"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you
thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.

His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had
so strongly the literary taint.

Nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them
anywhere. Only, as it happened, he had to be at home. He was expecting
Miss Bickersteth. They knew Miss Bickersteth?

They knew her. Nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of
cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and Miss Bickersteth was
eminently right.

The lady, he said, might be upon them any minute.

"In that case," said Tanqueray, "we'll clear out."

"_You_ clear out? But you're the very people he wants to see."

"He?"

Hugh Brodrick. Miss Bickersteth was bringing Hugh Brodrick.

They smiled. Miss Bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being
brought.

Brodrick was the right man to bring. He implored them to stay and meet
Brodrick.

"Who _is_ Brodrick?"

Brodrick, said Nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be
clung to and never to be let go. Brodrick was on the "Morning
Telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. And the Jews
were at the back of Brodrick. So much so that he was starting a monthly
magazine--for the work of the great authors only. That was his,
Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through.
Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the
advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He
could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the
back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave
the popular magazines behind him.

"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.

"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"

"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a
gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."

"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.

"And he wants--he told me--to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr.
Tanqueray. And he's sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You'll
all be in it. It's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all
days."

In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be
seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.

A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It
was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring
noises in it.

"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."

And he went out.

He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr.
Hugh Brodrick.

Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with
his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of
Tanqueray, of Brodrick.

Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso
inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but
regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who
grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull
sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from
the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes.
They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze,
which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his
interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her
in her corner.

This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky,
as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of
introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate.
It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.

Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet
what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his
positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her,
pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor
of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any
business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his
slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the
very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an
approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.

"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.

"Not very often."

There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a
voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.

"Only that it's an easy run down from Marylebone."

"It is--very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation
with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.

It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He
was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes.
For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them,
he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at
Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering
quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky's house.

Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on
the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to
Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As
a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had
sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious
teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an
incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering,
full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and
genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the
dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth.
There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no
ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the
spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely,
with a look of having grown there.

Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by
trying to make her talk about Shelley (she had edited him). He hoped
that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. To Nicky the
transition was a natural one.

But Miss Bickersteth did not want to talk about Shelley. Shelley, she
declared irreverently, was shop. She wanted to talk about people whom
they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say
anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet.
And she had just seen Jane and Tanqueray going out together through the
long window on to the lawn.

"I suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now."

"Now?" repeated poor Nicky vaguely.

"Now that one of them has got an income."

"I didn't think he was a marrying man."

"No. And you wouldn't think, would you, she was a marrying woman?"

"I--I don't know. I haven't thought about it. He _said_ he wasn't going
to marry."

"Oh." Two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the
pinkness of Miss Bickersteth's face.

"It's got as far as that, has it? That shows he's been thinking of it."

"I should have thought it showed he wasn't."

Miss Bickersteth's mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its
outline and its colouring. Her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of
her face.

"How have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? Do you
always go about with your head among the stars?"

"My head----?" He felt it. It was going round and round.

"Yes. Is a poet not supposed ever to see anything under his exquisite
nose?"

"I am not," said Nicky solemnly, "always a poet. And when a person tells
me he isn't going to do a thing, I naturally think he isn't."

"And I naturally think he is. Whatever you think about George Tanqueray,
_he's_ sure to do the other thing."

"Come--if you can calculate on that."

"You can't calculate on anything. Least of all with George Tanqueray.
Except that he'll never achieve anything that isn't a masterpiece. If
it's a masterpiece of folly."

"Mind you," she added, "I don't say he will marry Jane Holland, and I
don't say it would be a masterpiece of folly if he did."

"What do you say?"

"That if he ever cares for any woman enough to marry her, it will be
Jane."

"I see," said Nicky, after some reflection. "You think he's that sort?"

"I think he's a genius. What more do you want?"

"Oh, _I_ don't want anything more," said Nicky, plunging head-first into
a desperate ambiguity. He emerged. "What I mean is, when we've got Him,
and when we've got Her--creators----" He paused before the immensity of
his vision of Them. "What business have we----"

"To go putting one and one together so as to make two?"

"Well--it doesn't seem quite reverent."

"You think them gods, then, your creators?"

"I think I--worship them."

"Ah, Mr. Nicholson, _you're_ adorable. And I'm atrocious."

"I believe," said Nicky, "tea is in the garden."

"Let us go into the garden," said Miss Bickersteth.

And they went.

Tea was served in a green recess shut in from the lawn by high yew
hedges. Nicky at his tea-table was more charming than ever, surrounded
by old silver and fine linen, making tea delicately, and pouring it into
fragile cups and offering it, doing everything with an almost feminine
dexterity and grace.

After tea the group scattered and rearranged itself. In Nicky's perfect
garden, a garden of smooth grass plots and clipped yew-trees, of lupins
and larkspurs, of roses that would have been riotous but for the
restraining spirit of the place; in a green alley between lawn and
orchard, Mr. Hugh Brodrick found himself with Miss Holland, and alone.
Very quietly, very persistently, with eyes intent, he had watched for
and secured this moment.

"You don't know," he was saying, "how I've wanted to meet you, and how
hard I've worked for it."

"Was it so hard?"

"Hard isn't the word for it. If you knew the things I've done----" He
spoke in his low, even voice, saying eager and impulsive things without
a sign of eagerness or impulse.

"What things?"

"Mean things, base things. Going on my knees to people I didn't know,
grovelling for an introduction."

"I'm sorry. It sounds awful."

"It was. I've been on the point of meeting you a score of times, and
there's always been some horrid fatality. Either you'd gone when I
arrived, or I had to go before you arrived. I believe I've seen
you--once."

"I don't remember."

"At Miss Bickersteth's. You were coming out as I was going in." He
looked at his watch. "And _now_ I ought to be catching a train."

"Don't catch it."

"I shan't. For I've got to tell you how much I admire your work. I'm not
going to ask how you do it, for I don't suppose you know yourself."

"I don't."

"I'm not even going to ask myself. I simply accept the miracle."

"If it's miracles you want, look at George Tanqueray."

He said nothing. And now she thought of it, he had not looked at George
Tanqueray. He had looked at nobody but her. It was the look of a man who
had never known a moment's uncertainty as to the thing he wanted. It was
a look that stuck.

"Why aren't you at his feet?" she said.

"Because I'm not drawn--to my knees--by brutal strength and cold,
diabolical lucidity."

"Oh," she cried, "you haven't read him."

"I've read all of him. And I prefer you."

"Me? You've spoilt it all. If you can't admire him, what is the use of
your admiring me?"

"I see. You don't want me to admire you."

He said it with no emphasis, no emotion, as if he were indifferent as to
what she wanted.

"No. I don't think I do."

"You see," he said, "you have a heart."

"Oh, if people would only leave my heart alone!"

"And Tanqueray, I believe, has a devil."

She turned on him.

"Give me George Tanqueray's devil!" She paused, considering him. "Why do
you talk about my heart?"

[Illustration: "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."