file which includes the original illustrations.
      See 25971-h.htm or 25971-h.zip:

      or



Transcriber's note:

      [oe] represents the oe-ligature.





THE CREATORS

A Comedy

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of "The Divine Fire," "The Helpmate," Etc.

With Illustrations by Arthur I. Keller







New York
The Century Co.
1910

Copyright, 1909, 1910, by
The Century Co.

Published, October, 1910




[Illustration: "To the book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You
can drink now, George."]




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


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

"How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose, musing.

"Why do you talk about my heart?"

Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.

"And he," she said, "has still a chance if I fail you?"

She had wrung it from him, the thing that six days ago he had come to
her to say.

It was Jinny who lay there, Jinny, his wife.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"

"George," she said ... "I love you for defending him"

She closed her eyes, "I'm quite happy"

Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them.




THE CREATORS




I


Three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he
there for? And at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the
first time that evening, as if they said that he would see.

She had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table
between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him,
George Tanqueray, to meet.

Everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with
Jane Holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than
he. It was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by
Gisborne, R.A. He had given most of his attention to the portrait.

Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not
Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face,
broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a
straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her
genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her
features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened
queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the
bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight
enough when her will was dominant. He had got her hair, the darkness and
the mass of it. Tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that Gisborne
had put his best work into that, and when Gisborne resented it he had
told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted Jane
Holland's hair. (This was in the days when Gisborne was celebrated and
Tanqueray was not.)

If Jane had had the face that Gisborne gave her she would never have had
any charm for Tanqueray. For what Gisborne had tried to get was that
oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. Not a hint had he caught
of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy
possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden
gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine,
deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight.

When Tanqueray wanted to annoy Jane he told her that she looked like her
portrait by Gisborne, R.A.

They were all going to the play together. But at the last moment, she,
to Tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. She was too tired, she said,
to go.

The celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course,
if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would
sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They
bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration.
And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and
Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get
rid of them.

She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for.
Her tired eyes helped her.

Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.

"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"

"I am certainly not going with them----" He paused, hesitating.

"Then--you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she
hesitated too.

"But you're tired?" he said.

"Not now."

She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her
appeal.

That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose
to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though
he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the
moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted
to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but
one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.

That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the
first time in many weeks.

She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go
that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would
not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified
her.

Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six
weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him.
There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six
weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping
him.

"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.

"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."

"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"

"It won't work."

"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."

She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived
alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.

There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in
Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut
herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at
the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the
place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of
honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her
writing-table. His "Works"--five novels--were on a shelf by themselves
at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.

For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was
the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her
charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable
innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great
nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary
taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their
nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right
people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even
of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility
and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have
touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with
its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had
discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the
Master, told her was "_the_ unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred
and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on
his tremendous height.

But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.

"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"

"What hasn't?"

"Your pop--your celebrity."

"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they----"

"_They_ needn't. I must. Celebrity--you observe that I call it by no
harsher name--celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to
end that way."

"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I
hate it sometimes."

"You hate it, yet you're drawn."

"By what? By my vanity?"

"Not by your vanity, though there is that."

"By what, then?"

"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."

"Mayn't I be?"

"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."

For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was
silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.

"Because you've genius."

"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"

He laughed. "Why not I?"

"Because it was you who told me not to keep back. You told me not to
live alone. Don't you remember?"

He remembered. It was in the days when he first knew her.

"I did. Because you ran to the other extreme then. You were terrified of
life."

"Because I was a woman. You told me to be a woman!"

"Because I was the only man you knew. How you remember things."

"That comes of living alone. I've never really forgotten anything you
ever said to me. It's where I score."

"You had nobody but me to talk to then, if you remember."

"No. Nobody but you."

"And it wasn't enough for you."

"Oh, wasn't it? When you were never the same person for a week together.
It was like knowing fifteen or twenty men."

He smiled. "I've always been the same man to you, Jinny. Haven't I?"

"I'm not so sure," said she.

"Anyhow, you were safe with me."

"From what?"

"From being 'had.' But now you've begun knowing all sorts of people----"

"Is that why you've kept away from me?"

He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable,
pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the
persecutors, the pursuers. Did _I_ ever pursue you?"

"No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any
one."

"_They_ will. And they'll have you at every turn."

