Her tears were hanging now on the curve of her eyelashes. They shook and
fell.

She sat there silent, fronting the abyss. Nicky was horrified and looked
it. If that was how she took it----

"You've overworked yourself. That's all," he said presently.

"Yes. That's all."

She rose. "Nicky," she said, "it's half-past four. If we're going we
must go."

"Are you sure you want to?"

"Of course I want to." She said it in a tone that for Nicky pointed to
another blunder.

"I only thought," said he simply, "it might bore you."




XII


Miss Bickersteth's house was round the corner. So small a house that a
front room and a back room thrown together hardly gave Caro space enough
for tea-parties. But as the back room formed a recess, what space she
had was admirably adapted for the discreet arrangement of conversation
in groups. Its drawback was that persons in the recess remained unaware
of those who entered by the door of the front room, until they were
actually upon them.

Through that door, opened gently by the little servant, Miss
Bickersteth, in the recess, was heard inquiring with some excitement,
"Can't either of you tell me who she is?"

Only Nina and Laura were with her. Jane knew from their abrupt silence,
as she entered, that they had been discussing George Tanqueray's
marriage. She gathered that they had only just begun. There was nothing
for it but to invite them to go on, to behave in all things as if
nothing had happened, or could happen to her.

"Please don't stop," she said, "it sounds exciting."

"It is. But Mr. Nicholson disapproves of scandal," said Caro, not
without address.

"He's been talking nothing else to me," said Jane.

"Yes, but his scandal and our scandal----"

"Yours isn't in it with his. He's seen her."

Three faces turned to Nicholson's, as if it held for them the reflection
of his vision. Miss Bickersteth's face was flushed with embarrassment
that struggled with curiosity; Nina's was almost fierce in its sombre,
haggard intensity; Laura's, in its stillness, had an appealing anxiety,
an innocent distress. It was shadowless and unashamed; it expressed a
trouble that had in it no taint of self.

Nicky met them with an admirable air of light-heartedness. "Don't look
at me," he said. "I can't tell you anything."

"But--you've seen her," said Miss Bickersteth, seating herself at her
tea-table.

"I've seen her, but I don't know her," he said stiffly.

"She doesn't seem to have impressed him favourably," remarked Miss
Bickersteth to the world in general.

Nicky brought tea to Jane, who opened her eyes at him in deprecation of
his alarming reticence. It was as if she had said, "Oh, Nicky--to please
me--won't you say nice things about her?"

He understood. "Miss Holland would like me to tell you that she is
charming."

"Do you know her, Jinny?" It was Laura who spoke.

"No, dear. But I know George Tanqueray."

"As for Nicky," she went on, with high daring, "you mustn't mind what he
says. He wouldn't think any mortal woman good enough for George."

Nicky's soul smiled all to itself invisibly as it admired her.

"I see," said Miss Bickersteth. "The woman isn't good enough. I hope
she's good."

"Oh--good. Good as they make them."

"He knows," said Jane, "more than he lets out."

She withdrew into the corner where little Laura sat, while Miss
Bickersteth put her witness under severe cross-examination.

"Is it," she said, "the masterpiece of folly?"

"It looks like it. Only, she is good."

"Good, but impossible."

"Im-possible."

"Do you mean--for Him?"

"I mean in herself. Utterly impossible."

"But inevitable?"

"Not in the least, to judge by what I saw."

"Then," said Miss Bickersteth, "how _did_ it happen?"

"I don't know," said Nicky, "how it happened."

There was a long pause. Miss Bickersteth seemed almost to retire from
ground that was becoming perilous.

"You may as well tell them," said Jane, "what you do know."

"I have," said poor Nicky.

"You haven't told us who she is," said Nina.

"She is Mrs. George Tanqueray. She was, I believe, a very humble person.
The daughter--no--I think he said the niece--of his landlord."

"Uneducated?" said Miss Bickersteth.

"Absolutely."

"Common?"

He hesitated and Jane prompted. "No, Nicky."

"Don't tamper," said Miss Bickersteth, "with my witness. Uncommon?"

"Not in the least."

"Any aitches?"

"I decline," said Nicky, "to answer any more questions."

"Never mind. You've told us quite enough. I'm disgusted with Mr.
Tanqueray."

"But why?" said Jane imperturbably.

