She caught herself smiling now at the things she was going to say to
him.

Her bell rang with the dreadful, startling noise that made her heart
leap in her breast.

He came in slowly like a man preoccupied with grave business of his own.
And at the sight of him Jane's heart, which had leaped so madly, dragged
in her breast and drew the tide of her blood after it.

He took her hand, but not with any eagerness. His face was more than
ever sombre, as if with some inward darkness and concern. He turned from
her and became interested in finding a suitable place for his hat. (Jane
noticed that it was a new one.) Then he sat down and remained seated.

He let her get up and cross the room and ring the bell for herself, so
fixed was he in his dream. Only, as her gown brushed him in her passing
back, he was aware of it and shrank. She heard him draw in a hard
breath, and when she looked at him again she saw the sweat standing on
his forehead.

"You've hurried," she said.

"I haven't," said Brodrick. "I never hurry."

"Of course not. You never do anything undignified."

That was not one of the things that she had meant to say.

"Never," said Brodrick, "if I can help it." And he wiped his forehead.

Jane caught herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden
melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in
the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick,
she felt, ridiculously, for Brodrick's hat.

It was, of course, ridiculous, that she, Jane Holland, should feel a
passion for a man's hat, a passion that brought her heart into her
mouth, so that she could not say any of the things that she had thought
of.

Brodrick's hat on an arm-chair beside him was shining in the firelight.
On his uncomfortable seat Brodrick lowered and darkened, an incarnate
gloom.

"How happy your hat looks," said Jane, smiling at it again.

"I'm glad it amuses you," said Brodrick.

Jane made tea.

He rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. He sat down
again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there
as an offering to the hat. Then, with an immense, sustained politeness,
he began to talk.

Now that Hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition
was almost satisfied.

It was so much so, Jane said, that she was tired of hearing about
Hambleby. Whereupon Brodrick inquired with positively formidable
politeness, how the new serial was getting on.

"Very well," said Jane. "How's the 'Monthly Review'?"

Brodrick intimated that the state of the "Monthly Review" was prosperity
itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from Mr. Prothero?

Jane said that she had had a long letter from Mr. Prothero the other
day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for Mr.
Prothero at home. Brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not
think of any appointment more suitable for Mr. Prothero than the one he
had already got for him.

Then there was a silence, and when Jane with competitive urbanity
inquired after Brodrick's sisters, Brodrick's manner gave her to
understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and
personal. And while she was wondering what she could say next Brodrick
took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never
hurried.

Jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place
where his hat had been. And her heart drew its doors together and shut
them against Brodrick.

She had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of
the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front door; and then,
under her windows, his feet on the pavement of the Square. She went to
the window, and stared at the weeping ash-trees in the garden and
thought of how Brodrick had said that it was no wonder that they wept.
And at the memory of his voice she felt a little pricking, wounding pain
under her eyelids, the birth-pang of unwilling tears.

There were feet, hurrying feet on the pavement again, and again the bell
cried out with its nervous electric scream. Her staircase door was
opened quickly and shut again, but Jane heard nothing until Brodrick
stood still in the room and spoke her name.

She turned, and he came forward, and she met him, holding her head high
to keep back her tears. She came slowly, with shy feet and with fear in
her eyes, and the desire of her heart on her lips, lifting them like
wings.

He took her two hands, surrendered to his, and raised and kissed them.
For a moment they stood so, held together, without any movement or any
speech.

"Jinny," he said thickly, and she looked down and saw her own tears,
dreadful drops, rolling off Brodrick's hands.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to do that."

Her hands struggled in his, and for pity he let them go.

"You can't be more surprised at me than I am myself," said she.

"But I'm not surprised," said Brodrick. "I never am."

And still she doubted.

"What did you come back for?"

"This, of course."

He had drawn her to the long seat by the fireplace.

"Why did you go away," she said, "and make me cry?"

"Because, for the first time in my life, I was uncertain."

"Of yourself?" Doubt, dying hard, stabbed her.

