As for his mere marriage, he was certain with all of them to be understood. It was their business, as they had so often told each other, to understand. But he was not sure that he wanted to be understood with the lucidity, the depth, the prodigious thoroughness of which they were capable.
He said to himself, "The blood of these women is in their brains." That was precisely what he had against them.
It was a perfect day, Jane's birthday, like a young June day, a day of the sun, of white distances and vivid foregrounds.
Wendover Hill looked over Arnott Nicholson's white house and over his green garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly quiet, a perfect peace. It was strange and sad, said Tanqueray, that a quiet and peace like that should be given to Nicky—to write poems in. Jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from anything so charming, so perfect in its way as Nicky.
"Do you think," said she, as they crowded on his doorstep, "do you think he'll be at home?"
"Rather. We shall find him in his library, among his books and his busts, seething in a froth of abominable manuscripts, and feeling himself immortal."
Arnott Nicholson was at home, and he was in his library, with his books and his busts, and with Gisborne's great portrait of Jane Holland (the original) above his chimney-piece. He was, as Tanqueray had predicted, seething in his froth. Their names came to him there—Miss Holland and Mr. Tanqueray. In a moment Nicky was out of his library and into his drawing-room.
He was a singularly attractive person, slender, distinguished, highly finished in black and white. He was dressed, not like a candidate for immortality, but in the pink of contemporary perfection.
He was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. And delighted, of course, he said, to see Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. He insisted on their all staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come, a day. He ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. He brought peaches and chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things mortal and savouring of mortality.
He went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one aware that he entertained immortal guests. He couldn't get over it, he said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance, out of their blue. Heavens! Supposing he had been out! He stood there glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room.
It was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great bowls of roses everywhere. The whole house had a strange feminine atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had passed over it. Yet it was Nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts feminine.
Nicky was looking at Jane as she stooped over the roses. "Do you know," he said, "that you've come home? Come and see yourself."
He led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its high place.
"You bought it?" said she.
"Rather. Gisborne painted it for me."
"Oh, Nicky!"
"It's your genius brooding over mine—I mean over me."
He looked at her again. When he looked at you Nicky's perfect clothes, his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black moustache, Nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his enormous, prominent black eyes.
"I put you there," he said, "to inspire me."
Nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked about his inspiration.
"Do I?"
She did. They had caught him in the high act of creation. He'd been at it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have destroyed himself. His head was burning now.
"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.
His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had so strongly the literary taint.
Nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them anywhere. Only, as it happened, he had to be at home. He was expecting Miss Bickersteth. They knew Miss Bickersteth?
They knew her. Nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and Miss Bickersteth was eminently right.
The lady, he said, might be upon them any minute.
"In that case," said Tanqueray, "we'll clear out."
"Youclear out? But you're the very people he wants to see."
"He?"
Hugh Brodrick. Miss Bickersteth was bringing Hugh Brodrick.
They smiled. Miss Bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being brought.
Brodrick was the right man to bring. He implored them to stay and meet Brodrick.
"WhoisBrodrick?"
Brodrick, said Nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be clung to and never to be let go. Brodrick was on the "Morning Telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. And the Jews were at the back of Brodrick. So much so that he was starting a monthly magazine—for the work of the great authors only. That was his, Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through. Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave the popular magazines behind him.
"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.
"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"
"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."
"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.
"And he wants—he told me—to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr. Tanqueray. And he's sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You'll all be in it. It's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all days."
In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.
A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring noises in it.
"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."
And he went out.
He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr. Hugh Brodrick.
Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of Tanqueray, of Brodrick.
Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes. They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her in her corner.
This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky, as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate. It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.
Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her, pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.
"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.
"Not very often."
There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.
"Only that it's an easy run down from Marylebone."
"It is—very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.
It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes. For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them, he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky's house.
Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering, full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth. There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely, with a look of having grown there.
Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by trying to make her talk about Shelley (she had edited him). He hoped that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. To Nicky the transition was a natural one.
But Miss Bickersteth did not want to talk about Shelley. Shelley, she declared irreverently, was shop. She wanted to talk about people whom they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet. And she had just seen Jane and Tanqueray going out together through the long window on to the lawn.
"I suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now."
"Now?" repeated poor Nicky vaguely.
"Now that one of them has got an income."
"I didn't think he was a marrying man."
"No. And you wouldn't think, would you, she was a marrying woman?"