"Why? When one thinks of the women, the perfectly adorable women he
might have married--if he'd only waited. And he goes and does this."

"He knows his own business best," said Jane.

"A man's marriage is not his business."

"What is it, then?"

Miss Bickersteth was at a loss for once, and Laura helped her. "It's his
pleasure, isn't it?"

"He'd no right to take his pleasure this way."

Jane raised her head.

"He had. A perfect right."

"To throw himself away? My dear--on a little servant-girl without an
aitch in her?"

"On anybody he pleases."

"Can you imagine George Tanqueray," said Nina, "throwing himself away on
anybody?"

"_I_ can--easily," said Nicholson.

"Whatever he throws away," said Nina, "it won't be himself."

"My dear Nina, look at him," said Miss Bickersteth. "He's done for
himself--socially, at any rate."

"Not he. It's men like George Tanqueray who can afford to do these
things. Do you suppose anybody who cares for him will care a rap whom he
marries?"

"I care," said Nicky. "I care immensely."

"You needn't. Marriage is not--it really is not--the fearfully important
thing you think it."

Nicholson looked at his boots, his perfect boots.

"It's _the_ most important act of a man's life," he said. "An ordinary
man's--a curate's--a grocer's. And for Tanqueray--for any one who
creates----"

"For any one who creates," said Nina, "nothing's important outside his
blessed creation."

"And this lady, I imagine," said Miss Bickersteth, "will be very much
outside it."

Nicky raised his dark eyes and gazed upon them. "Good heavens! But a man
wants a woman to inspire him."

"George doesn't," said Jane. "You may trust him to inspire himself."

"You may," said Nina. "In six months it won't matter whether George is
married or not. At least, not to George."

She rose, turning on Nicky as if something in his ineffectual presence
maddened her. "Do you suppose," she said, "that woman counts? No woman
counts with men like George Tanqueray."

"She can hold you back," said Nicky.

"You think so? You haven't got a hundred horse-power genius pulling you
along. When he's off, fifty women hanging on to him couldn't hold him
back."

She smiled. "You don't know him. The first time that wife of his gets in
his way he'll shove her out of it. If she does it again he'll knock her
down and trample her under his feet."

Her smile, more than ever ironic, lashed Nicky's shocked recoil.

"Creators are a brutal crew, Mr. Nicholson. We're all the same. You
needn't be sorry for us."

She looked, over Nicky's head as it were, at Jane and Laura. It was as
if with a sweep of her stormy wing she gathered them, George Tanqueray
and Jane and Laura, into the spaces where they ran the superb course of
the creators.

The movement struck Arnott Nicholson aside into his place among the
multitudes of the uncreative. Who was he to judge George Tanqueray? If
_she_ arraigned him she had a right to. She was of his race, his kind.
She could see through Nicky as if he had been an innocent pane of glass.
And at the moment Nicky's soul with its chivalry and delicacy enraged
her. Caroline Bickersteth enraged her, everybody enraged her except Jane
and little Laura.

She stood beside Jane, who had risen and was about to say good-bye.

Caro would have kept them with her distressed, emphatic "_Must_ you go?"
She was expecting, she said, Mr. Brodrick.

Jane was not interested in Mr. Brodrick. She could not stay and did not,
and, going, she took Nina with her.

Laura would have followed, but Miss Bickersteth held her with a hand
upon her arm. Nicholson left them, though Laura's eyes almost implored
him not to go.

"My dear," said Miss Bickersteth. "Tell me. Have you any idea how much
she cares for him?"

"She?"

"Jane."

"You've no reason to suppose she cares."

"Do you think he cared in the very least for her?"

"I think he may have--without knowing it."

"My dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. He knows, for instance,
all about _us_."

"Us?"

"You and I. We've both of us been there. And Nina."

"How _do_ you know?"

"She was flagrant!"

"Flagrant?"

"Flagrant isn't the word for it. She was flamboyant, magnificent,
superb!"

"You forget she's my friend," said little Laura.

"She's mine. I'm not traducing her. Look at George Tanqueray. I defy any
woman not to care for him. It's nothing to be ashamed of--like an
infatuation for a stockbroker who has no use for you. It's--it's your
apprenticeship at the hands of the master."




XIII


Nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the Strand, overlooking
the river. You approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you
wonder.

In a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat
over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between
them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial
presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final,
consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to
talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them.

