's belief in her that had kept her up. It consoled her with the thought that her celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. For, through it all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. He swore by her. He staked his own genius upon hers. As long as he believed in it she could not really doubt. But now for the first time since she was celebrated she believed in it herself.
She no longer thought of Tanqueray. Or, if she did think of him, her thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, passionate jealousy. She no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. She even foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.
She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray. It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. And to those who did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme surrender.
Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable condition.
The quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain Tanqueray's most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he said, "The Lord our God is a consuming fire."
Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame. She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life, and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion, to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. She had attained only the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth whole.
She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing amazing things.
There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing breathed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this incomparable peace.
She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back. They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet unintroduced.
By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.
For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray. Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity, so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.
And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he was not there.
He had not even written to her since he married.
Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony, he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy. Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she would have written to him. But because she needed him, she could not bring herself to write.
"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?"
And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after.
In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four. Tanqueray."
Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug, of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart were still.
"What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out."
"I am worn out."
"With Book, Jinny?"
She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there. And there."
His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts. Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on celebrity.
Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene.
"Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny—"one little line—I've got to send answers to all that."
"You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of answering?"
"If it could only end in dreaming."
He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like."
"George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"
"My dear Jinny, I've tried my level best to save you. But you wouldn't be saved."
"Ah," said she, "you don't know how I've hated it."
"Haven't you liked any of it."
"No," she said slowly. "Not any of it."
"The praise, Jinny, didn't you like the praise? Weren't you just a little bit intoxicated?"
"Did I look intoxicated?"
"No-no. You carried it fairly well."
"Just at first, perhaps, just at first it goes to your head a bit. Then you get sick of it, and you don't want ever to have any more of it again. And all the time it makes you feel such a silly ass."
"You were certainly not cut out for a celebrity."
"But the awful thing is that when you've swallowed all the praise you can't get rid of the people. They come swarming and tearing and clutching at you, and bizzing in your ear when you want to be quiet. I feel as if I were being buried alive under awful avalanches of people."
"I told you you would be."
"If," she cried, "they'd only kill you outright. But they throttle you. You fight for breath. They let go and then they're at you again. They come telling you how wonderful you are and how they adore your work; and not one of them cares a rap about it. If they did they'd leave you alone to do it."
"Poor Jinny," he murmured.
"Why am I marked out for this? Why is it, George? Why should they take me and leave you alone?"
"It's your emotional quality that fetches them. But it's inconceivable how you've been fetched."
"I wanted to see what the creatures were like. Oh, George, that I should be so punished when I only wanted to see what they were like."
"Poor Jinny. Poor gregarious Jinny."
She shook her head.
"It was so insidious. I can't think, I really can't think how it began."
"It began with those two spluttering imbecilities you asked me to dine with."
"Oh no, poor things, they haven't hurt me. They've gone on to dine at other tables. They're in it, too. They're torn and devoured. They dine and are dined on."
"But, my dear child, you must stop it."
"If I could. If I could only break loose and get away."
"Get away. What keeps you?"
"Everything keeps me."
"By everything you mean——?"
"London. London does something to your brain. It jogs it and shakes it; and all the little ideas that had gone to sleep in their little cells get up and begin to dance as if they heard music. Everything wakes them up, the streams of people, the eyes and the faces. It's you and Nina and Laura. It's ten thousand things. Can't you understand, George?"
"It's playing the devil with your nerves, Jinny."
"Not when I go about in it alone. That's the secret."
"It looks as if you were alone a lot, doesn't it?" He glanced significantly around him.
"Oh—that!"
"Yes," he said, "that. Will you really let me save you?"
"Can you?"
"I can, if I do it my own way."
"I don't care how you do it."
"Good." He rose. "Is there anything in those letters you mind my seeing?"
"Not a word."
He sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid, irritable hands. In two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the little notes of invitation. He then went round the room collecting the tickets and the cards and the telegrams. These he added to his heap.
"What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised about you."
He took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on the fire.
"George——" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. She was paralyzed, fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed.
"There," he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you."
"Yes." She smiled. "You can tell me what I'm to say to my stepmother."
"Your stepmother?"
"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."
"Effy?"
"My half-sister."
"Well?"
"I think, George, I may have to have her."
"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being had?"
He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.
"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."
She said nothing.
"Can you afford to have him done for?"
"If it would help them, George."
"You want to help them?"
"Of course I do."
"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and rakes in the shekels, not you."
"Ye-es. I know he does."
"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."
Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this truth.
"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"
"Not yet."
"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."