"I am never uncertain of myself," said Brodrick.

"Of what, then?"

"Of you."

"But you never told me."

"I've been trying to tell you the whole time."

Yet even in his arms her doubt stirred.

"What are you going to do now?" she whispered.

"_You're_ going to marry me," he said.

He had been certain of it the whole time.

"I thought," she said an hour later, "that you were going to marry
Gertrude."

"Oh, so that was it, was it? You were afraid----"

"I wasn't afraid. I knew it was the best thing you could do."

"The best thing I could do? To marry Gertrude?"

"My dear--it would be far, far better than marrying me."

"But I don't want," said he, "to marry Gertrude."

"Of course, _she_ doesn't want to marry you."

"I never supposed for a moment that she did."

"All the same, I thought it was going to happen."

"If it was going to happen," he said, "it would have happened long ago."

She insisted. "It would have been nicer for you, dear, if it had."

"And when I'd met you afterwards--you think _that_ would have been
nicer--for all three of us?"

His voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. But he
could see things plainly. It was with the certainty, the terrible
lucidity of passion that he saw himself. The vision was disastrous to
all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long
tradition of the Brodricks. But he saw true.

Jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him.

"And is it really," she said, "as bad as that?"

"It always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing
you want. Luckily for me I've only really wanted one thing."

"One thing?"

"You--or a woman like you. Only there never was a woman like you."

"I see. _That's_ why you care for me?"

"Does it matter why?"

"Not a bit. I only wondered."

He looked at her almost as if he also wondered. Then they were silent.
Jane was content to let her wonder die, but Brodrick's mind was still
groping in obscurity. At last he seemed to have got hold of something,
and he spoke.

"Of course, there's your genius, Jinny. If I don't say much about it,
you mustn't think I don't care."

"Do you? There are moments when _I_ hate it."

Her face was set to the mood of hatred.

"Hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it."

"I wouldn't marry it, if I didn't think I could look after it."

"You needn't bother. It can look after itself."

She paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the
pattern of the sofa-cover.

"Did you think I cared for it so frightfully?" she said.

"I know you did."

"I care for it still." She turned to him with her set face. "But I could
kill it if it came between you and me."




XXXIV


Jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that
even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her
capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in
himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there
fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of
her adoration.

For the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible,
audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible
on some verge between creation and oblivion. This withdrawal had once
been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against
it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing
vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its
disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover
it.

She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as
the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of
terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life.
That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh
Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible,
had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had
ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no
longer moved her.

Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing
had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to
the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful,
adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall
called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon,
found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had
taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked
tenderly in passing.

And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered,
red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched
in the poignant, tender light of it.

That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was
not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She
marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things
ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and
immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the
production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely
acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state
was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock.
She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how
odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the
quarters.

She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett.
She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She
had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had
listened humbly while Gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of
the sacred Books. She had stood like a child, breathless with attention,
when Gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed
her the little squat god in his shrine.

She played with this house of Brodrick's like a child, making believe
that she adored the little squat god and respected all the paraphernalia
of his service. She knew that Gertrude doubted her seriousness and
sincerity in relation to the god.

And all the time she was overcome by the pathos of Gertrude who had been
so serious and so sincere, who was leaving these things for ever. But
though she was sorry for Gertrude, her heart exulted and cried out in
her, "Do you think He cares for the little squat god? He cares for
nothing in the world but me!"

All would have been well if Brodrick had not committed the grave error
of asking to look at the Books, just to see that she had got them all
right. Like Gertrude he doubted.

She brought them to him; presenting first the Book marked "Household."
He turned from the beginning of this Book to the end. The pages of
Gertrude's housekeeping looked like what they were, a perfect and simple
system of accounts. Jinny's pages looked like a wild, straggling lyric,
flung off in a rapture and meticulously revised.

Brodrick smiled at it--at first.

"At any rate," said she, "it shows how hard I've tried."

For all answer he laid before her Gertrude's flawless work.