They left him behind them in the other room, a room where there was no
evidence of Tanqueray's ever having been. The place was incontestably
and inalterably Nina's. There were things in it cared for by Nina with a
superstitious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it
were, in shrines. And in their company were things that Nina had worn
out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury
of rejection; things on which Nina had inflicted personal violence,
provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate association with her;
signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. It was as
if Nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left
them there. You inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the
open air. There were antlers about and the skins of animals. A
hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. Foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs
staggered together in a corner. Nina herself, long-limbed, tawny,
aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within
walls.

Beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to London,
to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the
river.

It was Nina who began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her
legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its
ease, she talked.

"Jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?"

Jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly
inarticulate.

Nina pondered. "I believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." She
paused on that a moment. "It needn't have happened," she said. "It
wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared."

Jane looked at her then. "I did show him," she said. "That's how it
happened."

"It couldn't. Not that way."

"It did. I waked him up. I made him restless, I made him want things.
But there was nothing--nothing----"

"You forget. I've seen him with you. What's more, I've seen him without
you."

"Ah, but it wasn't _that_. Not for a moment. It could never have been
_that_."

"You could have made it that. You could have made it anything you liked.
Jinny! If I'd been as sure of him as you were, I'd never have let him
go. I'd have held on----"

Her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would
have held on.

"You see," said Jinny, "I was never sure of him."

A silence fell between them.

"You were in it," said Nina, troubling the silence. "It must--it must
have been something you did to him."

"Or something I didn't do."

"Yes. Something you didn't do. You didn't know how."

Jane could have jumped at this sudden echo of her thought.

"And _she_ did," said Nina.

She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece, looking down on Jane.
"Poor Jinny," she said. "How I hated you three years ago."

Jane remembered. It was just three years since Nina had gone away
without saying a word and hidden herself among the mountains where she
was born. In her isolation she had conceived and brought forth her
"Tales of the Marches." And a year ago she had come back to them, the
Nina whom they knew.

"You can't hate me now," Jane said.

"I believe I would if you had been sure of him. But I don't hate you. I
don't even hate her."

"Why should you?"

"Why should I? When I don't believe she's sure of him, either. She's
called out the little temporary animal or the devil in him. That's what
she's married. It won't last."

"No, Nina. Nicky said she was good."

"It's wonderful how good women manage these things."

"Not when they're absolutely simple."

"How do you know she's simple?"

"Oh--because I'm not."

"Simplicity," said Nina, "would only give her more rope."

"Nina--there's one thing Nicky didn't tell us. He never let on that she
was pretty. I suppose he thought that was more than we could bear."

"How do you know she's pretty?"

"That's how I see her. Very pretty, very soft and tender. Shy at first,
and then very gently, very innocently letting herself go. And always
rather sensuous and clinging."

"Poor idiot--she's done for if she clings. I'm not sorry for George,
Jinny; I'm sorry for the woman. He'll lay her flat on the floor and wipe
his boots on her."

Jane shrank back. "Nina," she said, "you loved him. And yet--you can
tear him to pieces."

"You think I'm a beast, do you?"

"Yes. When you tear him--and before people, too."

She shrank a little further. Nina was now sitting on the floor with her
back against Jane's knees.

"It's all very well for you," she said. "He wanted to care for you. He
only wanted me--to care. That's what he is. He makes you care, he makes
you show it, he drives you on and on. He gives nothing; he takes
nothing. But he lets you strip yourself bare; he lets you bring him the
soul out of your body, and then he turns round and treats you as if you
were his cast-off mistress."

She laid her head back on Jane's knee, so that Jane saw her face
foreshortened and, as it were, distorted.

"If I had been--if I'd been like any other woman, good or bad, he'd have
been different."

Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.

[Illustration: Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought]

It was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark
and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not
incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed.
It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture,
violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its
utterance. But she was sorry for it. She hated to see it suffer.

It raised its head.

"Doesn't it look, Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can
be saddled with? It's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger
one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman
and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. We go after it like a
man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights
when he isn't a coward or a fool. And because we fight we're done for.
And then, when we're down, the woman in us turns and rends us. But if we
got what we wanted we'd be just like any other woman. As long," she
added, "as we wanted it."

She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather
like a man, on Jane.

"It's borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn't meant to
matter. She's simply the victim of the Will-to-do-things. It puts the
bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. It's like a whip
laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside."