He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of Jinny's style.
"I am going to post this myself," he said, "because I can't trust you for a minute."
He ran out bareheaded and came back again.
"You can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a minute."
He sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had happened. "And now about Hambleby. Another day, Jinny, and I should have been too late to save him."
"But, George, it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour."
"Tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything."
"The scenes I do move in! I was so happy once, when I hadn't any money, when nobody but you knew anything about me."
"Were you really, Jinny?"
"Yes. And before that, when I was quite alone. Think of the hours, the days, the months I had to myself."
"Then the curse fell, and you became celeb——Even then, with a little strength of mind, you might have saved yourself. Do you think, if I became celebrated, I should give myself up to be devoured?"
"If I could only not be celebrated," she said. "Do you think I can ever creep back into my hole again and be obscure?"
"Yes, if you'll write a book that nobody but I can read."
"Why, isn't Hambleby——?"
"Not he. He'll only make things worse for you. Ten times worse."
"How do you mean?"
"He may make you popular."
"Is that what you think of him?"
"Oh, I think a lot of him. So do you."
He smiled his old teasing and tormenting smile.
"Are you sure you're not just a little bit in love with that little banker's clerk?"
"I was never in love with a banker's clerk in my life. I've never even seen one except in banks and tubes and places."
"I don't care. It's the way you'll be had. It's the way you'll be had by Hambleby if you don't look out. It's the way," he said, "that's absolutely forbidden to any artist. You've got to know Hambleby outside and inside, as God Almighty knows him."
"Well?" Jinny's mind was working dangerously near certain personal matters. George himself seemed to be approaching the same borders. He plunged in an abyss of meditation and emerged.
"You can't know people, you can't possibly hope to know them, if you once allow yourself to fall in love with them."
"Can't you?" she said quietly.
"No, you can't. If God Almighty had allowed himself to fall in love with you and me, Jinny, he couldn't have made us all alive and kicking. You must be God Almighty to Hambleby or he won't kick."
"Doesn't he kick?"
"Oh, Lord, yes. You haven't gone in deep enough to stop him. I'm only warning you against a possible danger. It's always a possible danger when I'm not there to look after you."
He rose. "Anything," he said, "is possible when I'm not there."
She rose also. Their hands and their eyes met.
"That's it," she said, "you weren't there, and you won't be."
"You're wrong," said he, "I've always been there when you wanted me."
He turned to go and came back again.
"If I don't like to see you celebrated, Jinny, it's because I want to see you immortal."
"You don't want to be alone in your immortality?"
"No. I don't want to be alone—in my immortality."
With that he left her. And he had not said a word about his wife.
Neither for that matter had Jane. She wondered why she had not.
"At any rate," she thought, "I haven't hurt his immortality."
XVI
A week after his visit to Jane Holland, Tanqueray was settled, as he called it, in rooms in Bloomsbury. He had got all his books and things sent down from Hampstead, to stay in Bloomsbury for ever, because Bloomsbury was cheap.
It had not occurred to him to think what Rose was to do with herself in Bloomsbury or he with Rose. He had brought her up out of the little village of Sussex where they had lodged, in a farmhouse, ever since their marriage. Rose had been happy down in Sussex.
And for the first few weeks Tanqueray had been happy too. He was never tired of playing with Rose, caressing Rose, talking nonsense to Rose, teasing and tormenting Rose for ever. The more so as she provoked him by turning an imperturbable face to the attack. He liked to lie with his head in Rose's lap, while Rose's fingers played with his hair, stirring up new ideas to torment her with. He was content, for the first few weeks, to be what he had become, a sane and happy animal, mated with an animal, a dear little animal, superlatively happy and incorruptibly sane.
He might have gone on like that for an interminable number of weeks but that the mere rest from all intellectual labour had a prodigiously recuperative effect. His genius, just because he had forgotten all about it, began with characteristic perversity to worry him again. It wouldn't let him alone. It made him more restless than Rose had ever made him. It led him into ways that were so many subtle infidelities to Rose. It tore him from Rose and took him out with it for long tramps beyond the Downs; wherever they went it was always too far for Rose to go. He would try, basely, to get off without her seeing him, and managed it, for Rose was so sensible that she never saw.
Then it made him begin a book. He wrote all morning in a room by himself. All afternoon he walked by himself. All evening he lay with his head in Rose's lap, too tired even to tease her.
But, because she had Tanqueray's head to nurse in the evenings, Rose had been happy down in Sussex. She went about the farm and stroked all the animals. She borrowed the baby at the farm and nursed it half the day. And in the evening she nursed Tanqueray's head. Tanqueray's head was never bothered to think what Rose was doing when she was not nursing it.