"I—I don't know. I haven't thought about it. Hesaidhe wasn't going to marry."
"Oh." Two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the pinkness of Miss Bickersteth's face.
"It's got as far as that, has it? That shows he's been thinking of it."
"I should have thought it showed he wasn't."
Miss Bickersteth's mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its outline and its colouring. Her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of her face.
"How have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? Do you always go about with your head among the stars?"
"My head——?" He felt it. It was going round and round.
"Yes. Is a poet not supposed ever to see anything under his exquisite nose?"
"I am not," said Nicky solemnly, "always a poet. And when a person tells me he isn't going to do a thing, I naturally think he isn't."
"And I naturally think he is. Whatever you think about George Tanqueray,he'ssure to do the other thing."
"Come—if you can calculate on that."
"You can't calculate on anything. Least of all with George Tanqueray. Except that he'll never achieve anything that isn't a masterpiece. If it's a masterpiece of folly."
"Mind you," she added, "I don't say he will marry Jane Holland, and I don't say it would be a masterpiece of folly if he did."
"What do you say?"
"That if he ever cares for any woman enough to marry her, it will be Jane."
"I see," said Nicky, after some reflection. "You think he's that sort?"
"I think he's a genius. What more do you want?"
"Oh,Idon't want anything more," said Nicky, plunging head-first into a desperate ambiguity. He emerged. "What I mean is, when we've got Him, and when we've got Her—creators——" He paused before the immensity of his vision of Them. "What business have we——"
"To go putting one and one together so as to make two?"
"Well—it doesn't seem quite reverent."
"You think them gods, then, your creators?"
"I think I—worship them."
"Ah, Mr. Nicholson,you'readorable. And I'm atrocious."
"I believe," said Nicky, "tea is in the garden."
"Let us go into the garden," said Miss Bickersteth.
And they went.
Tea was served in a green recess shut in from the lawn by high yew hedges. Nicky at his tea-table was more charming than ever, surrounded by old silver and fine linen, making tea delicately, and pouring it into fragile cups and offering it, doing everything with an almost feminine dexterity and grace.
After tea the group scattered and rearranged itself. In Nicky's perfect garden, a garden of smooth grass plots and clipped yew-trees, of lupins and larkspurs, of roses that would have been riotous but for the restraining spirit of the place; in a green alley between lawn and orchard, Mr. Hugh Brodrick found himself with Miss Holland, and alone. Very quietly, very persistently, with eyes intent, he had watched for and secured this moment.
"You don't know," he was saying, "how I've wanted to meet you, and how hard I've worked for it."
"Was it so hard?"
"Hard isn't the word for it. If you knew the things I've done——" He spoke in his low, even voice, saying eager and impulsive things without a sign of eagerness or impulse.
"What things?"
"Mean things, base things. Going on my knees to people I didn't know, grovelling for an introduction."
"I'm sorry. It sounds awful."
"It was. I've been on the point of meeting you a score of times, and there's always been some horrid fatality. Either you'd gone when I arrived, or I had to go before you arrived. I believe I've seen you—once."
"I don't remember."
"At Miss Bickersteth's. You were coming out as I was going in." He looked at his watch. "AndnowI ought to be catching a train."
"Don't catch it."
"I shan't. For I've got to tell you how much I admire your work. I'm not going to ask how you do it, for I don't suppose you know yourself."
"I don't."
"I'm not even going to ask myself. I simply accept the miracle."
"If it's miracles you want, look at George Tanqueray."
He said nothing. And now she thought of it, he had not looked at George Tanqueray. He had looked at nobody but her. It was the look of a man who had never known a moment's uncertainty as to the thing he wanted. It was a look that stuck.
"Why aren't you at his feet?" she said.
"Because I'm not drawn—to my knees—by brutal strength and cold, diabolical lucidity."
"Oh," she cried, "you haven't read him."
"I've read all of him. And I prefer you."
"Me? You've spoilt it all. If you can't admire him, what is the use of your admiring me?"
"I see. You don't want me to admire you."
He said it with no emphasis, no emotion, as if he were indifferent as to what she wanted.
"No. I don't think I do."
"You see," he said, "you have a heart."
"Oh, if people would only leave my heart alone!"
"And Tanqueray, I believe, has a devil."
She turned on him.
"Give me George Tanqueray's devil!" She paused, considering him. "Why do you talk about my heart?"
"Because, if I may say so, it's what I like most in you."