"Is it any use trying to bring it up to Gertrude's standard?" she said.
"Wouldn't it be better just to accept the fact that she was wonderful?"

(He ignored the suggestion.)

"I suppose you never realized till now how wonderful that woman was?"

Brodrick said gravely he would have to go into it to see.

Brodrick, going in deeper, became very grave. It seemed that each week
Jane's expenditure overlapped her allowance with appalling regularity.
It was the only regularity she had.

"Have you any idea, Jinny, how it goes?"

She shook her head sadly.

"If it's gone, it's gone. Why should we _seek_ to know?"

"Just go into it with me," he said.

She went into it and emerged with an idea.

"It looks," said Jinny, "as if I ate more than Gertrude. Do I?"

Still abstracted, he suggested the advisability of saving.

"Can it be done?" said Jinny.

"It can," said Brodrick, "because Gertrude did it."

"Must I do it?"

"Not if it bothers you. I was only saying it can be done."

"And you'd like it?"

"Well--I should like to know where I am."

"But--darling--It's _so_ much better not to."

He sighed. So did Jinny.

"I can see," she said, "what I've done. I've crumpled _all_ the
rose-leaves, and you'll never be able to lie on them any more."

Then she had another idea.

"Hugh! It's just occurred to me. Talk of saving! I've been saving all
the time like fury. I save you Gertrude's salary."

At this Brodrick became angry, as Jane might have seen, only she was too
entirely taken up with her discovery to look at him.

"Here I have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant,
and thinking how incompetent I am and how much more advantageous it
would have been for you to have married Gertrude. And I come lots
cheaper. I really do. Wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it
before?"

He was very angry, but he had to smile. Then by way of correction he
reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. Didn't she
think it was about time to haul them up?

She didn't. She didn't like the poor things to feel that they were
driven. She liked to see happy faces all around her.

"But they're so unpunctual--those faces," Brodrick said. And while they
_were_ on the subject there was the clock. The clock that Gertrude
always used to wind, that Brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that
Jinny never by any chance wound at all.

"I'm happier," said Jane, "when it's not wound."

"But why----" His face was one vast amazement.

"Because," she said, "it chimes. And it strikes the quarters."

He had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock.

She seemed incorrigible. Then, miraculously, for two months all went
well, really well.

It was not for nothing that Hambleby sold and was selling. The weekly
deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to Jane; but she made it up
secretly. Secretly, she seemed to save.

But Brodrick found that out and stopped it. Jane was not allowed, and
she knew it, to use her own income for the house or for anything else
but herself and her people. It wasn't for that he had married her.
Besides, he objected to her method. It was too expensive.

Jane was disposed to argue the matter.

"Don't you see, dear, that it's the price of peace? Peace is the most
expensive thing on this earth--any stupid politician will tell you that.
If you won't pay for peace, what will you pay for?"

"My dear child, there used to be more peace and considerable less pay
when Miss Collett did things."

"Yes. But she was wonderful."

(Her lips lifted at the corners. There was a flash of irony in her tone,
this time.)

"Not half so wonderful as you," he said.

"But--Hugh--angel--as long as it's _me_ who pays----"

"That's what I won't have--your paying."

"It's for _my_ peace," she said.

"It certainly isn't for mine," said Brodrick.

She considered him pensively. She knew that he didn't care a rap about
the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness--in other people.

"Poor darling--how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves
crumpled under him. Irritating him."

She came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled.

"I told you at the time you ought to have married Gertrude. What on
earth possessed you to go and marry me?"

He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.

The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and
finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough
to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in
triumph.

"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it
shows that I _can_ save when I give my mind to it."

He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.

As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing,
desperately, because of her divine folly.

In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed
to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of
nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be
greater than Hambleby.

She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly
concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar,
unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense
was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.

She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She
spoke of it to Brodrick.

They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on
the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.

"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"

He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a
misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."

"Yes, all day long."