Then, because his book made him think of Jane Holland, he sat down one day and wrote that letter to Jinny.
He did not know that it was because of Jinny that he had come back to live in Bloomsbury.
They had been a month in Bloomsbury, in a house in Torrington Square. Rose was sitting alone in the ground-floor room that looked straight on to the pavement. Sitting with her hands before her waiting for Tanqueray to come to lunch. Tanqueray was up-stairs, two flights away, in his study, writing. She was afraid to go and tell him lunch was ready. She had gone up once that morning to see that he didn't let his fire out, and he hadn't liked it; so she waited. There was a dish of cutlets keeping hot for him on the hearth. Presently he would come down, and she would have the pleasure of putting the cutlets on the table and seeing him eat them. It was about the only pleasure she could count on now.
For to Rose, as she sat there, the thought had come that for all she saw of her husband she might as well not be married to him. She had been better off at Hampstead when she waited on him hand and foot; when she was doing things for him half the day; when, more often than not, he had a minute to spare for a word or a look that set her heart fairly dancing. She had agreed to their marriage chiefly because it would enable her to wait on him and nobody but him, to wait on him all day long.
And he had said to her, first thing, as they dined together on their wedding-day, that he wasn't going to let his wife wait on him. That was why they lived in rooms (since he couldn't afford a house and servant), that she might be waited on. He had hated to see her working, he said; and now she wouldn't have to work. No, never again. And when she asked him if he liked to see her sitting with her hands before her, doing nothing, he said that was precisely what he did like. And it had been all very well so long as he had been there to see her. But now he wasn't ever there.
It was worse than it was down in Sussex. All morning he shut himself up in his study to write. After lunch he went up there again to smoke. Then he would go out by himself, and he might or might not come in for dinner. All evening he shut himself up again and wrote. At midnight or after he would come to her, worn out, and sleep, lying like a dead man at her side.
She was startled by the sound of the postman's knock and the flapping fall of a letter in the letter-box. It was for Tanqueray, and she took it up to him and laid it beside him without a word. To speak would have been fatal. He had let his fire go out (she knew he would); so, while he was reading his letter, she knelt down by the hearth and made it up again. She went to work very softly, but he heard her.
"What are you doing there?" he said.
"I thought," said she, "I was as quiet as a mouse."
"So you were. Just about. A horrid little mouse that keeps scratching at the wainscot and creeping about the room and startling me."
"Do I startle you?"
"You do. Horribly."
Rose put down the poker without a sound.
He had finished his letter and had not begun writing again. He was only looking at his letter. So Rose remarked that lunch was ready. He put the letter into a drawer, and they went down.
About half-way through lunch he spoke.
"Look here," he said, "you must keep out of the room when I'm writing."
"You're always writing now."
Yes. He was always writing now; because he did not want to talk to Rose and it was the best way of keeping her out of the room. But as yet he did not know that was why, any more than he knew that he had come to live in London because he wanted to talk to Jinny. The letter in his drawer up-stairs was from Jinny, asking him if she might not come and see his wife. He was not sure that he wanted her to come and see his wife. Why should she?
"You'll 'urt your brain," his wife was saying, "if you keep on writ-writin', lettin' the best of the day go by before you put your foot out of doors. It would do you all the good in the world if you was to come sometimes for a walk with me——"
It all went in at one ear and out of the other.
So all morning, all afternoon, all evening, Rose sat by herself in the room looking on the pavement. She had nothing to do in this house that didn't belong to them. When she had helped the little untidy servant to clear away the breakfast things; when she had dusted their sitting-room and bedroom; when she had gone out and completed her minute marketings, she had nothing to do. Nothing to do for herself; worse than all, nothing to do for Tanqueray. She would hunt in drawers for things of his to mend, going over his socks again and again in the hope of finding a hole in one of them. Rose, who loved taking care of people, who was born in the world and fashioned by Nature to that end, Rose had nothing to take care of. You couldn't take care of Tanqueray.
Sometimes she found herself wishing that he were ill. Not dangerously ill, but ill enough to be put to bed and taken care of. Not that Rose was really aware of this cruel hope of hers. It came to her rather as a picture of Tanqueray, lying in his sleeping-suit, adorably helpless, and she nursing him. Her heart yearned to that vision.