"Anybody can likethat."
"Can they?"
"Yes. For ten people who care for me there isn't one capable of caring for George Tanqueray."
"How very unfortunate for him."
"Unfortunate for me, you mean."
He smiled. He was not in the least offended. It was as if her perverse shafts never penetrated his superb solidity.
And yet he was not obtuse, not insensitive. He might fall, she judged, through pride, but not through vanity.
"I admit," said he, "that he is our greatest living novelist."
"Then," said she, "you are forgiven."
"And I may continue to adore your tenderness?"
"You may adore anything—after that admission."
He smiled again, like one satisfied, appeased.
"What," he said presently, "is Miss Lempriere's work like? Has she anything of your breadth, your solidity, your fire?"
"There's more fire in Nina Lempriere's little finger than in my whole body."
Brodrick took out his pocket-book and made a note of Nina.
"And the little lady? What does she do?"
"Little things. Charming, delicious, funny, pathetic things. Everything she does is like herself."
"I must put her down too." And he made another note of Laura.
They had turned on to the lawn. Their host was visible, gathering great bunches of roses for his guests.
"What a lovable person he is," said Brodrick.
"Isn't he?" said Jane.
They faced the house, the little house roofed with moss, walled with roses, where, thought Jane, poor Nicky nested like the nightingale he wasn't and would never be.
"I wonder," said Brodrick, "how he gets the perfection, the peace, the finish of it, the little feminine touches, the flowers on the table——"
"Yes, Mr. Nicholson and his house always look as if they were expecting a lady."
"But," said Brodrick, "it's so pathetic, for the lady never comes."
"Perhaps if she did it wouldn't be so peaceful."
"Perhaps. But it must be sad for him—living alone like this."
"I don't know. I live alone and I'm not sad."
"You? You live alone?"
"Of course I do. So does Mr. Tanqueray."
"Tanqueray. He's a man, and it doesn't matter. But you, a woman——It's horrible."
He was almost animated.
"There's your friend, Miss Bickersteth. She lives alone."
"Miss Bickersteth—is Miss Bickersteth."
"There's Nina Lempriere."
"The fiery lady?" He paused, meditating. "Why do her people let her?"
"She hasn't got any. Her people are all dead."
"How awful. And your small friend, Miss Gunning? Don't say she lives alone, too."
"She doesn't. She lives with her father. He's worse than a family——"
"Worse than a——?" He stared aghast.
"Worse than a family of seven children."
"And that's a misfortune, is it?" He frowned.
"Yes, when you have to keep it—on nothing but what you earn by writing, and when it leaves you neither time nor space to write in."
"I see. She oughtn't to have to do it."
"But she has, and it's killing her. She'd be better if she lived alone."
"Well—I don't know anything about Miss Gunning. But for you——"
"You don't know anything about me."
"I do. I've seen you. And I stick to it. It's horrible."
"What's horrible?" said Miss Bickersteth, as they approached.
"Ask Mr. Brodrick."
But Brodrick, thus appealed to, drifted away towards Nicholson, murmuring something about that train he had to catch.
"What have you done to agitate him?" said Miss Bickersteth. "You didn't throw cold water on his magazine, did you?"
"I shouldn't have known he had a magazine."
"What? Didn't he mention it?"
"Not to me."
"Then somethingisthe matter with him." She added, after a thoughtful pause, "What did you think of him?"
"There's no doubt he's a very amiable, benevolent man. The sort of man who wants everybody to marry because he's married himself."
"But he isn't married."
"Well, he looks it. He looks as if he'd never been anythingbutmarried all his life."
"Anyhow," said Miss Bickersteth, "that's safe. Safer than not looking married when you are."
"Oh, he's safe enough," said Jane. As she spoke she was aware of Tanqueray standing at her side.
The day was over, and they were going back.
Their host insisted on accompanying them to the station. They had given him a day, and every moment of it, he declared solemnly, was precious.
They could hardly have spent it better than with Nicky in his perfect house, his perfect garden. And Nicky had been charming, with his humble ardour, his passion for a perfection that was not his.
The day, Miss Holland intimated, was his, Nicky's present, rather than theirs. He glowed. It had been glorious, anyhow, a perfect day. A day, Nicky said, that made him feel immortal.