"No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them."

"They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'"

"Do I?" She said it defiantly.

"No. You never lend--you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let
everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you."

"Oh--you----"

"And yet," he said, "I wonder----"

He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes.

"Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your
books?"

"Where you get yours," she said.

Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these
dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people."

She smiled, recognizing them.

"Look at _me_," he said.

"Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation.

"Yes, me. I was born out of it."

"And I--wasn't I born? Look at _me_?" She turned to him, holding her
head high.

"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening--and I
see a difference already."

"What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in
me."

It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the
secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever
and the brilliance fever brought.

She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly
alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair,
close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his
face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent,
sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full,
pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip
accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his
features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind,
suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his
difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost
something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet
somehow more obscure.

Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven.

He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the
hills, questing the visionary maid.

It was not she. His trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. She
saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was
not she. She saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason,
that it was not she. That showed that he was approaching headlong the
point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him
back. He was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that
insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. Any
woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand.

And between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey,
dumb, and holding them dumb. She searched for words to dispel it, but no
words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. That was
not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart.

He tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking
about the room and examining the things in it. There were some that it
had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in
material prosperity. Yes. He had liked her better when she had worked
harder and was as poor as he. They had come to look on poverty as their
protection from the ruinous world. He now realized that it had also been
their protection from each other. He was too poor to marry.

He reflected with some bitterness that Jane was not, now.

She in her corner called him from his wanderings. She had made the
coffee. He drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old
place on the sofa by her side.

She brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. She had man[oe]uvred to
keep him. And now she wished that she had let him go.

"Aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said.

"No. I shan't sleep if I do."

"Haven't you been sleeping?"

"Not very well."

"That's why you're looking like your portrait. That man isn't such a
silly ass as I thought he was."

"I wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and
everything."

"Everything?"

"You know what I mean. The horrid thing that's happened to me. My--my
celebrity." She brought it out with a little shiver of revolt.

He laughed. "But when you remind me of it every minute? When it's
everlastingly, if I may say so, on the carpet?"

Her eyes followed his. It was evident that she had bought a new one.

"It doesn't mean what you think it does. It isn't, it really isn't as
bad as that----"

"I was afraid."

"You needn't be. I'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger
mouthfuls."

"Why apologize?"

"I can't help it. You make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu."

"_I_ make you feel----?"

"Yes. You--you. You don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded.

"You know what I think you."

"I don't. I only know what you used to think me."

"I think the same."

"Tell me--tell me."

"I think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years,
you'll write a superb book, Jinny. But it all depends on what you do
with yourself in the next five years."

He paused.

"At the present moment there's hardly any one--of our generation, mind
you--who counts except you and I."

He paused again.

"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our
families have cast us off."

"Mine hasn't yet."

"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.

He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the
rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in
such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray
said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his
first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake.
He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him
from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the
"consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.

Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and
inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm
and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.

"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet
that's our temptation, yours and mine."

Again he paused.

"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws
them by one divine sense. Ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the
very soul, into the thick of it. _The_ unpardonable sin is separating
literature from life. You know that as well as I do."

She did. She worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls
of men. There was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the
serene, inspired audacity of Jane Holland. Her genius seemed to have
kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation.

Tanqueray continued in his theme. Talking like this allayed his
excitement.

"We're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. They're the stuff
we work in. It's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. We're
being tempted all the time. People--people--people--we can't have enough
of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. The thing is--to keep 'em off us. And
Jane, I _know_--they're getting at you."

She did not deny it. They were.

"And you haven't the--the nerve to stand up against it."

"I have stood up against it."

"You have. So have I. When we were both poor."

"You want me to be poor?"

"I don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just
pleasantly short of cash. There's nothing like that for keeping you out
of it."

"You want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? Deprived of everything that
makes life amusing?"

"Thoroughly uncomfortable. Deprived of everything that stands in the way
of your genius."

She felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing
that had been tacked on to her. He cared for it and could be tender to
it, but not to her.

"You're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain.

"My cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the
cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be
prepared to be burnt."

"It's all very well for you, George. I don't like being burnt."

That roused him; it stirred the devil in him.

"Do you suppose _I_ like it? Why, you--you don't know what burning _is_.
It means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink
themselves drunk."

