"Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper. I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday."Yrs., G. T."P.S.—Nicky saw me through."
"Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper. I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday.
"Yrs., G. T.
"P.S.—Nicky saw me through."
Not a word about his wife.
At first the omission did not strike her as significant. It was so like Tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the secret soul of it himself. He must have wondered how she would take it.
She took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling her that Tanqueray was dead. She took it, as she would have taken the stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. She faced, as it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence constrained her to all the observances of decency.
She crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made her suffer. Then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible.
Verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. She was aware of the existence of the woman. There had been a woman all the time. But she couldn't realize her. She only knew that she meant finality, separation.
An hour passed. She went to bed. Her footsteps and her movements in undressing were hushed and slow. She was still like some one who knows that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the next room. Stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there being only a wall between the living and the dead.
The best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till they hammered her to stupefaction. Unfortunately, towards morning she fell into a sound sleep.
She woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things which last night she had overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an unbearable illumination) Jane saw transparently whatshehad been to Tanqueray. She had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. But she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. So much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening, he, George Tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the other. He had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had made her suffer.
But never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any power or splendour of her own.
She wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. It had been just two days before he married her. Perhaps it had been only his shyness, or, more likely, his perversity.
But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each other and that he hoped they would be friends.
It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.
He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been, though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness. She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife. As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart than Tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it would end there.
It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.
Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let him go for a scruple finer than a hair.
And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was so pre-eminentlyherfailure) came of feeling and of understanding at every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain, passion and insight in her running disastrously together.
It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of response.
Her heart, of course, he must have heard. It had positively screamed at him. But her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. She remembered how she had said to him that night, "Mayn't I be a woman?" and he had answered her brutally. Whathadconcerned him was her genius. If there had been twenty women in her he would have made her sacrifice them all to that. He had cared for it to the point of tenderness, of passion. She had scores of his letters in a drawer, there; love-letters written to her genius. She knew one of them, the last, by heart. It was written at Hampstead.
"Jinny," it had said, "I'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet. I'm in the dust, Jinny, kissing your feet. Shivers of exquisite adoration are going up and down my spine. Do you know what you've done to me, you unspeakably divine person? I've worn out the knees, the knees of my trousers; I've got dust in my hair, Jinny, kissing your feet."
That letter (there was a great deal more of it) had tided her over Tanqueray's worst absence; it had carried her on, so to speak, to Wendover. As she thought of it her heart was filled with hatred and jealousy of her genius.
It was odd, but she had no jealousy and no hatred for Tanqueray's wife.
She hated and was jealous of her genius, not only because it had forced Tanqueray to care for it, but because, being the thing that had made her different from other women, it had kept Tanqueray from caring about her.
And she had got to live alone with it.
Her solitude had become unbearable. The room was unbearable; it was so pervaded, so dominated by her genius and by Tanqueray. Most of all by Tanqueray. There were things in it which he had given to her, things which she had given to him, as it were; a cup he drank out of, a tray he used for his cigar-ash; things which would remain vivid for ever with the illusion of his presence. She could not bear to see them about. She suffered in all ways, secretly, as if Tanqueray were dead.
A bell rang. It was four o'clock. Somebody was calling.
As to one preoccupied with a bereavement, it seemed to her incredible that anybodycouldcall so soon. She was then reminded that she had a large acquaintance who would be interested in seeing how she took it. She had got to meet all these people as if nothing had happened. She remembered now that she had promised Caroline Bickersteth to go to tea with her to-day. If she wanted to present an appearance of nothing having happened, she couldn't do better than go to Caro's for tea. Caro expected her and would draw conclusions from her absence.
So might her caller if she declared herself not at home.
It was Nicky, come, he said, to know if she were going to Miss Bickersteth's, and if he might have the pleasure of taking her there. That was all he cared to go for, the pleasure of taking her.
Jane had never thought of Nicky being there. He was a barrister and he had chambers, charming chambers, in the Temple, where he gave little tea-parties and (less frequently) looked up little cases. But on Sundays he was always a little poet down at Wendover.
They needn't start at once, he said, almost as if he knew that Jane was dreading it. He sat and talked; he talked straight on end; talked, not literature, but humble, innocent banalities, so unlike Nicky who cared for nothing that had not the literary taint.
It was a sign of supreme embarrassment, the only one he gave. He did not mention Tanqueray, and for a moment she wondered if he had heard. Then she remembered. Of course, it was Nicky who had seen Tanqueray through.