He looked at Jane Holland and George Tanqueray, and they tried not to smile. Jane would have died rather than have hurt Nicky's feelings. It was not in her to spoil his perfect day. All the same, it had been their secret jest that Nickywasimmortal. He would never end, never by any possibility disappear. As he stuck now, he always would stick. He was going with them to the station.
Sensitive to the least quiver of a lip, the young man's mortal part was stung with an exquisite sense of the becoming.
"If I feel it," said he, "what mustyoufeel?"
"Oh, we!" they cried, and broke loose from his solemn and detaining eyes.
They walked on ahead, and Nicholson was left behind with Laura Gunning and Nina Lempriere. He consented, patiently and politely, to be thus outstripped. After all, the marvellous thing was that he should find himself on that road at all with Them. After all, he had had an hour alone with Him, in his garden, and five-and-twenty minutes by his watch with Her. It was enough if he could keep his divinities in sight, following the flutter of Miss Holland's veil.
Besides, she had asked him to talk to Nina and look after Laura. She was always asking him to be an angel, and look after somebody. Being an angel seemed somehow his doom. But he was sorry for Laura. They said she had cared for Tanqueray; and he could well believe it. He could believe in any woman caring for Him. He wondered how it had left her. A little defiant, he thought, but with a quiet, clear-eyed virginity. Determined, too. Nicholson had never seen so large an expression of determination on so small a face.
He always liked talking to Laura; but he shrank inexpressibly from approaching Nina, the woman with unquiet eyes and nervous gestures, and a walk that suggested the sweep of a winged thing to its end. A glance at Nina told him that wherever she was she could look after herself.
Morose, fearlessly disarrayed, and with it all a trifle haggard and forlorn, Nina Lempriere had the air of not belonging to them. She paused, she loitered, she swept tempestuously ahead, but none of her movements had the slightest reference to her companions. From time to time he glanced uncomfortably at Nina.
"Leave her," said Laura, "to herself."
"Do you think," he said, "she minds being left?"
"Not she. She likes it. You don't suppose she's thinking ofus?"
"Dear me, no; but one likes to be polite."
"She'd so much rather you were sincere."
"I say, mayn't I be both?"
"Oh yes, but you couldn't always be with Nina. She makes you feel sometimes as if it was no use your existing."
"Do you think," he said, "she'll stand beside Jane Holland?"
"No. She may go farther."
"Go farther? How?"
"She's got a better chance."
"A better chance? I shouldn't have backed her chance against Miss Holland's."
"Itisbetter. She doesn't get so mixed up with people. If shewereto——"
He waited.
"She'd go with a rush, in one piece, and either die or come out of it all right. Whereas Jane——"
He waited breathlessly.
"Jane would be torn to tatters, inch by inch."
Nicholson felt a curious constriction across his chest. His throat dried as he spoke again.
"What do you think would tear her most?"
"Oh, if she married."
"I thought you meant that."
"The thing is," said Laura, "not to marry." She said it meditatively and without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept her view.
He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He, Tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they all took. Not to marry.
He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to chastity and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary priest and priestesses of a god diviner than desire. And She—he saw her more virgin, more perfect than they all.
"You think too then," the blameless youth continued, "that if Miss Holland—married it would injure her career?"
"Injure it? There wouldn't be any career left to injure."
Was it really so? He recorded, silently, his own determination to remember that. It had for him, also, the consecration of a vow.
A thought struck him. Perhaps Laura, perhaps Tanqueray, had divined him and were endeavouring in kindness to take from him the poison of a preposterous hope. He preferred, however, not to explain them or the situation or himself thus. He was, with all possible sublimity, renouncing Jane.
Another thought struck him. It struck him hard, with the shock almost of blasphemy. It broke into speech.
"Not," he said, "if she were to marry Him?"
Laura was silent, and he wondered.
Why not? After all it was natural. She matched him. The thing was inevitable, and it was fitting. So supremely fitting was it that he could not very well complain. He could give her up to George Tanqueray.
Jane Holland and Tanqueray had left the others some considerable way behind. It was possible, they agreed, to have too much of Nicky, though he did adore them.
The wide high road stood up before them, climbing the ridge, to drop down into Wendover. A white road, between grass borders and hedgerows, their green powdered white with the dust of it. Over all, the pallor of the first white hour of twilight.
For a moment, a blessed pause in the traffic, they were alone; twilight and the road were theirs.