She paused in her vehemence.

"Jinny--have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?"

Jane stirred in her corner. "I suppose," she said, "if it's any good
I'll have to pay for it."

"You'll have to pay for it with everything you've got and with
everything you haven't got and might have had. With a genius like yours,
Jinny, there'll be no end to your paying. You may make up your mind to
that."

"I wonder," said Jane, "how much George will have to pay?"

"Nothing. He'll make his wife pay. _You_'d have paid if he'd married
you."

"I wonder. Nina--he was worth it. I'd have paid ten times over. So would
you."

"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."

She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina's feet,
and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.

"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There
must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife
into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find
out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I
haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me.
You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"

Her murky face cleared suddenly.

"Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything
stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and
me."




XIV


August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square
had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the
corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the
top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.

Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a
certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the
terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little
people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue
celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves.
They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and
Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it,
vanished when they went.

She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her
secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.

Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do
anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature
that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking,
this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got
up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But
when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to
write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the
blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way."
When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite.
And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from
her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me,
a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington
Gardens."

He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that
walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it
could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish
of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the
solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.

So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and
round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.

She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of
sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So
she hardened it.

She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never
touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August
had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look.
This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen
in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it
had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody
she knew.

At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the
dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living
grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was
beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things
pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in
the Gardens, where she walked.

One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The
little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a
steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently
at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where
you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.

Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes
that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her
so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran
to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a
steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.

And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding
her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came
in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's
wail.

"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if
it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to
them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute--I was a steam-engine
and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could
do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again--I wonder if
he knew I was like that."

The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way
through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in
growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world
again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that
feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt
her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings,
to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees
as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.

There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that
insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of
September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She
could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but
of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial
and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the
world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the
world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew
that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of
sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.

Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and
Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And
the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that
he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see
him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.

He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She
could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of
seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme
distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow
with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban,
adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a
blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would
have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark
flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby;
the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of
Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency
of Hambleby.

Heavens, what a book he would be.

Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so
divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to
deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate
excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were
falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this
virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of
creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.

And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she
hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so
possessed by the furious impulse to be born.

Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think
about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a
year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.

But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby
was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely
as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray.
Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and
Laura Gunning.

That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the
fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.

"Do you like him?" said Jane.

"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along
the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary
taint.

"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"

"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with
him?"

"Not a thing."

If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to
Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a
discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura
spoke again.

"How George would have loved him."

Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were
dead.

Nina broke their silence.

"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"

They did not answer.

"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"

"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Sussex," said Jane.

"And where's she?"

"Wherever he is, I imagine."

"I gave her six months, if you remember."

"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."

"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."

"He might write. It isn't like him not to."

"No," said Jane, "it isn't like him." She rose. "Good-bye, I'm going."

She went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that
blurred the splendour of Hambleby.

"Perhaps," Laura continued, "he thinks _we_ want to drop him. You know,
if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think."

"If," said Nina, "he thought about it at all."

"He'd think about Jinny."

"If he'd thought about Jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl."

It was then that Laura had her beautiful idea. She was always having
them.

"It _was_ Jinny he thought about. He thought about nothing else. He gave
Jinny up for her own sake--for her career. You know what he thought
about marrying."

She was in love with her idea. It made George sublime, and preserved
Jinny's dignity. But Nina did not think much of it, and said so. She sat
contemplating Laura a long time. "Queer Kiddy," she said, "very queer
Kiddy."

It was her tribute to Laura's moral beauty.

"I say, Infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?"

"Why shouldn't I be? I'm human," said the Infant.

"I doubt it. You're such a calm Kiddy. I'd like to know how it takes
you."

"It doesn't take me at all. I don't give it a chance."

"It doesn't give _you_ a chance, when it comes, my child."

"Yes, it does. There's always," said the Infant, speaking slowly,
"just--one--chance. When you feel it coming."

"You don't feel it coming."

"I do. You asked me how it takes _me_. It takes me by stages. Gradual,
insidious stages. In the first stage I'm happy, because it feels nice.
In the second I'm terrified. In the third I'm angry and I turn round and
stamp. Hard."

"Ridiculous baby. With _those_ feet?"