"You don't want to be drunk, George. Any more than I do."

"I do not, thank God. But it would be all the same if I did. I can't get
a single thing I do want."

"Can't you? I should have thought you could have got most things you
really wanted."

"I could if I were a grocer or a draper. Why, a hair-dresser has more
mastery of the means of life."

He was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the
matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration
there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit.

He began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from
his mood. Now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them,
only that dark, unhappy fire.

He was quiet now. He had caught sight of some sheets of manuscript lying
on her desk.

"What's this?" he said.

"Only the last thing I've written."

"May I look?"

"You may."

He took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the
leaves over with a nervous hand. He was not reading. There was no
thought in his eyes.

He looked at her again. She saw that he was at the mercy of his moment,
and of hers.

For it was her moment. There was a power that every woman had, if she
cared to use it and knew how. There was a charm that had nothing to do
with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. These things had
their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other
power. His senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her.
She knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. She had
only to kindle her flame, send out her signal.

And she said to herself, "I can't. I can't take him like this. He isn't
himself. It would be hateful of me."

In that moment she had no fear. Love held her back and burning honour
that hardly knew itself from shame. It accused her of having
man[oe]uvred for that moment. It said, "You can't let him come in like
this and trap him."

Another voice in her whispered, "You fool. If you don't marry him some
other woman will--in this mood of his." And honour cried, answering it,
"Let her. So long as it isn't I."

She had a torturing sense of his presence. And with it her fear came
back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from
him.

He flung the manuscript into the place she had left, and bowed forward,
hiding his face in his hands. He rose too, and she knew that his moment
had gone. She had let it go.

Then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to
her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart.

"Do you know what I should like to do?" she said. "I should like to
sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for nobody
to come near me but you, nobody to read me but you, nobody to talk about
me but you. Do you remember?"

He did, but he was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his
mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held
immorality.

"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"

"I've told you why."

"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you----"

He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the
physician who knew her malady.

"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be
worst of all."

And so he left her.




II


He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to
think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so
much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him
alone and insisted on his letting her alone.

This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as
an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption
in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of
sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked
with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the
eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that
plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.

His device was, "Look and let go." He had never allowed himself to hold
on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you
were stifled by the stuff you worked in. Your senses, he maintained,
were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it
with the first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many
degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use
to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was
even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine,
rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. It yearned
perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no
more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the
undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be
its own. The live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in
any other way. Genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. It
was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the
sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with
experience to do their work for them.

And yet there was no more assiduous devotee of experience than George
Tanqueray. He repudiated with furious contempt any charge of
inspiration. There was no such thing as inspiration. There was instinct,
and there was eyesight. The rest was all infernal torment and labour in
the sweat of your brow. All this Tanqueray believed sincerely.

It would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same
time so unsophisticated as he.

For five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined
to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it,
among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for
their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk
perceptibly from their advances. He condemned their manner as a shade
too patronizing to his proud obscurity. And now, at two-and-thirty, of
three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, Jane
Holland.

He had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode
incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country
back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people,
persistent, insufferable people.

For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead. The
charm of Hampstead was that nobody whom he knew lived there.

He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too
steep for traffic. He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a
green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at
the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low
hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the grass of his slope
turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to
purple. He looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded
himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in Hampstead whom he
knew. And that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last
he had found peace. He would stay there for ever, in those two rooms.

Here, on the morning after he had dined with Jane Holland, he sat down
to write. And he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it
created. In those days Tanqueray could never count upon his genius. The
thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never
let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. At times it
seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times
it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. He courted it, and
it avoided him. He let it go, and it came back to him, caressing and
tormenting him, compelling his embrace. There were days when it pursued
and captured him, and then it had wings that swept him divinely to its
end. There were days when he had to go out and find it, and lure the
winged thing back to him. Once caught, it was unswerving in its
operations.

But Tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius
failed him. And apparently it had failed him now. In forty-eight hours
he had accomplished nothing.

At the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what
he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. His genius
had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. But still he
had cared for it supremely. Now, the horrible thing was that he did not
care. His genius was of all things that which interested him least. He
was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating
because it was aimless and obscure.

That came of dining with Jane Holland.

He was not in love with Jane. On the contrary, he was very angry with
her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. And he
was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could
not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was
not in it.

But wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were
always running upon Jane. They ran on her now. He conceived of her more
than ever as the unfit. "She's too damnably clever," he kept saying to
himself, "too damnably clever." And he took up her last book just to see
again how damnably clever she was.

In an instant he was at her feet. She wasn't clever when she wrote that.
What a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. It
matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. Almost as
clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. Reading Jane Holland, Tanqueray
became depressed or exalted according to his mood. He was now depressed.

But he could not leave her. In spirit he remained at her feet. He bowed
himself in the dust. "I couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my
life. I shall never do anything like that."

He wrote and told her so. But he did not go to see her, as he would have
done six weeks ago.

And then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did
not feel them. "I don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. She's
like me." Too like him to be altogether fit.

So he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her,
while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day.

He went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond Hampstead.
He lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think
about Jane. For all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible
for him to think of anything else. And when he got back into his room
its solitude was intolerable. For ten days he had not spoken to any
woman but his landlady. Every morning, before he sat down to write, he
had to struggle with his terror of Mrs. Eldred. It was growing on him
like a nervous malady.

An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a
large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The
appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and
demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it
was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things
unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out
to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became
tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her
figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed,
rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For
though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it
quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed.

He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could
call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced
himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he
forgot himself so far as to implore her for God's sake not to talk to
him.

The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to
her, it would not be necessary for her to talk.

He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him
at a figure which surprised him by its moderation.

Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill,
frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the
obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk,
bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands.

He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other
end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because,
being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from
Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from
things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that
dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of
creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge.

It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or
three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the
sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of
self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of
inimitable remoteness.

He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably
feminine. He smiled, simply to reassure it.

"How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?"

"I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak."

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to
play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose
Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty,
yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from
some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have
achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only
grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose
as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her
face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large
for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a
thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a
feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All
but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft,
so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners,
and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards
it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as
delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness,
when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust
largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she
tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and
smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. Mouse-colored hair
it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that
curled away under the coil.

She wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a
knot of brown ribbon at her throat.

Thus attired, for three days Rose waited on him. For three days she
never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready.

In three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort.
There was about Rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to
everything she laid her hands on. (Her hands were light in their touch
and exquisitely gentle.) His writing-table was like a shrine that she
tended. Every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay
ready to his hand. Not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its
place. The charm was that he never caught her at it. In all her
ministrations Rose was secret and silent and unseen.

Only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and
Rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the
magic and rhythm of a song, "Puss--Puss--Puss," she called;
"Minny--Min--Min--Minny--Puss--Puss--Puss." That was the hymn with which
Rose saluted the night. It ought to have irritated him, but it didn't.

It was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her
admirable silence. She had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from
under the book he was reading.

"It isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir."

"I know it isn't. But what are you to do if you've nobody to talk to?"

A long silence. It seemed as if Rose was positively thinking.

"You should go out more, sir."

"I don't like going out."

Silence again. Rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its
drawer. Yet she lingered.

"Would you like to see the little dogs, sir?"

"Little dogs? I didn't know there were any."

"We keep them very quiet; but we've seven. We've a fox and a dandy"
(Rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an Aberdeen, and two
Aberdeen pups, and two Poms, a mole and a white. May they come up, sir?"

"By all means let them come up."

She ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her
heels. Tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (He was fond of animals.)
The fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. The old Aberdeen ran
away from him backwards, showing her teeth. Her two pups sat down in the
doorway and yapped at him.

Rose tried not to laugh, while the Poms ran round and round her skirts,
panting with their ridiculous exertions.

"That's Prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. He doesn't belong to us.
And this," said Rose, darting under the table and picking up the white
Pom, "this is Joey."

The white Pom leaped in her arms. He licked her face in a rapture of
affection.

"Is Joey a pedigree dog, too?" said Tanqueray.

"Yes," said Rose. She met his eyes without flinching.

"So young a dog----"

"No, sir, Joey's not so very young."

She was caressing the little thing tenderly, and Tanqueray saw that
there was something wrong with Joey.

Joey was deplorably lean and puny, and his hair, which should have stood
out till Joey appeared three times the size he was, his hair, what hair
he had, lay straight and limp along his little back. Rose passed her
hand over him the wrong way.