The two bore themselves with a certain physical audacity, a swinging challenge to fatigue. He, in his well-knit youth, walked with the step of some fine, untamed animal. She, at his side, kept the wild pace he set with a smooth motion of her own. She carried, high and processionally, her trophy, flowers from their host's garden, wild parsley of her own gathering, and green fans of beech and oak. As she went, the branches swayed with the swinging of her body. A light wind woke on the hill and played with her. Her long veil, grey-blue and transparent, falling from her head to her shoulders, flew and drifted about her, now clinging to her neck, her breasts, now fluttering itself free.
He looked at her, and thought that if Gisborne, R.A., hadn't been an idiot, he would have painted her, not sitting, but like that. Protected by the charm of Rose, there was no more terror for him in any charm of Jane's. He could afford to show his approval, to admit that, even as a woman, she had points. He could afford, being extremely happy himself, to make Jane happy too.
So sheltered, so protected was he that it did not strike him that Jane was utterly defenceless and exposed.
"Yes," he said, "it's been a day."
"Hasn't it?"
She saw him sustained by some inward ecstasy. The coming joy, the joy of his wedding-day, was upon him; the light of it was in his eyes as he looked at her, the tenderness of it in his voice as he spoke to her again.
"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"
"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."
It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite feeling of treachery toward Jane.
Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in?
"It was you, Jane, who did it."
"No, George; it was you. You introduced him."
He owned it. "I did it because I hoped you'd fall in love with him."
She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her.
"That," said she, "would have been very bad for Nicky."
"Yes. But it would have been very good for you."
She had her moment of torment; then she recovered.
"I thought," said she, "that was the one thing I was not to do."
"You're not to do it seriously. But you couldn't fall in love with Nicky seriously. Could you? Could anybody?"
"Why are you so unkind to Nicky?"
"Because he's so ungovernably a man of letters."
"He isn't. He only thinks he is."
"He thinks he's Shelley, because his father's a squire."
"That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. Don't you wishyoucould feel like that!"
He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame.
"To feel myself an immortal, a blessed god!"
They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all divine.
"Such a tragic little god," said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little god without a single apostle or a prophet—nobody," she wailed, "to spread the knowledge of him."
"I say—we'll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown God."
"He won't like that, our calling him unknown."
"Let's call him the Unapparent—the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped."
"In one aspect. In another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric——"
"An ode to immortality on legs——"
"Nicky hasn't any legs. He's a breath—a perpetual aspiration."
"Oh, at aspiring he beats Shelley into apoplexy."
"He stands for the imperishable illusion——"
"The stupendous hope——"
"And, after all, he adoresyou."
"And nobody else does," said Tanqueray.
"That's Nicky's achievement. Hedoessee what you are. It's his little claim to immortality. Just think, George, when Nicky dies and goes to heaven he'll turn up at the gates of the poets' paradise, and they'll let him in on the strength of that. The angel of the singing stars will come up to him and say, 'Nicky, you sing abominably, but you can see. You saw George Tanqueray when nobody else could. Your sonnets and your ballads are forgiven you; and we've got a nice place for you, Nicky, near Keats and Shelley.' Because it wouldn't be heaven for Nicky if he wasn't near them."
"How aboutthem, though?"
"Oh, up in heaven you won't see anything of Nicky except his heart."
"I suppose he'll be stuck somewhere near you, too. It won't be heaven for him if he isn't. The first thing he'll ask is, 'Where's Jane?'"
"And then they'll break it to him very gently—'Jane's in the other place, Nicky, where Mr. Tanqueray is. We had to send her down, because if she wasn't there it wouldn't be hell for Mr. Tanqueray.'"
"But why amIdown there?"
"Because you didn't see what Nicky was."
"If you don't take care, Jinny, he'll 'have' you like the rest. You're laying up sorrow for yourself in the day when Nicky publishes his poems."
"It's you he'll turn to."
"No. I'm not celebrated," said he grimly. "There, do you see the full horror of it?"
"I do," she moaned.
Tanqueray's devil came back to him.
"Do you think he'll fall in love with Laura?"
"No, I don't." She said it coolly, though his gaze was upon her, and they were both of them aware of Nicky's high infatuation.
"Why not?" he said lightly.
"Because Nicky'll never be in love with any woman as she is; and nobody could be in love with Laura as she isn't."
She faced him in her courage. He might take it, if he liked, that she knew Nicky was in love with her as she was not; that she knew Tanqueray would never, like Nicky, see her as she was not, to be in love with that.