"When those feet have done stamping there isn't much left to squirm, I
can tell you."

"Let's look at them."

Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity
of her feet.

"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."

"It wasn't half as difficult as it looks."

"You're a wonderful Kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you
may thank your stars you don't."

"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn't for Papa. Papa's a
perfect safeguard against passion. I know beforehand that as long as
he's there, passion isn't any good. You see," she explained, "it's so
simple. I wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with Papa. And nobody
would marry me if he had to."

"I see. Is it very bad?"

"Pretty bad. He dreams and dreams _and_ dreams."

"Won't that ever be better?"

Laura shook her head.

"It may be worse. There are things--that I'm afraid of."

"What things, Kiddy, what things?"

"Oh! I don't know----"

"How on earth do you go on?"

"I shut my eyes. And I sit tight. And I go."

"Poor Kiddy. You give me a pain."

"I'm quite happy. I'm working like ten horses to get things done while I
can." She smiled indomitably. "I'm glad Tanks didn't care for me. I
couldn't have let him in for all these--horrors. As for his marrying--I
didn't want you to have him because he wouldn't have been good for you,
but I _did_ want Jinny to."

"And you don't mind--now?"

"There are so many things to mind. It's one nail driving out another."

"It's all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin,"
said Nina. She drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed
her.

"Oh, don't! _Don't_ be sorry for me. I'm all right."

She broke from Nina's hand that still caressed her.

"I am, really," she said. "I like Jinny better than anybody in the world
except you and Tanks. And I like Nina better than all the Tankses that
ever were."

("Nice Kiddy," Nina whispered into Laura's hair.)

"And now Tanks is married, he can't take you away from me."

"Nobody else can," said Nina. "We've stuck together. And we'll stick."




XV


The creation of Hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters.
Jane Holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had
been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of George
Tanqueray. Her celebrity, by removing her from Tanqueray, had cut the
ground from under her feet. So far from being uplifted by it, she had
felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was
celebrated and George Tanqueray was not. It was Tanqueray's belief in
her that had kept her up. It consoled her with the thought that her
celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. For, through it
all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. He swore by her.
He staked his own genius upon hers. As long as he believed in it she
could not really doubt. But now for the first time since she was
celebrated she believed in it herself.

She no longer thought of Tanqueray. Or, if she did think of him, her
thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, passionate jealousy.
She no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. She even
foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at
the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.

She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to
create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was
subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this
thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked
of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it
abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It
could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray.
It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed
on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the
blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. And to those who
did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back
immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme
surrender.

Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable
condition.

The quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain
Tanqueray's most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he
said, "The Lord our God is a consuming fire."

Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all
that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could
put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame.
She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life,
and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious
impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion,
to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. She had attained only
the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in
fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken
dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the
thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth
whole.

She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet
bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing
amazing things.

There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of
Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator
possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four
walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing
breathed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost
tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that
adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no
longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She
no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as
she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its
stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this
incomparable peace.

She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have
been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed
for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of
the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back.
They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some
tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could
defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let
in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing
the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was
Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had
streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they
had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of
an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They
had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific
verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet
unintroduced.

By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that
she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.

For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray.
Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His
greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their
littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity,
so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.

And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her
with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he
was not there.

He had not even written to her since he married.

Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony,
he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy.
Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after
New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she
would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not
bring herself to write.

"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He
must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?"

And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please
me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane
sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after.

In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four.
Tanqueray."

Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in
her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of
his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his
old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug,
of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart
were still.

"What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out."

"I am worn out."

"With Book, Jinny?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting
people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a
spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there.
And there."

His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were
stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts.
Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every
available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on
celebrity.

Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene.

"Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny--"one little
line--I've got to send answers to all that."

"You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of
answering?"

"If it could only end in dreaming."

He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is
it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you
go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by
yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like."

"George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"

"My dear Jinny, I've tried my level best to save you. But you wouldn't
_be_ saved."

"Ah," said she, "you don't know how I've hated it."

"Haven't you liked any of it."

"No," she said slowly. "Not any of it."

"The praise, Jinny, didn't you like the praise? Weren't you just a
little bit intoxicated?"

"Did I look intoxicated?"

"No-no. You carried it fairly well."