For she saw visions. From perpetual activities of hands and feet, from running up and down stairs, from sweeping and dusting, from the making of beds, the washing of clothes and china, she had passed to the life of sedentary contemplation. She was always thinking. Sometimes she thought of nothing but Tanqueray. Sometimes she thought of Aunt and Uncle, of Minnie and the seven little dogs. She could see them of a Sunday evening, sitting in the basement parlour, Aunt in her black cashmere with the gimp trimmings, Uncle in his tight broadcloth with his pipe in his mouth, and Mrs. Smoker sleeping with her nose on the fender. Mr. Robinson would come in sometimes, dressed as Mr. Robinson could dress, and sit down at the little piano and sing in his beautiful voice, "'Ark, 'Ark, my Soul," and "The Church's one Foundation," while Joey howled at all his top notes, and the smoke came curling out of Uncle's pipe, and Rose sat very still dreaming of Mr. Tanqueray. (She could never hear "Hark, Hark, my Soul," now, without thinking of Tanqueray.)
Sometimes she thought of that other life, further back, in her mistress's house at Fleet, all the innocent service and affection, the careful, exquisite tending of the delicious person of Baby, her humble, dutiful intimacy with Baby's mother. She would shut her eyes and feel Baby's hands on her neck, and the wounding pressure of his body against her breasts. And then Rose dreamed another dream.
She no longer cared to sew now, but when Tanqueray's mending was done, she would sit for hours with her hands before her, dreaming.
He found her thus occupied one evening when he had come home after seeing Jane. After seeing Jane he was always rather more aware of his wife's existence than he had been, so that he was struck now by the strange dejection of her figure. He came to her and stood, leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down at her, as he had stood once and looked down at Jane.
"What is it?" he said.
"It's nothing. I've a cold in me head."
"Cold in your head! You've been crying. There's a blob on your dress." (He kissed her.) "What are you crying about?"
"I'm not cryin' about anything."
"But—you're crying." It gave him pain to see Rose crying.
"If I am it's the first time I've done it."
"Are you quite sure?"
"Certain. I never was one for cryin', nor for bein' seen cry. It's just—it's just sittin' here with me 'ands before me, havin' nothing to do."
"I suppose there isn't very much for you to do."
"I've done all there is and a great deal there isn't."
"I say, shall we go to the play to-night?"
She smiled with pleasure at his thought for her. Then she shook her head. "It's not plays I want—it's work. I'd like to have me hands full. If we had a little house——"
"Oh no. No—no—no." He looked terrified.
"It would come a lot cheaper. Only a little house, where I could do all the work."
"I've told you before I won't let you."
"With a girl," she pleaded, "to scrub. A little house up Hampstead way."
"I don't want to live up Hampstead way."
"If you mean Uncle and Aunt," she said, "they wouldn't think of intrudin'. We settled that, me and Uncle. I'd be as happy as the day is long."
"You're not? And the day is very long, is it?"
He kissed her, first on her mouth and then on the lobe of the ear that was next to him.
"Kissin' 's all very well," said Rose. "You never kissed me at Hampstead, and you don't know how happy I was there. Doin' things for you."
"I don't want things done for me."
"No. I wish you did."
"And, Rose, I don't want to be bothered with a house; to be tied to a house; to have anything to do with a house."
"Would it worry you?"
"Abominably. And think of the horrors of moving!"
"I'd move you," said Rose.
"I couldn't. Look here. It would kill that book. I must have peace. This is a beastly hole, I know, but there's peace in it. You don't know what that damned book is."
She gave up the idea of a house; and seven months after her marriage, she fell into a melancholy.
Sometimes, now, on a fine afternoon, she would go out into the streets and look listlessly through shop-windows at hats and gowns and all the pretty things she would have thought it sin so much as to desire to wear. Where Rose lingered longest was outside those heavenly places where you saw far off a flutter of white in the windows, which turned out to be absurd, tiny, short-waisted frocks and diminutive under-garments, and little heartrending shoes; things of desire, things of impossible dream, to be approached with a sacred dumbness of the heart.
The toy-shops, too, they carried her away in a flight; so that Rose caught herself saying to herself, "Some day, perhaps, I shall be here buying one of them fur animals, or that there Noah's ark."
Then, p'raps, she said to her very inmost self, things might be different.
Sometimes she would go up to Hampstead, ridin', as she phrased it, in a bus, to see her Aunt and Uncle and a friend she had, Polly White. Not often; for Rose did not hold with gadding about when you had a husband; besides, she was afraid of Aunt asking her, "Wot's 'E doin'?" (By always referring to Tanqueray as "'E," Mrs. Eldred evaded the problem of what she was expected to call the gentleman who had so singularly married her husband's niece.) Most of all Rose dreaded the question, "Wen is 'E goin' to take a little 'ouse?" For in Rose's world it is somewhat of a reflection on a married man if he is not a householder.
