He himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. The perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would not be recognized. He did not suppose for a moment that it would be. His tide would never turn.
His first intimation that it was turning came from Jane, in a pencil note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review. "Poor George," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. But it's coming—it's come. You needn't think you're going to be so very posthumous, after all." He marvelled that Jinny should attach so much importance to the printed word.
But Jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the tides. It looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected it, as if (as dear Jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being posthumous. Not only was he aware that this book of his was a masterpiece, but other people were aware. There was one man, even Tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would be placed. And lesser men followed, praising him; some with the constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered unwillingly under judicial pressure. And there were others, lesser still, men who had hated Tanqueray. They postured now in attitudes of prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of English letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. They would, if they could, have passed him by.
It was Caro Bickersteth who said of Tanqueray that he played upon the imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts.
And so it went on. One took off a conventional hat to Mr. Tanqueray's sincerity; and one complained of "Mr. Tanqueray's own somewhat undraped attitude toward the naked truth," observing that truth was not nearly so naked as "Mr. Tanqueray would have us think." Another praised "his large undecorated splendour." They split him up into all his attributes and antitheses. They found wonder in his union of tenderness and brutality. They spoke of "the steady beat of his style," and his touch, "the delicate, velvet stroke of the hammer, driven by the purring dynamo." Articles appeared ("The Novels of George Tanqueray;" "George Tanqueray: an Appreciation;" "George Tanqueray: an Apology and a Protest"); with the result that his publishers reported a slight, a very slight improvement in his sales.
Besides this alien tribute there was Caro Bickersteth's large column in the "Morning Telegraph," and Nicky's inspired eulogy in the "Monthly Review." For, somehow, by the eternal irony that pursued him, Nicky's reviews of other people could get in all right, while his own poems never did and never would. And there was the letter that had preceded Jinny's note, the letter that she wrote to him, as she said, "out of the abyss." It brought him to her feet, where he declared he would be glad to remain, whether Jinny's feet were in or out of the abyss.
Rose revived a little under this praise of Tanqueray. Not that she said very much about it to him. She was too hurt by the way he thrust all his reviews into the waste-paper basket, without showing them to her. But she went and picked them out of the waste-paper basket when he wasn't looking, and pasted all the good ones into a book, and burnt all the bad ones in the kitchen fire. And she brought the reviews, and made her boast of him to Aunt and Uncle, and told them of the nice sum of money that his book had "fetched," this time. This was all he had been waiting for, she said, before he took a little house at Hampstead.
For he had taken it at last, that little house. It was one of a terrace of three that stood high above the suburb, close to the elm-tree walk overlooking the West Heath. A diminutive brown-brick house, with jasmine climbing all over it, and a little square of glass laid like a mat in front of it, and a little garden of grass and flower-borders behind. Inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did Rose want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? But there was a beautiful study for Tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a kitchen for Rose below.
Rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that Tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to Laura Gunning's room in Camden Town, while Rose's dining-room recalled vividly Mrs. Henderson's dining-room at Fleet.
Though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about getting the furniture all in. The awful thing was moving Tanqueray and his books. It was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his birthday. And in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, Tanqueray announced that he had asked some people to dine that night.