"It's not as if I bothered you--I say, _they_ don't bother you, do
they?"

She understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent
incursions of his family.

"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."

"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."

"What is it then?"

"Only that everything's different. I'm different."

He regarded her for a long time. She _was_ different. It was part of her
queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see
nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life.
It was his miracle on her.

He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear
his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.

"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once
or twice since he had known her it had meant that.

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden
slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his
flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for
Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden
towards the house.

Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of
estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.




XXXV


This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was
sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and
happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or
propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some
wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He
could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been
confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.

In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who
watched him.

The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets
following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light;
stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light,
divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so
radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her
thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw
herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had
worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fashion and the colour of it,
and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. She was writing, this solitary
woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. Jane found
herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger,
admiring as she would have admired a stranger. The solitary woman knew
nothing of Hugh Brodrick or of his house at Putney, and cared less; she
had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. That seemed to Jane
most curious.

Then suddenly she was aware that she, Jane Brodrick, and this woman,
Jane Holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. For a moment her
memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so
that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became
strange to her and empty of all significance. As for her own presence
in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious
wonder at its reality. What she felt was a shock of surprise, of
spiritual dislocation. She was positively asking herself, "What am I
doing here?"

The wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain.

But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In
any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it
would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other
her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent
disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked
about the genius of Jane Holland.

For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon
her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed
her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed
to own.

She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her
book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with
expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it
appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said,
"there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her
charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal
strength.

It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches,"
showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn
her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to
create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from
Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen
Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And
in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that
the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that
the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable
virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code
and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and
brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick
wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the
mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was
hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the
element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done
violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible
will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young
impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved
divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that
beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection;
further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a
frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place;
there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of
course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that
she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they
reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an
unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate
corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had
finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly
came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.

And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received
money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again
for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful
day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work
endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine
would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever made. It
was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that
this time she would achieve popularity. It was just the sort of
terrible, ironic thing that happened. If it did happen she would not be
able to look George Tanqueray in the face.

The date of the Event was fixed now, the fifteenth of July. It was like
death. She had never thought of it as a personal experience so long as
its hour remained far-off in time. But the terror of it was on her, now
that the thing was imminent, that she could count the hours.

The day came, the Birthday, as Brodrick called it, of the Great Book. He
had told Tanqueray long ago that it was the biggest thing she had done
yet. He bore himself, this husband of Jane's, with an air of triumphant
paternity, as if (Tanqueray reflected) he had had a hand in it. He had
even sent Tanqueray an early copy. Tanqueray owned that the fellow was
justified. He thought he could see very plainly Brodrick's hand, his
power over the infatuated Jinny.

By way of celebrating the fifteenth he had asked Tanqueray to dinner.

The Levines were there and the John Brodricks, Dr. Henry Brodrick and
Mrs. Heron. But for the presence of the novelist, the birthday dinner
was indistinguishable, from any family festival of Brodricks. Solemn it
was and ceremonial, yet intimate, relieved by the minute absurdities,
the tender follies of people who were, as Tanqueray owned, incomparably
untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not
married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had
contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of
his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness in
the man.

And only the supreme levity of innocence could have devised and
accomplished this amazing celebration. It took, Tanqueray said to
himself, a mind like Brodrick's to be unaware of Jinny's tragedy, to be
unaware of Jinny.

He himself was insupportably aware of her, as she sat, doomed and
agonizing, in her chair at the head of Brodrick's table.

They had stuck him, of course, at her left, in the place of honour.
Unprofitable as he was, they acknowledged him as a great man. He was
there on the ground and on the sanction of his greatness. Nobody else,
their manner had suggested, was great enough to be set beside Jinny in
her splendid hour. His stature was prized because it gave the measure of
hers. He was there also to officiate. He was the high priest of the
unspeakable ritual. He would be expected presently to say something, to
perform the supreme and final act of consecration.

