"I don't want to do better."
"Of course, if it's only a question of terms——"
It was incredible, Brodrick's depreciating himself to a mere question of terms. She flushed at this dreadful thought.
"It isn't," she said. "Oh! I didn't meanthat."
"You never mean that. Which is why I must think of it for you. I can at least offer you higher terms."
"But," she persisted, "I should hate to take them. Iwantyou to have the thing. That's to say I wantyouto have it. You must not go paying me more for that."
"I see," he said, "you want to make up."
She looked at him. He was smiling complacently, in the fulness of his understanding of her.
"My dear Miss Holland," he went on, "there must be no making up. Nothing of that sort between you and me."
"There isn't," she said. "What is there to make up for? For your not getting me?"
He smiled again as if that idea amused him.
"Or," said she, "for my making you take Mr. Tanqueray?"
"You didn'tmakeme," he said. "I took him to please you."
"Well," she said; "and you'll take me now, to please me."
She rose.
"I must say good-bye to Miss Collett. How nice," she said, "Miss Collett is."
"Isn't she?" said he.
He saw her politely to the station.
That evening he drank his coffee politely in the drawing-room with Miss Collett.
"Do you know," he said, "Miss Holland thinks you're nice."
To his wonder Miss Collett did not look as if the information gave her any joy.
"Did she say so?"
"Yes. Do you thinkhernice?"
"Of course I do."
"What," said he, "do you really think of her?" He was in the habit of asking Miss Collett what she thought of people. It interested him to know what women thought, especially what they thought of other women.
It was in the spirit of their old discussions that she now replied.
"You can see she is a great genius. They say geniuses are bad to live with. But I do not think she would be."
He did not answer. He was considering very profoundly the question she had raised.
Which was precisely what Miss Collett meant that he should do.
As the silver-chiming clock struck ten she rose and said good-night. She never allowed these sittings to be prolonged past ten. Neither did Brodrick.
"And I am not to read any more proofs?" she said.
"Do you like reading them?"
She smiled. "It's not because I like it. I simply wanted to save you."
"You do save me most things."
"I try," she said sweetly, "to save you all."
He smiled now. "There are limits," he said, "even to your power of saving me. And to my capacity for being saved."
The words were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not his own.
His secretary understood him better than he did himself. She had spent three years in understanding him. And now, for the first time in three years, her lucidity was painful.
She could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen. Therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was there.
"He did not mean anything," said Gertrude to herself. "He is not the sort of man who means things." Which was true.
Brodrick, living on Putney Heath, was surrounded by his family. It was only fifteen minutes' walk from his front door to his brother John's house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon; only five minutes from his back door to Henry's house in Roehampton Lane. You went by a narrow foot-track down the slope to get to Henry. You crossed the Heath by Wimbledon Common to get to John. If John and Henry wanted to get to each other, they had to pass by Brodrick's house.
Moor Grange was a half-way house, the great meeting-place of all the Brodricks.
One fine warm Sunday in mid-May, about four o'clock, all the Brodricks except Hugh were assembled on Hugh's lawn. There was Mr. John Brodrick, the eldest brother, the head of the firm of Brodrick and Brodrick, Electrical Engineers. There was Dr. Henry Brodrick, who came next to John. He had brought Mrs. Heron, their sister (Mrs. Heron lived with Henry, because Mr. Heron had run away with the governess, to the unspeakable scandal of the Brodricks). There was Mrs. Louis Levine, who came next to Mrs. Heron. There was Mrs. John Brodrick, not to be separated from her husband, who, in a decorous dumbness and secrecy, adored her; and Mr. Louis Levine, who owed his position among the Brodricks to the very properly apparent devotion of his wife.
And there were children about. Eddy and Winny Heron, restless, irrepressible in their young teens, sprawled at their mother's feet and hung over her in attitudes of affection. One very small Levine trotted to and fro on fat legs over the lawn. The other, too small to run, could be seen in the background, standing in Gertrude Collett's lap and trampling on her.
The Levines had come over from St. John's Wood, packed tight in their commodious brand-new motor-car, the symbol of Levine's prosperity. So that all Brodrick's family were at Putney this afternoon.
They were sitting in the delicate shadow of the lime-tree. Outside, the lawn was drenched with light, light that ran quivering into the little inlets and pools among the shadows. The cropped grass shone clear as emerald, and all the garden showed clear-cut and solid and stable in its propriety and order.