"You should always brush a Pom the wrong way, sir. It brings the hair
on."

"I'm afraid, Rose, you've worn his hair away with stroking it."

"Oh no, sir. That's the peculiarity of Joey's breed. Joey's my dog,
sir."

"So I see."

He saw it all. Joey was an indubitable mongrel, but he was Rose's dog,
and she loved him, therefore Joey's fault, his hairlessness, had become
the peculiarity, not to say the superiority, of Joey's breed.

She read his thoughts.

"We're taking great pains to bring it on before the tenth."

"The tenth?"

"The Dog Show, sir."

(Heavens above! She was going to show him!)

"And do you think you'll bring it on before the tenth?"

"Oh yes, sir. You've only got to brush a Pom's hair backwards and it
comes."

The little dogs clamoured to be gone. She stooped, stroking them,
smoothing their ears back and gazing into their eyes, lost in her own
tenderness, and unaware that she was watched. If Rose had been skilled
in the art of allurement she could not have done better than let him see
how she loved all things that had life.

"How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose, musing.

[Illustration: "How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose,
musing]

She moved slowly to the door, gathering up the puppies in her arms, and
calling to the rest to follow her. "Come along," she said, "and see what
Pussy's doing."

He heard her voice going down-stairs saying,
"Puss--Puss--Pussy--Min--Min--Min."

When she appeared to him the next day, Minny, the cat, was hanging by
his claws on to her shoulder.

"Are you fond of cats, sir?"

"I adore them." (He did.)

"Would you like to have Minny, sir? He'll be nice company for you."

"Ought I to deprive you of his society?"

"I don't mind, sir. I've got the little dogs." She looked at him softly.
"And you've got nothing."

"True, Rose. I've got nothing."

That evening, as he sat in his chair, with Rose's cat curled up on his
knee, he found himself thinking, preposterously thinking, about Rose.

He supposed she was Mrs. Eldred's daughter. He did not like to think of
her as Mrs. Eldred's daughter. She was charming now; but he had a vision
of her as she might be in twenty years' time, grown shapeless and
immense, and wheezing as Mrs. Eldred wheezed. Yet no; that was too
horrible. You could not think of Rose as--wheezing. People did not
always take after their mothers. Rose must have had a father. Of course,
Eldred was her father; and Eldred was a small man, lean and brown as a
beetle; and he had never heard him wheeze.

At dinner-time Rose solved his doubt.

"Aunt says, sir, do you mind my waitin' on you?"

"I do not mind it in the very least."

"It's beginning to be a trouble to Aunt now to get up-stairs."

"I wouldn't dream of troubling your aunt."

Her aunt? Mrs. Eldred was not her mother. Ah, but you could take after
your aunt.

He found that this question absorbed him more than was becoming. He
determined to settle it.

"Are you going to stay here, then?" he asked, with guile.

"Yes, sir. I've come back to live with Uncle."

"Have you always lived here?"

"Yes, sir. Father left me to Uncle when he died."

"Then, Rose, Mrs. Eldred is not your aunt?"

"Oh no, sir," said Rose eagerly.

Tanqueray felt a relief out of all proportion to its cause.

He continued the innocent conversation.

"And so you're going to look after me, are you?"

"Yes," said Rose. He noticed that when she dropped the "sir," it was
because her voice drew itself back with a little gasping breath.

"And your aunt, you think, really won't be equal to it?"

"Well, sir, you see, she gets all of a flutter like, and then she
w'eezes, and she knows that's irritating for you to hear." She paused.
"And Aunt was afraid that if you was irritated, sir, you'd go. Nothin'
could keep you."

(How thoroughly they understood him!)

"Well, I'm not irritated any more. But it is unfortunate, isn't it, that
she--er--wheezes?"

He had tried before now to make Rose laugh. He wanted to see how she did
it. It would be a test. And he perceived that, somewhere behind her
propriety, Rose cherished a secret, iniquitous enjoyment of her aunt.

An imp of merriment danced in Rose's eyes, but the rest of her face was
graver than ever. ("Good," he thought; "she doesn't giggle.")

"Oh, Mr. Tanqueray, talk of w'eezin', you should hear Aunt snore."

"I have heard her. In my dreams."