And for the life of him he could not think of anything to say. The
things he thought could not be said while he sat there, at Brodrick's
table. Afterwards, perhaps, when he and she were alone, if she insisted.

But she would not insist. Far from it. She would not expect him to say
anything. What touched him was her utter absence of any expectation, the
candour with which she received his silence as her doom.

The ceremony was growing more and more awful. Champagne had been
brought. They were going--he might have foreseen it--they were going to
drink to the long life of the Book.

John Brodrick rose first, then Henry, then Levine. They raised their
glasses. Jane's terrified eyes met theirs.

"To the Book!" they said. "To the Book!" Tanqueray found himself gazing
in agony at his glass where the bubbles danced and glittered, calling
him to the toast. For the life of him he could not rise.

Brodrick was drinking now, his eyes fixed upon his wife. And Tanqueray,
for the life of him, could not help looking at Jane, to see how she
would take it.

She took it well. She faced the torture smiling, with a courage that was
proof, if he had wanted proof, of her loyalty to Brodrick. Her smile
trembled as it met Brodrick's eyes across the table, and the tenderness
of it went to Tanqueray's heart. She held out her glass; and as she
raised it she turned and looked full in Tanqueray's face, and smiled
again, steadily.

"To the Book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You can drink now,
George."

He met her look.

"Here's to you. You immortal Jinny."

Lucid and comprehending, over the tilted glass his eyes approved her,
adored her. She flushed under the unveiled, deliberate gaze.

"Didn't I get you out of that nicely?" she said, an hour later, outside
in the darkening garden, as she paced the terrace with him alone. The
others, at Brodrick's suggestion, had left them to their communion.
Brodrick's idea evidently was that the novelist would break silence only
under cover of the night.

"Yes," he said. "It was like your sweetness."

"You can't say," she continued, "that I'm not appreciated in my family."

Through the dark, as her face flashed towards him, he saw the little
devil that sat laughing in her eyes.

"You needn't be afraid to talk about it," she said. "And you needn't lie
to me. I know it's a tragedy."

He had never lied to her. It was not in him to fashion for her any
tender lie.

"It's worse than a tragedy. It's a sin, Jinny. And that's what I would
have saved you from. Other people can sin and not suffer. You can't.
There's your tragedy."

She raised her head.

"There shall be no more tragedies."

He went on as if he had not heard her. "It wouldn't have mattered if it
had been bad all through. But neither you nor I, Jinny, have ever
written, probably we never shall write, anything to compare with the
beginning of that book. My God! To think that there were only six
months--six months--between that beginning and that end."

She smiled, saying to herself, "Only six months. Yes. But what months!"

"You've killed a masterpiece," he said, "between you."

"Do you mean Hugh?" she said. "What had he to do with it?"

"He married you."

"My crime was committed before he married me."

"Exactly." She was aware of the queer, nervous, upward jerk of his
moustache, precluding the impermissible--"When you were in love with
him."

Her face darkened as she turned to him.

"Let's talk about Nina's book. George--there isn't anybody like her. And
I knew, I knew she'd do it."

"Did you know that she did it before she saw Prothero."

"I know."

"And that she's never written a line since?"

"When she does it will be immense. Because of him."

"Possibly. She hasn't married him."

"After all, George, if it comes to that, you're married too."

"Yes. But I married a woman who can't do me any harm."

"Could anybody."

She stood still there, on the terrace, fronting him with the scorn of
her question.

He did not answer her at first. His face changed and was silent as his
thought. As they paced up and down again he spoke.

"I don't mind, Jinny; if you're happy; if you're really content."

"You see that I am."

Her voice throbbed. He caught the pure, the virginal tremor, and knew it
for the vibration of her soul. It stirred in him a subtle, unaccountable
pang.

She paused, brooding.

"I shall be," she said, "even if I never do anything again."

"Nothing," he assured her, "can take from you the things you have done.
Look at Hambleby. He's enough. After all, Jinny, you might have died
young and just left us that. We ought to be glad that, as it is, we've
got so much of you."

