"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.