And last time Mrs. Eldred's inquiries had taken a more terrible and searching form. "Is 'E lookin' for anything to do besides 'Is writin'?" Rose had said then that no, he needn't, they'd got enough; an answer that brought Mrs. Eldred round to her point again. "Then why doesn't 'E take a little 'ouse?"
Sometimes Polly White came to tea in Bloomsbury. Very seldom, though, and only when Tanqueray was not there. Rose knew and Polly knew that her friends had to keep away when her husband was about. As for his friends, she had never caught a sight of them.
Then, all of a sudden, when Rose had given up wondering whether things would ever be different, Tanqueray, instead of going up-stairs as usual, sat down and lit a pipe as if he were going to spend the evening with her. Rose did not know whether she would be allowed to talk. He seemed thoughtful, and Rose knew better than to interrupt him when he was thinking.
"Rose," he said at last, apparently as the result of his meditation, "a friend of mine wants to call on you to-morrow."
"To call on me?"
"On you, certainly."
"Shall I have to see him?"
"She, Rose, she. Yes; I think you'll have to see her."
"I didn't know," said Rose, "you had a friend."
She meant what she would have called a lady friend.
"I've dozens," said Tanqueray, knowing what she meant.
"You haven't told me this one's name yet."
"Her name is Jane Holland."
It was Rose who became thoughtful now.
"'As she anything to do with the Jane Holland that's on those books of yours?"
"She wrote 'em."
"You didn't tell me you knew her."
"Didn't I?"
"I suppose that's how you knew her."
"Yes. That's how I knew her."
"What made 'er take to writin'? Is she married?"
"No."
"I see," said Rose, almost as if she really saw. "And wot shall I've to do?"
"You'll write a pretty little note to her and ask her to tea."
"Oh dear!"
"You needn't be afraid of her."
"I'm not afraid; but goodness knows what I shall find to talk about."
"You can talk about me."
"I suppose I shall 'ave to talk to her?"
"Well—yes. Or—I can talk to her."
Rose became very thoughtful indeed.
"Wot's she like?"
He considered. What was Jinny like? Like nothing on earth that Rose had ever seen.
"I mean," said Rose, "to look at."
"I don't know that I can tell you what she's like."
"Is she like Miss Kentish? You remember Miss Kentish at Hampstead?"
He smiled. "Not in the very least."
Rose looked depressed. "Is she like Mrs. 'Enderson down at Fleet?"
"That's nearer. But she's not like Mrs. Henderson. She's—she's charming."
"So's Mrs. 'Enderson."
"It's another sort of charm. I don't even know whether you'd see it."
"Ah, you should have seen Mrs. 'Enderson with Baby. They was a perfect picture."
"That's it. I can't see Miss Holland with Baby. I can only see her by herself."
"I wish," said Rose, "she was married. Because, if she 'ad been, there might be something——"
"Something?"
"Well—to talk about."
It was his turn to say "I see."
He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thus closing the sitting, and settled down to a long correspondence in arrears.
At bed-time Rose spoke again.
"How old is she?" Rose said.
XVII
The next day at four o'clock Rose had on her best gown and was bright-eyed and pink. Brighter-eyed and pinker than Tanqueray had seen her for many weeks. She was excited, not so much by the prospect of seeing Miss Holland as by the beautiful vision of her tea-table. There was a cake with sugar icing on it, and bread and butter rolled as Rose had seen it rolled at Fleet. She had set out the tea-service that her aunt had given her for a wedding-present. The table cloth had a lace edge to it which gratified Rose whenever she thought of it. Tanqueray had on his nicest suit, and Rose's gaze travelled up and down it, and paused in ecstasy at his necktie.
"You do pay for dressin'," she said.
"I do indeed," said Tanqueray.
Rose got on very well at tea-time. It was marvellous how many things she found to say. The conversation really made itself. She had only to sit there and ask Miss Holland how she liked her tea, weak or strong, and if she took so much milk or a little drop more, and sugar, one lump or two lumps, and that sized lump or a little larger? She spun it out till George was ready to begin talking. And there came a beautiful and sacred silence while Rose made Tanqueray's tea and gave it him.
After seven months it was still impossible for Rose to hide her deep delight in waiting on him. More than once her eyes turned from Jane to watch him in the wonderful and interesting acts of eating and drinking.