"So much----"

Almost he could have said she sighed.

"Nothing can touch Hambleby or the genius that made him."

"George--do you think it'll ever come back to me?"

She stood still again. He was aware now, through her voice, of
something tense, something perturbed and tormented in her soul. He
rejoiced, for it was he who had stirred her; it was he who had made her
feel.

"Of course," he said, "it'll come back. If you choose--if you let it.
But you'll have to pay your price."

She was silent. They talked of other things. Presently the John
Brodricks, the Levines and Mrs. Heron came out into the garden and said
good-night, and Tanqueray followed them and went.

She found Hugh closeted with Henry in the library where invariably the
doctor lingered. Brodrick made a sign to his brother-in-law as she
entered.

"Well," he said, "you've had your talk."

"Oh yes, we've had it."

She lay back in her seat as if exhausted by hard physical exercise,
supporting the limp length of her arms on the sides of the chair.

The doctor, after a somewhat prolonged observation of her posture,
remarked that she should make a point of going to bed at ten.

Brodrick pleaded the Birthday of the Book. And at the memory of the
intolerable scene, and of Tanqueray's presence in it, her agony broke
out.

"Don't talk about it. I don't want ever to hear of it again."

"What's he been saying to you?" said Brodrick.

"He'd no need to say anything. Do you suppose I don't know? Can't you
see how awful it is for me?"

Brodrick raised the eyebrows of innocence amazed.

"It's as if I'd brought something deformed and horrible into the
world----"

The doctor leaned forward, more than ever attentive.

"And you _would_ go and drag it out, all of you, when I was sitting
there in shame and misery. And before George Tanqueray--How could you?"

"My dear Jinny----"

Brodrick was leaning forward too now, looking at her with affectionate
concern.

Her brother-in-law rose and held out his hand. He detained hers for an
appreciable moment, thoughtfully, professionally.

"I think," he said, "really, you'd better go to bed."

Outside in the hall she could hear him talking to Hugh.

"It's physical, it's physical," he said. "It won't do to upset her. You
must take great care."

The doctor's voice grew mysterious, then inaudible, and she heard Hugh
saying he supposed that it was so; and Henry murmured and mumbled
himself away. Outside their voices still retreated with their footsteps,
down the garden path, and out at the terrace gate. Hugh was seeing Henry
home.

When he came back he found Jane in the library, sitting up for him. She
was excited and a little flushed.

"So you've had _your_ talk, have you?" she said.

"Yes."

He came to her and put his hands on her forehead.

"Look here. You ought to have gone to bed."

She took his hand and drew him to her.

"Henry doesn't think I'm any good," she said.

"Henry's very fond of you."

She shook her head.

"To Henry I'm nothing but a highly interesting neurotic. He watches me
as if he were on the look-out for some abnormal manifestation, with that
delightful air he has of never being surprised at anything, as if he
could calculate the very moment."

"My dear----"

"I'm used to it. My people took me that way, too. Only they hadn't a
scientific turn of mind, like Henry. They didn't think it interesting;
and they haven't Henry's angelic patience and forbearance. I was the
only one of the family, don't you know, who wasn't quite sane; and
yet--so unlike Henry--they considered me rather more responsible than
any of them. I couldn't get off anything on the grounds of my insanity."

All the time, while thus tormenting him, she seemed profoundly occupied
with the hand she held, caressing it with swift, nervous, tender
touches.

"After all," she said, "I haven't turned out so badly; even from Henry's
point of view, have I?"

He laughed. "What is Henry's point of view?"

She looked up at him quickly. "You know, and I know that Henry didn't
want you to marry me."

The uncaptured hand closed over hers, holding it tighter than she
herself could hold.

"No," she said. "I'm not the sort of woman Henry _would_ want you to
marry. To please Henry----"

"I didn't marry to please Henry."