"Just at first, perhaps, just at first it goes to your head a bit. Then
you get sick of it, and you don't want ever to have any more of it
again. And all the time it makes you feel such a silly ass."

"You were certainly not cut out for a celebrity."

"But the awful thing is that when you've swallowed all the praise you
can't get rid of the people. They come swarming and tearing and
clutching at you, and bizzing in your ear when you want to be quiet. I
feel as if I were being buried alive under awful avalanches of people."

"I told you you would be."

"If," she cried, "they'd only kill you outright. But they throttle you.
You fight for breath. They let go and then they're at you again. They
come telling you how wonderful you are and how they adore your work; and
not one of them cares a rap about it. If they did they'd leave you alone
to do it."

"Poor Jinny," he murmured.

"Why am I marked out for this? Why is it, George? Why should they take
me and leave you alone?"

"It's your emotional quality that fetches them. But it's inconceivable
how _you_'ve been fetched."

"I wanted to see what the creatures were like. Oh, George, that I
should be so punished when I only wanted to see what they were like."

"Poor Jinny. Poor gregarious Jinny."

She shook her head.

"It was so insidious. I can't think, I really can't think how it began."

"It began with those two spluttering imbecilities you asked me to dine
with."

"Oh no, poor things, they haven't hurt me. They've gone on to dine at
other tables. They're in it, too. They're torn and devoured. They dine
and are dined on."

"But, my dear child, you must stop it."

"If I could. If I could only break loose and get away."

"Get away. What keeps you?"

"Everything keeps me."

"By everything you mean----?"

"London. London does something to your brain. It jogs it and shakes it;
and all the little ideas that had gone to sleep in their little cells
get up and begin to dance as if they heard music. Everything wakes them
up, the streams of people, the eyes and the faces. It's you and Nina and
Laura. It's ten thousand things. Can't you understand, George?"

"It's playing the devil with your nerves, Jinny."

"Not when I go about in it alone. That's the secret."

"It looks as if you were alone a lot, doesn't it?" He glanced
significantly around him.

"Oh--that!"

"Yes," he said, "that. Will you really let me save you?"

"Can you?"

"I can, if I do it my own way."

"I don't care how you do it."

"Good." He rose. "Is there anything in those letters you mind my
seeing?"

"Not a word."

He sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid,
irritable hands. In two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the
little notes of invitation. He then went round the room collecting the
tickets and the cards and the telegrams. These he added to his heap.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised
about you."

He took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on
the fire.

"George----" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to
flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. She was paralyzed,
fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed.

"There," he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you."

"Yes." She smiled. "You can tell me what I'm to say to my stepmother."

"Your stepmother?"

"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."

"Effy?"

"My half-sister."

"Well?"

"I think, George, I may have to have her."

"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being
had?"

He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd
pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always
been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.

"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even
the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."

She said nothing.

"Can you afford to have him done for?"

"If it would help them, George."

"You want to help them?"

"Of course I do."

"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and
rakes in the shekels, not you."

"Ye-es. I know he does."

"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."

Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this
truth.

"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be
a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."

He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of
intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto
expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of
Jinny's style.

"I am going to post this myself," he said, "because I can't trust you
for a minute."

He ran out bareheaded and came back again.

"You can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a
minute."

He sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had
happened. "And now about Hambleby. Another day, Jinny, and I should have
been too late to save him."

"But, George, it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize
the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour."

"Tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything."

"The scenes I do move in! I was so happy once, when I hadn't any money,
when nobody but you knew anything about me."

"Were you really, Jinny?"

"Yes. And before that, when I was quite alone. Think of the hours, the
days, the months I had to myself."

"Then the curse fell, and you became celeb----Even then, with a little
strength of mind, you might have saved yourself. Do you think, if I
became celebrated, I should give myself up to be devoured?"

"If I could only not be celebrated," she said. "Do you think I can ever
creep back into my hole again and be obscure?"

"Yes, if you'll write a book that nobody but I can read."

"Why, isn't Hambleby----?"

"Not he. He'll only make things worse for you. Ten times worse."

"How do you mean?"

"He may make you popular."

"Is _that_ what you think of him?"

"Oh, I think a lot of him. So do you."

He smiled his old teasing and tormenting smile.

"Are you sure you're not just a little bit in love with that little
banker's clerk?"

"I was never in love with a banker's clerk in my life. I've never even
seen one except _in_ banks and tubes and places."