For a moment Jane suffered an abominable pang as she realized the things that were permissible to Rose, the things that she could say to Tanqueray, the things that she might do for him. At first she had looked away so that she might not see these tender approaches of Rose to Tanqueray. Then she remembered that this was precisely what she had come out to see,—that she had got to realize Rose. And thus, as she brought herself round to face it fairly, she caught in a flash Rose's attitude and the secret of it.
It was not a thing flung in her face to madden her, it had no bridal insolence about it, and none of the consecrated folly of the bride. It was a thing of pathos and of innocence, something between the uncontrollable tenderness, the divine infatuation of a mother, and the crude obsession of a girl uncertain of the man she has set her unhappy heart on; a thing, Rose's attitude, stripped of all secrecy by its sadness.
But there was nothing abject in it. It was strong; it was militant under its pathos and its renunciation. With such a look Rose would have faced gates of death closing between her and Tanqueray.
So Jane realized Rose.
And she said to herself, "What a good thing Tanks never did care for me. It would be awful if I made her more uncertain of him."
At this moment Tanqueray said, "How's Hambleby?"
"He's not quite so well as he was," said Jane.
"I'm sorry to hear that," said Tanqueray.
"Is anybody ill?" said Rose. She was always interested in anybody who was ill.
"Only Hambleby," said Tanqueray.
"Who's he?" said Rose.
"The man Jinny's in love with."
Rose was shocked at this violation of the holy privacies. She looked reprovingly at Tanqueray.
"Is your tea as you like it?" she inquired, with tact, to make it more comfortable for Jane.
"I'm going to smoke," said Tanqueray. "Will you come to my den, Jinny, and talk about Hambleby?"
Rose looked as if positively she couldn't believe her ears. But it was at Jane that she looked, not at Tanqueray.
"No," said Jinny. "I don't want to talk about Hambleby. I want to talk to your wife."
"You mustn't mind what 'e says," said Rose, when they were alone together. "'E sometimes says things to me that make me fair jump."
"I didn't jump," said Jane, "did I?"
"No. You took it a deal better than I should have done."
It was odd, but Rose was ten times more at her ease since Tanqueray's awful reference to Hambleby. And she seemed happier, too.
"You see," said Jane, "there wasn't much to take. Hambleby's only a man in a book I'm writing."
"Oh—only a man in a book."
Rose looked depressed. There was a silence which even Jane found it difficult to break. Then she had an inspiration.
"I'm supposed to be in love with him because I can't think or talk about anything else."
"That's just like Mr. Tanqueray," said Rose.
"Only he isn't in love with the people in his books," said Jane.
"He must think a deal of 'em."
"He says he doesn't."
"Well—'e's always thinkin' when he isn't writin'."
There was trouble on Rose's face.
"Miss 'Olland—'ow many hours do you sit at it?"
"Oh, it depends."
"'E's sittin' all day sometimes, and 'arf the night. And my fear is," said Rose, "'e'll injure 'is brain."
"It will take a good deal to injure it. It's very tough. He'll leave off when he's tired."
"He hasn't left off for months and months."
Her trouble deepened.
"Did 'e always work that 'ard?"
"No," said Jane. "I don't think he ever did."
"Then w'y," said Rose, coming straight to her point, "is he doin' it now?"
They looked at each other; and somehow Jane knew why he was doing it. She wondered if Rose knew; if she suspected.
"He's doing it," she said, "because he can do it. You've had a good effect on him."
"Do you think, do you really think it's me!"
"I do indeed," said Jane, with immense conviction.
"And you think it doesn't hurt him?"
"No. Does him good. You should be glad when you see him writing."
"If," said Rose, "I could see 'im. But I've bin settin' here thinkin'. I lie awake sometimes at night till I'm terrified wonderin' wot's 'appenin', and whether 'is brain won't give way with 'im drivin' it. You see, we 'ad a lodger once and 'e overworked 'is brain and 'ad to be sent orf quick to the asylum. That's wot's frightened me."
"But I don't suppose the lodger's brain was a bit like Mr. Tanqueray's."
"That's wot I keep sayin' to myself. People's brains is different. But there's been times when I could have taken that old book away from him and hidden it, thinkin' that might be for his good."
"It wouldn't be for his good."
"No," said Rose, "I'm not that certain that it would. That's why I don't do it."
She became pensive.
"Besides, it's 'is pleasure. Why, it's all the pleasure he's got."
She looked up at Jane. Her thoughts swam in her large eyes.
"It's awful, isn't it," said she, "not knowin' wot really is for people's good?"
"I'm afraid we must trust them to know best."
