The Baxter girl laughed uncertainly and then stopped because Anita’s eyes were on her.
“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen. You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me! Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them. Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my will. That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means, you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied, that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That” —she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind her—“and my column in the Matins, and some comforting hundreds a year, and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that. I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career. There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose, would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I will have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve exploited her, if you like to call it that. When I think of the day I discovered her——” She paused an instant, dragging her hand wearily over her eyes—“I was at my zero that day. The Famous Women had been out a week. The reviews—oh, the reviews! Respectful, courteous, lukewarm. If they’d attacked me, if they’d slated, I’d have rejoiced. But they respect me and they’re bored. They know it’s sound work and they’re bored. I bore people. I bore you—all of you. Do you think I’m blind? That night I read the manuscript of Eden Walls. (Wasn’t it kind of me—it wasn’t even typed!) And then I saw my chance. I saw how far she’d got at twenty, and I thought—‘I’ll take my chance. I’ll take this genius. I’ll make her fond of me. I’ll help her. I’ll worm myself into her. I’ll abase myself. I’ll toady. I’ll do anything. But I will find out how she does it. I will find out the secret. I’ll find it and I’ll make it my own. I’ll serve for her as Jacob served for Rachel; but she shall serve me in the end.’ I have watched. I have studied. I have puzzled. I believe I’ve grasped it at last. I know myself and I know her. If genius is life—the power to give life—is it that?—then I’m barren. I can’t make life as Madala can. But—listen to me! Listen to me, all of you! I can take a living thing—I can cut it open alive. That’s what I shall do with this life-maker—this easy genius. I’ve taken her to pieces, flesh and blood, bone and ligament and muscle, every secret of her mind and her heart and her soul. The life, the real life of Madala Grey, the rise and fall of a genius, that’s what I’m going to make plain. She’s been a puzzle to you all, with her gifts and her ways and her crazy marriage—she’s not a mystery to me. I tell you I’ve got her, naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn’t it fair? She ought to thank me. ‘Dead,’ he says. Who’s to blame? She chose to kill herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I’ve refrained. She couldn’t. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again. Finding’s keeping. It’s mine.”
Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked, panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.
“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as she challenged them.
The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in answer, a laugh rippled out.
I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective soul.
“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she, too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.
“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”
Miss Howe made a wry face.
“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”