"I don't care. It's the way you'll be had. It's the way you'll be had by
Hambleby if you don't look out. It's the way," he said, "that's
absolutely forbidden to any artist. You've got to know Hambleby outside
and inside, as God Almighty knows him."

"Well?" Jinny's mind was working dangerously near certain personal
matters. George himself seemed to be approaching the same borders. He
plunged in an abyss of meditation and emerged.

"You can't know people, you can't possibly hope to know them, if you
once allow yourself to fall in love with them."

"Can't you?" she said quietly.

"No, you can't. If God Almighty had allowed himself to fall in love with
you and me, Jinny, he couldn't have made us all alive and kicking. You
must be God Almighty to Hambleby or he won't kick."

"Doesn't he kick?"

"Oh, Lord, yes. You haven't gone in deep enough to stop him. I'm only
warning you against a possible danger. It's always a possible danger
when I'm not there to look after you."

He rose. "Anything," he said, "is possible when I'm not there."

She rose also. Their hands and their eyes met.

"That's it," she said, "you weren't there, and you won't be."

"You're wrong," said he, "I've always been there when you wanted me."

He turned to go and came back again.

"If I don't like to see you celebrated, Jinny, it's because I want to
see you immortal."

"You don't want to be alone in your immortality?"

"No. I don't want to be alone--in my immortality."

With that he left her. And he had not said a word about his wife.

Neither for that matter had Jane. She wondered why she had not.

"At any rate," she thought, "_I_ haven't hurt his immortality."




XVI


A week after his visit to Jane Holland, Tanqueray was settled, as he
called it, in rooms in Bloomsbury. He had got all his books and things
sent down from Hampstead, to stay in Bloomsbury for ever, because
Bloomsbury was cheap.

It had not occurred to him to think what Rose was to do with herself in
Bloomsbury or he with Rose. He had brought her up out of the little
village of Sussex where they had lodged, in a farmhouse, ever since
their marriage. Rose had been happy down in Sussex.

And for the first few weeks Tanqueray had been happy too. He was never
tired of playing with Rose, caressing Rose, talking nonsense to Rose,
teasing and tormenting Rose for ever. The more so as she provoked him by
turning an imperturbable face to the attack. He liked to lie with his
head in Rose's lap, while Rose's fingers played with his hair, stirring
up new ideas to torment her with. He was content, for the first few
weeks, to be what he had become, a sane and happy animal, mated with an
animal, a dear little animal, superlatively happy and incorruptibly
sane.

He might have gone on like that for an interminable number of weeks but
that the mere rest from all intellectual labour had a prodigiously
recuperative effect. His genius, just because he had forgotten all about
it, began with characteristic perversity to worry him again. It wouldn't
let him alone. It made him more restless than Rose had ever made him. It
led him into ways that were so many subtle infidelities to Rose. It tore
him from Rose and took him out with it for long tramps beyond the Downs;
wherever they went it was always too far for Rose to go. He would try,
basely, to get off without her seeing him, and managed it, for Rose was
so sensible that she never saw.

Then it made him begin a book. He wrote all morning in a room by
himself. All afternoon he walked by himself. All evening he lay with his
head in Rose's lap, too tired even to tease her.

But, because she had Tanqueray's head to nurse in the evenings, Rose had
been happy down in Sussex. She went about the farm and stroked all the
animals. She borrowed the baby at the farm and nursed it half the day.
And in the evening she nursed Tanqueray's head. Tanqueray's head was
never bothered to think what Rose was doing when she was not nursing it.

Then, because his book made him think of Jane Holland, he sat down one
day and wrote that letter to Jinny.

He did not know that it was because of Jinny that he had come back to
live in Bloomsbury.

They had been a month in Bloomsbury, in a house in Torrington Square.
Rose was sitting alone in the ground-floor room that looked straight on
to the pavement. Sitting with her hands before her waiting for Tanqueray
to come to lunch. Tanqueray was up-stairs, two flights away, in his
study, writing. She was afraid to go and tell him lunch was ready. She
had gone up once that morning to see that he didn't let his fire out,
and he hadn't liked it; so she waited. There was a dish of cutlets
keeping hot for him on the hearth. Presently he would come down, and she
would have the pleasure of putting the cutlets on the table and seeing
him eat them. It was about the only pleasure she could count on now.