"Well," said Rose, "I'll just let 'im alone. That's safest."
Jane rose.
"You mustn't worry," said she.
"I don't," said Rose. "He hates worryin'."
She looked up again into Jane's face as one beholding the calm face of wisdom.
"You've done me good," said she.
Jane stooped and kissed her. She kissed Tanqueray's wife.
"Do you know," she said, "you are what I thought you would be."
Rose's eyes grew rounder.
"And what's that?"
"Something very sweet and nice."
Rose's face was a soft mist of smiles and blushes. "Fancy that," she said.
"Why did you let her go away without telling me?" said Tanqueray, half-an-hour later.
"I didn't think," said Rose. "We got talking."
"What did you talk about?"
She would not tell.
XVIII
She had known all the time that if she was not to go on thinking about George Tanqueray she must see his wife. When she had once thoroughly realized his wife it would be easier to give him up to her.
It was George who had tried to prevent her realizing Rose. He, for his part, refused to be given up to Rose or in any way identified with her. Nina was right. His marriage had made no difference to George.
But now that she realized Rose, it made all the difference to Jane. Rose was realized so completely that she turned George out of the place he persisted in occupying in Jane's mind. Jane had not allowed herself to feel that there was anything to be sorry about in George's marriage. She was afraid of having to be sorry for George, because, in that case, there would be no end to her thinking about him. But if there was any sorrow in George's marriage it was not going to affect George. She would not have to be sorry about him.
Like Nina, Jane was sorry for the woman.
That little figure strayed in and out of Jane's mind without disturbing her renewed communion with Hambleby.
Up till now she had contrived to keep the very existence of Hambleby a secret from her publishers. But they had got wind of him somehow, and had written many times inquiring when he would be ready? As if she could tell, as if her object was to get him ready, and not rather to prolong the divine moments of his creation. She would have liked to have kept him with her in perpetual manuscript, for in this state he still seemed a part of herself. Publicity of any sort was a profanation. When published he would be made to stand in shop windows coarsely labelled, offering himself for sale at four-and-six; he would go into the houses of people who couldn't possibly appreciate him, and would suffer unspeakable things at their hands. As the supreme indignity, he would be reviewed. And she, his creator, would be living on him, profiting by his degradation at percentages which made her blush. To be thinking of what Hambleby would "fetch" was an outrage to his delicate perfection.
But she had to think of it; and after all, when she had reckoned it up, he would not "fetch" so very much. She had failed to gather in one half of the golden harvest. The serial rights of Hambleby lay rotting in the field. George used to manage all these dreadful things for her. For though George was not much cleverer than she he liked to think he was. It was his weakness to imagine that he had a head for business. And in the perversity of things he had really done better for her than he had ever done for himself. That was the irony of it; when, if she could, she would have taken her luck and shared it with him.
Anyhow, business without George had been very uninteresting; and therefore she had not attended to it. There had been opportunities as golden as you please, but she had not seized them. There had been glorious openings for Hambleby, far-reaching prospects, noble vistas, if only he had been born six months sooner. And when George said that Hambleby would be popular, he was, of course, only tormenting her. He never meant half of the unpleasant things he said.
It was now April. Hambleby waited only for the crowning chapter. The arrangements for his publication had been made, all but the date, which was left unsettled, in case at the last moment a new opening should be found.
At four o'clock on an April afternoon Jane was meditating on her affairs when the staircase bell rang somewhat imperiously. It sounded like somebody determined to get in. A month ago she would have taken no notice of it. Now she was afraid not to open her door lest Tanqueray should be there.
It was not Tanqueray. It was Hugh Brodrick.
For a second she wondered at him, not taking him in. She had forgotten that Brodrick existed. It was his eyes she recognized him by. They were fixed on her, smiling at her wonder. He stood on the little square of landing between the door and the foot of the staircase.
"Of course," he said. "You're just going out?"
"No, do come in."
"May I? I don't believe you know in the least who I am."
"I do, really. I'm very glad to see you."
He followed her up the stairs and into her sitting-room, the small white-painted sitting-room, with its three straight windows looking on the Square. He went to one of the windows and looked out.
"Yes," he said, "there is a charm about it."
He spoke as if his mind had been long occupied with this place she lived in; as if they had disputed together many times as to the attraction of Kensington Square, and he had been won over, at last, reluctantly, to her view. It all strengthened the impression he gave of being absorbed in her.
He turned to her.
"You like living here? All alone? Cut off from everybody?"
She remembered then how they had really discussed this question.
"I like it very much indeed."