"To please Henry you should have married placable flesh and blood, very
large and handsome, without a nerve in her body. The sort of woman who
has any amount of large and handsome flesh-and-blood children, and lives
to have them, thrives on them. That's Henry's idea of the right woman."

He admitted that it had once been his. He had seen his wife that was to
be, placable, as Jinny said, sane flesh and blood, the mother of perfect
children.

"And so, of course," said Jinny, "you go and marry me."

"Of course," said Brodrick. He said it in the voice she loved.

"Why didn't you marry her? _She_ wouldn't have bothered your life out."
She paused. "On the other hand, she wouldn't have cared for you as I do.
That sort of woman only cares for her children."

"Won't you care for them, Jinny?"

"Not as I care for you," said Jinny.

And to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and
cried.




XXXVI


Tanqueray's book was out. Times and seasons mattered little in a case so
hopeless. There was no rivalry between George Tanqueray and his
contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce
him in the same month as Jane Holland. They handled any work of his with
the apathy of despair.

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.

"Wot, a dinner-party?" said Rose (she was trying not to cry).

"No, not a party. Only six."

"Six," said Rose, "_is_ a dinner-party."

"Twenty-six might be."

Rose sat down and looked at him and said, "Oh dear, oh dear." But she
had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of anticipation.

Then Tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and
said it was his birthday. He always did ask people to dine on his
birthday. There would only be the Brodricks and Nicky and Nina Lempriere
and Laura Gunning--No, Laura Gunning couldn't come. That, with
themselves, made six.

"Well----" said Rose placidly.

"I can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. But I thought it would
be so nice to have them in our own house. When it's my birthday."

She smiled. She was taking it all in. In her eyes, for once, he was like
a child, with his birthday and his party. How could she refuse him
anything on his birthday? And all through the removal he had been so
good.

Already she was measuring spaces with her eye.

"It'll 'old six," she said--"squeezin'."

She sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the
dinner.

"There must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint,
an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow."

"Oh Lord, no. Give 'em bread and cheese. They're none of 'em greedy."

"I'll give you something better than that," said Rose; "on your
birthday--the idea!"

Dinner was to be at eight o'clock. The lateness of the hour enabled Mr.
and Mrs. Eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the
dishing-up. They had softened towards Tanqueray since he had taken that
little house. That he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle
of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.

The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse
with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush
of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so
handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his
beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his
birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like
that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought
would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the
dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet
in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The
dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his
friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out,
laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said
that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that
she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner,
she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose
became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came
she felt that she could talk a little.

For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear,
patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left
strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was
talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had
been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?

"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up
on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me,
and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the
little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my
legs?"

Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room.
But you should see 'is study."

He bowed an ear that did not hear her.

"Nicky did me well," said Tanqueray.

"I told you all the time," said Jane, "that Nicky knew."

"'E couldn't do anything without 'is study."

"Ah?" Nicky returned to the little woman, all attention.

"Aren't you proud of him? Isn't it splendid how he's brought them round?
How they're all praising him?"

"So they'd ought to," Rose said. "'E's worked 'ard enough for it. The
way 'e works! He'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if
'e could get fair hold of a word----"

They had all stopped talking to Tanqueray and were listening to
Tanqueray's wife.

"Then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and
again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a
marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. And the study
and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think."

Nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her;
and Rose became aware that George's forehead was lowering upon her from
the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence.

After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was
that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was
her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much
had suddenly become dreadful to her.

Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over,
when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in
it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's
awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had
something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in
some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of
him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a
married woman.

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul,
a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause.
It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.

Her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the
bedroom that she had been called on to admire. Rose's bedroom was a
wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the
smoothest and the whitest thing in it was Tanqueray's pillow where
Tanqueray's head had never lain. There was a tiny dressing-room beyond,
and through the open door Jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where,
night after night, Tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off
the orgy of the day's work. The dressing-room was a place where he could
hide from Rose by night as he hid from her by day.

And Rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the
dressing-room.

Jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove the fear and jealousy. She
must let Rose see that she was not dangerous; and she knew how.