Nicky was crowning his unlikelihood by refraining from the slightest allusion to the event. He was, she saw with dreadful lucidity, afraid of hurting her. And yet, he was (in his exquisite delicacy) behaving as if nothing had happened. They were going together to Miss Bickersteth's as if nothing had happened. His manner suggested that they were moving together in a world where nothing could happen; a world of delightful and amicable superficialities. She was not to be afraid of him; he was, as it were, looking another way; he wasn't even aware of any depths. The sheer beauty and gentleness of him showed her that he had seen and understood thoroughly what depths there were.
It was her certainty of Nicky's vision that drove her to the supreme act of courage.
"Why aren't we talking," she said, "about George Tanqueray?"
Nicky blushed in a violent distress. Even so, in the house of mourning, he would have blushed at some sudden, unsoftened reference to the deceased.
"I didn't know," he said, "whether he had told you."
"Why shouldn't he?"
Poor Nicky, she had made him blunder, so upset was he by the spectacle of her desperate pluck. He reallywaslike a person calling after a bereavement. He had called on account of it, and yet it was the last thing he was going to talk about. He had come, not to condole, but to see if there was any way in which he could be of use.
"Well," said Nicky, "he seemed to have kept it so carefully from all his friends——"
"He toldyou——Why, you were there, weren't you?"
It was as if she had said, "You were there—you saw him die."
"Yes." Nicky's face expressed a tender relief. If she could talk about it——"But it was only at the last minute."
"I wonder," said she, "why he didn't tell us."
"Well, you know, I think it was because she—the lady——"
He hesitated. He knew what would hurt most; and he shrank almost visibly from mentioning Her.
"Yes—you've forgotten the lady."
She smiled, and he took courage. "There it is. The lady, you see, isn't altogether a lady."
"Oh, Nicky——"
He did not look at her. He seemed to be a partaker in what he felt to be her suffering and Tanqueray's shame.
"Has he known her long?" she said.
"About two months."
She was right then. It had been since that night. It had been her own doing. She had driven him to her.
"Since he went to Hampstead then?"
"Yes."
"Who was she?"
"His landlady's daughter, I think, or a niece. She waited on him and—she nursed him when he was ill."
Jane drew in her breath with an almost audible sound. Nicky had sunk into his chair in his attitude of vicarious, shamefaced misery.
It made her rally. "Nicky," she said, "why do you look like that? I don't think it's nice of you to sit there, giving him away by making gloomy faces, in a chair. Why shouldn't he marry his landlady's daughter if he likes? You ought to stand up for him and say she's charming. She is. She must be; or he wouldn't have done it."
"He ought not to have done it."
"But he has. It had to happen. Nothing else could have happened."
"You think so? It seems to me the most unpredestined, the most horribly, fantastically fortuitous occurrence."
"It was what he wanted. Wouldn't you have given him what he wanted?"
"No," said Nicky, "not if it wasn't good for him."
"Oh, Nicky, how do you know what's good for him? You're not George Tanqueray."
"No. If I were I'd have——" He stopped. His passion, growing suddenly, recklessly, had brought him to the verge of the depth they were trying to avoid.
"If you were," said she, with amazing gaiety, "you'd have married this lady who isn't a lady. And then where would you have been?"
"Where indeed?" said Nicky bitterly.
Jane's face, so gay, became suddenly tragic. She looked away, staring steadily, dumbly, at something that she saw. Then he knew that he had raised a vision of the abyss, and of Tanqueray, their Tanqueray, sinking in it. He must keep her from contemplating that, or she would betray herself, she would break down.
He searched his heart for some consoling inspiration, and found none. It was his head which suggested that irrelevance was best.
"When," said he, by way of being irrelevant, "are you going to give us another big book?"
"I don't know," she said. "Never, I think."
He looked up. Her eyes shone perilously over trembling pools of tears. He had not been irrelevant at all.
"You don'tthinkanything of the sort," he said, with a sharp tenderness.
"No. I feel it. There isn't another book in me. I'm done for, Nicky."
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."
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, "howdidit 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?"
"Ican—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'sthemost 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? Ifshearraigned 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 "Mustyou 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 aboutus."
"Us?"
"You and I. We've both of us been there. And Nina."
"Howdoyou 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."
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, "youdoknow." 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'tthat. Not for a moment. It could never have beenthat."
"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.
"Andshedid," 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.
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. "Ibelieve, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But Iknowit means that for you and me."
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 thinkswewant 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.
"ItwasJinny 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 giveyoua 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 takesme. 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. Withthosefeet?"
"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 dreamsanddreams."
"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 Ididwant 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'tbe 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."
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 tohim. 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'tbesaved."
"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 howyou'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."
"Isthatwhat 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 exceptinbanks 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."