"Well——" (He said it sadly.) "Do you write in this room? At that table?"
"Yes."
He looked at the table as if he thought it all very interesting and very incomprehensible and very sad. He looked at the books on the shelf close to the table and read George Tanqueray's name on them. He frowned slightly at the books and turned away.
She sat down. He did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another where he could see her rather better. He was certainly a man who knew his own mind.
"I've called," he said, "a great many times. But I've always missed you."
"So at last you gave it up? Like everybody else."
"Does it look as if I'd given it up?"
She could not say it did.
"No," he said. "I never give anything up. In that I'm not like everybody else."
He wasn't, she reflected. And yet somehow he ought to have been. There was nothing so very remarkable about him.
He smiled. "I believe," he said, "you thought I was the man come to tune the piano."
"Did I look as if I did?"
"A little."
"Do I now?" She was beginning to like Brodrick.
"Not so much. As it happens, I have come partly for the pleasure of seeing you and partly—to discuss, if you don't mind, some business."
Jane was aware of a certain relief. If it was that he came for——
"I don't know whether you've heard that I'm bringing out a magazine?"
"Oh yes. I remember you were bringing it out——"
"I was thinking of bringing it out when I last met you. It may interest you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. I'm going in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. No politics."
"Won't that limit your circulation?"
"Of course it'll limit it. Still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go in for politics."
"I see. Rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?"
He blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of vaunting his own honesty.
"Oh, well, I don't know about that. Politics means my brother-in-law. If I keep them out I keep him out, and run the thing my own way. I dare say that's all there is in it."
Certainly she liked him. He struck her as powerful and determined. With his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the forlorn hope of literature.
"It's taken me all this time to get the capital together. But I've got it."
"Yes. You would get it."
He looked up gravely inquiring.
"You strike me as being able to get things."
He flushed with pleasure. "Do I? I don't know. If I can get the authors I want I believe I can make the magazine one of the big things of the century." He said it quietly, as if inspired by caution rather than enthusiasm. "They'll make it—if I can get them."
"Are they so difficult?"
"The ones I want are. I don't want any but the best."
She smiled.
"It's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really been tried before. There's room for it."
"Oh, oceans of room."
"And it will have all the room there is. Now's its moment. All the good old magazines are dead."
"And gone to heaven because they were so good."
"Because they were old. My magazine will be young."
"There has been frightful mortality among the young."
"I know the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much as you."
She seemed to have hardly heard him.
"Have you asked Mr. Tanqueray?"
"Not yet. You're the first I've asked. The very first."
"You should have asked him first."
"I didn't want him first."
"You should have wanted him. Why" (she persisted), "did you come to me before him?"
"Because you're so much more valuable to me."
"In what way?"
"Your name is better known."
"It oughtn't to be. If it's names you want——" She gave him a string of them.
"Your name stands for more."
"And Mr. Tanqueray's? Does it not stand?"
He hesitated.
She insisted. "If mine does."
"I am corrupt," said Brodrick, "and mercenary and brutal."
"I wish you weren't," said she, so earnestly that he laughed.
"My dear Miss Holland, we cannot blink the fact that you have a name and he hasn't."
"Or that my name sells and his doesn't. Is that it?"
"Not altogether. If I couldn't get you I'd try to get him."
"Would you? How do you know that you're going to get me?"
He smiled. "I don't. I only know that I'm prepared, if I may say so, to pay for you."
"Oh," she said, "it isn't that."
He smiled again at her horror.
"I know it isn't that. Still——" He named a round sum, a sum so perfect in its roundness that it took her breath away. With such a sum she could do all that she wanted for her sister Effy at once, and secure herself against gross poverty for years.
"It's more than we could give Mr. Tanqueray."
"Is it?"
"Much more."
"That's what's so awful," she said.
He noticed how she clenched her hands as she said it.
"It's not my fault, is it?"
"Oh—I don't care whose fault it is!"
"But you care?"
"Yes." She almost whispered it.
He was struck by that sudden drop from vehemence to pathos.
"He is a very great friend of yours?"
"Yes."
"And—he's just married, isn't he?"
"Yes. And he isn't very well off. I don't think he could afford——" she said.
He coloured painfully as if she had suspected him of a desire to traffic in Tanqueray's poverty.
"We should pay him very well," he said.
"His book" (she pressed it on him), "is not arranged for."
"And yours is?"
"Practically it is. The contract's drawn up, but the date's not settled."
"If the date's not settled, surely I've still a chance?"
"And he," she said, "has still a chance if—I fail you?"