Rose, abashed at her own outburst, remained silent for several minutes.
Then she spoke again.

"Do you think, sir, you could do without me on the tenth?"

"No. I don't think I could possibly do without you."

Her face clouded. "Not just for the tenth?"

"Why the tenth?"

"The Dog Show, sir. And Joey's in it."

"I forgot."

"Miss Kentish, the lady up-stairs, is going for her holiday on the
tenth."

He saw that she was endeavouring to suggest that if he couldn't do
without her, he and he alone would be keeping her from the superb
spectacle of the Dog Show with Joey in it.

"So you want me to go for a holiday, too. Is that it?"

"Well, sir, if it's not inconvenient, and you don't really mind
Aunt----"

"Doesn't she want to see Joey, too?"

"Not if you required her, sir."

"I don't require her. I don't require anybody. I'm going away, like the
lady up-stairs, for the tenth. I shall be away all day."

"Oh, thank you, sir." She glowed. "Do you think, sir, Joey'll get a
prize?"

"Certainly, if you bring his hair on."

"It's coming. I've put paraffin all over him. You'd laugh if you were to
see Joey now, sir."

Rose herself was absolutely serious.

"No, Rose, I should not laugh. I wouldn't hurt Joey's feelings for the
world."

Tanqueray had his face hidden under the table where he was setting a
saucer of milk for Minny, the cat.

Rose rejoiced in their communion. "He's quite fond of you, sir," she
said.

"Of course he's fond of me," said Tanqueray, emerging. "Why shouldn't he
be?"

"Well, Minny doesn't take to everybody."

"I am more than honoured that he should take to me."

Rose accepted that statement with incorruptible gravity. It was the
fifth day, and she had not laughed yet.

But on the seventh day he met her on the stairs going to her room. She
carried a lilac gown over her arm and a large hat in her hand. She was
smiling at the hat. He smiled at her.

"A new gown for the Rose Show?"

"The Dog Show, sir." She stood by to let him pass.

"It's the same thing. I say, what a howling swell you'll be."

At that Rose laughed (at last he had made her).

She ran up-stairs; and through a door ajar, he heard her singing in her
own room.




III


In Tanqueray's memorandum-book for nineteen hundred and two there stands
this note: "June 10th. Rose Show. Remember to take a holiday."

Rose, he knew, was counting the days till the tenth.

About a fortnight before the tenth, Tanqueray was in bed, ill. He had
caught a cold by walking furiously, and then lying out on the grass in
the chill of the May evening. There was a chance, Rose said, of its
turning to influenza and bronchitis, and it did.

He was so bad that Mrs. Eldred dragged herself up-stairs to look at him.

"Bed's the best place, sir, for you," she said. "So just you lie quiet
'ere, sir, and Rose'll look after you. And if there's anything you
fancy, sir, you tell Rose, and I'll make it you."

There was nothing that he fancied but to lie still there and look at
Rose when, in a spare hour, she sat by his window, sewing. Bad as he
was, he was not so far gone as to be ever oblivious of her presence.
Even at his worst, one night when he had had a touch of fever, he was
aware of her wandering in and out of his room, hanging over him with a
thermometer, and sitting by his bedside. When he flung the clothes off
she was there to cover him; when his pillow grew hot she turned it; when
he cried out with thirst she gave him a cool drink.

In the morning she was pale and heavy-eyed; her hair was all unsleeked,
and its round coils were flattened at the back. She had lain down on her
bed, dressed, for five minutes at a time, but she had not closed her
eyes or her ears all night.

In a week he was well enough to enjoy being nursed. He was now
exquisitely sensitive to the touch of her hands, and to the nearness of
her breathing mouth as her face bent over him, tender, absorbed, and
superlatively grave. What he liked best of all was to hold out his weak
hands to be washed and dried by hers; that, and having his hair brushed.

He could talk to her now without coughing. Thus--

"I say, what a bother I am to you."

Rose had taken away the basin and towels, and was arranging his hair
according to her own fancy. And Rose's fancy was to part it very much on
one side, and brush it back in a curl off his forehead. It gave him a
faint resemblance to Mr. Robinson, the elegant young draper in the High
Street, whom she knew.

"There's nothing I like so much," said she, "as tucking people up in bed
and 'aving them lie there and nursing 'em. Give me anybody ill, and
anybody 'elpless, and me lookin' after 'em, and I'm happy."