"Oh, you're too subtle," he said. But he understood her subtlety.
He must tell her about Rose. Before the others could come up with them he must tell her. And then he must tell Nicky.
"Jane," he said, "will you forgive me for never coming to see you? I simply couldn't come."
"I know, George, I know."
"You don't. You don't know what I felt like."
"Perhaps not. And yet, I think, you might——"
But what she thought he might have done she would not tell him.
"At any rate," said he, "you'll let me come and see you now? Often; I want to come often."
He meant to tell her that his marriage was to make no difference.
"Come as often as you want. Come as often as you used to."
"Was it so very often?"
"Not too often."
"I say, those were glorious times we had. We'll have them again, Jinny. There are things we've got to talk about. Things we've got to do. Why, we're hardly beginning."
"Do you remember saying, 'When you've made yourself an absolutely clear medium, then you can begin'?"
"I remember."
He was content now to join her in singing the duet of remembrance.
She dismissed herself. "What haveyoubeen doing?"
"Not much. It looks as if I couldn't do things without you."
A look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed.
"That isn't so, George. There never was anybody less dependent on other people. That's why nothing has ever stopped you. Nothing ever will. Whereas—you're right about me. Anything might stop me."
"CouldIstop you?"
Not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question, whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her.
"You?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate vibration. He had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung from Jane.
Her eyes met his. Steady they were and deep, under their level brows; but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. Something in her startled him with its intensity.
Her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about Rose. It was not the moment.
"I didn't know she was like that," he thought.
No, he had never known until now what Jane was; never seen until now that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more, to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm.
And, with the charm of Rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he had known, it would have made any difference. All he knew or cared to know was that he was going to marry Rose the day after to-morrow.
He would have to ask Nicky to let him go back with him and stay the night. Then he could tell him. And he could get out of telling Jane. He liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. Still less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her bleed.
He must get away from Jane.
On the morning after Wendover Jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with dreams. Last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept. It passed into her dreams, and joy woke her.
She sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught, agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe.
She went to it and stood there, looking at herself. For the last three months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. Sometimes she had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. Every day the woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her Genius.
And now she did not look likethatin the very least. She looked, to her amazement, like any other woman.
Nobody had ever said that Jane was handsome. She hadn't one straight feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. She wasn't pretty, either. There was something about her too large and dominating for that. She had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some ugliness subdued. It was part of her queerness that she had the square brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for the blood it took it had given her back fire.
Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had seen. She had felt herself cruelly despoiled, disinherited of the splendours and powers of her sex. And here she was, looking, as she modestly put it, like any other woman. Any one of the unknown multitude whom lately, in prophetic agony, she had seen surrounding Tanqueray; women dowered, not with the disastrous gift of genius, but with the secret charm and wonder of mere womanhood. One of these (she had always reckoned with the possibility), one of these conceivably might at any moment, and inevitably would when her moment came, secure and conquer Tanqueray. She had been afraid, even in vision, to measure her power with theirs.
But now, standing there in the long nightgown that made her so straight and tall, with arms raised, holding up the thick mass of her hair, her body bent a little backwards from the waist, showing it for the slender and supple thing it was, seeing herself so incredibly feminine and so alive, she defied any one to tell the difference. If any difference there were it was not in her body, neither was it in her face. That was the face which had looked at Tanqueray last night; the face which he had called up to meet that strange excitement and that tenderness of his. Her body was the body of a woman created in a day and a night by joy for its own wooing.
This glorious person was a marvel to itself. It was so incomprehensibly, so superlatively happy. Its eyes, its mouth, its hands and feet were happy. It was happy inside and out and all over. It had developed a perfectly preposterous capacity for enjoyment. It found pleasure in bathing itself, in dressing itself, in brushing its hair. And its very hair, when it had done with it, looked happy.
It was at its happiest at ten o'clock, when Jane sat down to write a letter to Tanqueray. The letter had to be written. For yesterday Nina Lempriere had asked her to supper in her rooms on Sunday, and she was to bring George Tanqueray. If, said Nina, she could get him.
Sunday was the seventeenth. This was Wednesday, the thirteenth. She would hear from Tanqueray to-night or to-morrow at the latest. And there would be only four days to get through till Sunday.
To-night and to-morrow went, and Tanqueray did not write. Jane's heart began to ache with an intolerable anxiety.
It was on Saturday night that the letter came.