"And the longer I lie here, Rose, the happier you'll be?"

"Yes. But I want you to get well, too, sir."

"Because you're so unselfish."

"Oh no. There isn't anybody selfisher than me."

"I suppose," said Tanqueray, "that's why I _don't_ get well."

Rose had a whole afternoon to spare that day. She spent it turning out
his drawers and finding all the things there were to mend there. She was
sitting by his bed when, looking up from her mending, she saw his eyes
fixed on her.

"I don't irritate you, sittin' here, do I, sir?"

"Irritate me? What do you think I'm made of?"

Rose meditated for the fraction of a second.

"Brains, sir," said she.

"So you think you know a man of brains when you see him, do you?"

"Yes, sir."

"What were you, Rose, before you came here?"

"I was nurse in a gentleman's family. I took care of the baby."

"Did you like taking care of the baby?"

"Yes."

Rose blushed profoundly and turned away. He wondered why.

"I had a bad dream last night," said Tanqueray. "I dreamt that your aunt
got into this room and couldn't get out again. I'm afraid of your aunt."

"I dare say, sir. Aunt is so very 'uge."

Rose dropped her g's and, when deeply moved, her aitches; but he did not
mind. If it had to be done, it couldn't be done more prettily.

"Rose, do you know when I'm delirious and when I'm not?"

"Yes, sir. You see, I take your temperature."

"It must be up now to a hundred and eighty. You mustn't be alarmed at
anything I say. I'm not responsible."

"No, sir." She rose and gravely took his temperature.

"Aren't you afraid of my biting the bulb off, and the quicksilver flying
down my throat, and running about inside me for ever and ever?"

"No, sir."

"You don't seem to be afraid of anything."

"I'm not afraid of many things, and I would never be afraid of you,
sir."

"Not if I went mad, Rose? Raving?"

"No. Not if you went mad. Not if you was to strike me, I wouldn't." She
paused. "Not so long as I knew you was really mad, and didn't mean to
hurt me."

"I wouldn't hurt you for the world."

He sighed deeply and closed his eyes.

That evening, when she was giving him his medicine, he noticed that her
eyelids were red and her eyes gleaming.

"You've been crying. What's made you cry?"

Rose did not answer.

"What is it?"

"Miss Kentish keeps on callin' and callin' me. And she scolds me
something awful when I don't come."

"Give my compliments to Miss Kentish, Rose, and tell her she's a beast."

"I _'ave_ told her that if it was she that was ill I'd nurse her just
the same and be glad to do it."

"You consider that equivalent to calling her a beast, do you?"

Rose said, "Well----" It was a little word she used frequently.

"Well, I'm sorry you think I'm a beast."

Rose's face had a scared look. She could not follow him, and that
frightened her. It is always terrifying to be left behind. So he spared
her.

"Why would you be glad to nurse Miss Kentish?"

"Because," said Rose, "I like taking care of people."

"Do you like taking care of me?"

Rose was silent again. She turned suddenly away. It was the second time
she had done this, and again he wondered why.

By the eighth day Tanqueray was strong enough to wash his own hands and
brush his own hair. On the ninth the doctor and Rose agreed that he
might sit up for an hour or two in his chair by the window. On the
eleventh he came down-stairs for dinner. On the thirteenth Rose had
nothing more to do for him but to bring him his meals and give him his
medicine, which he would otherwise have forgotten.

At bed-time, therefore, he had two sovereigns ready for her in an
envelope. Rose refused obstinately to take them; to have anything to do
with sovereigns.

"No, sir, I couldn't," she reiterated.

But when he pressed them on her she began to cry.

And that left him wondering more.




IV


On the fourteenth day, Tanqueray, completely recovered, went out for a
walk. And the first thing he did when he got back was to look at his
note-book to see what day of the month it was.

It was the tenth, the tenth of June, the day of the Dog Show. And the
memorandum stared him in the face: "Rose Show. Remember to take a
holiday."

He looked in the paper. The show began at ten. And here he was at
half-past one. And here was Rose, in her old green and brown, bringing
in his luncheon.

"Rose," he said severely, "why are you not at the Rose Show?"

Rose lowered her eyes. "I didn't want to go, sir."

"How about the new gown?"