Still more distinct, more stable and more solid, more ineradicably fixed in order and propriety, were the four figures of the Brodricks. Sitting there, in a light that refused, in spite of the lime-tree, to lend itself to any mystery or enchantment, they maintained themselves in a positively formidable reality. All these Brodricks had firm, thick-skinned faces in which lines came slowly, and were few but strong. Faces, they were, of men who have lived in absolute sobriety and sanity, untorn by any temptation to live otherwise; faces of women to whom motherhood has brought the ultimate content.
Comfortably material persons, sitting in a deep peace, not to be rapt from it by any fantasy, nor beguiled by any dream, they paid only in a high morality their debt to the intangible.
This afternoon, in spite of themselves, they were roused somewhat from the peace they sat in. They were expecting somebody.
"I suppose, when she arrives, we shall all have to sit at the lady's feet," said Mrs. Levine.
"I've no objection," said the Doctor; "after what she's done."
"It was pretty decent of her," said Levine. He was dark, nervous and solemn-eyed, a lean man of his race, and handsome. Sophy Brodrick had not loved her husband when she married him. She adored him now, because of the beauty that had passed from him into her children.
"I say, Uncle Louis, youmighttell me what shediddo," said Eddy Heron.
"She got your Uncle Hughy out of a tight place, my boy."
"I say, what'shebeen doing?"
Mr. Levine smiled inscrutably, while his wife shook her head at him.
"He's been going it, has he? Good old Uncle Hughy!"
Eddy's mother thought it would be nice if he and Winny went down the Heath road to meet Uncle Hughy and Miss Holland. Whereupon Eddy embraced his mother, being unable to agree with her.
"You really believe," said Mr. John Brodrick, who seemed anxious to be sure of his facts before he committed himself, "you really believe that if it had not been for this lady he'd have had to give it up?"
"Well," said Levine judicially, "she practically saved it. You see hewouldstart it with George Tanqueray. And who cares about George Tanqueray? That's what wrecked him. I told him at the time it was sheer lunacy, but he wouldn't listen to me.Why" (Levine spoke in a small excited voice with sudden high notes), "he hadn't subscriptions enough to float the thing for twenty-four hours. As soon as he gets Miss Holland they go up by leaps and bounds, and it's bin goin' steady ever since. How long it'll keep goin's another thing."
"I understood Hugh to say," said John, "that the arrangements involved some considerable sacrifice to the lady."
"Well, you see, he'd been a bit of an ass. He'd made her a ridiculous offer, an offerwesimply couldn't afford, and we had to tell her so."
"And then," said Sophy, "you might as well mention that she gave it him for what youcouldafford."
"She certainly let him have it very cheap." He ruminated. "Uncommonly cheap—considering what her figure is."
Eddy wanted to know what Miss Holland's figure had to do with his Uncle Hughy. Winny, round-eyed with wonder, inquired if it was beautiful, and was told that it was fairly beautiful, a tidy figure, a nice round figure, like her Aunt Sophy's.
"That," said John, "wasverydecent of her."
"Very," said the gentle lady, Mrs. John.
"It was splendid," said Mrs. Heron.
The Doctor meditated. "I wonderwhyshe did it," said the Doctor.
His brother-in-law explained. "Oh, she thought she'd let him in for Tanqueray."
"Let himin?"
"Don't you see," said Mrs. Heron, "it was her idea of honour."
"A woman's idea of honour," said the Doctor.
"You needn't criticize it," said his sister Sophy.
"I don't," said the Doctor.
"I can tell you," said Levine, "what with her idea of honour and Hugh's idea of honour, the office had a pretty rough time of it till they got the business fixed."
"With Hugh'sideas," said John, "he's hardly likely to make this thing pay, is he? Especially if he's going to bar politics."
He said it importantly. By a manner, by wearing spectacles, and brushing his hair back in two semi-circles from his forehead, Mr. John Brodrick contrived to appear considerably more important than he was.
"Ah, he's made a mistake there," said the Doctor.
"That's whatItell him." Levine was more excited than ever.
"I should think he might be allowed to do what he likes," said Sophy. "After all, it'shismagazine."
Mr. Levine's face remained supernaturally polite while it guarded his opinion that it wasn't his brother-in-law's magazine at all. They had disagreed about Tanqueray. They had disagreed about everything connected with the magazine, from the make-up of the first number to the salary of the sub-editor. They had almost quarreled about what Levine called "Miss Holland's price." And now, when his wife said that it was Sunday—and if they were going to talk business all the afternoon—she was told that Hugh's magazine wasn't business. It was Hugh's game. (His dreadfully expensive, possibly ruinous game.)
"Then," she said, "you might let him play it. I'm sure he works hard enough on your horrid old 'Telegraph.'"
Sophy invariably stood up for her family against her husband. But she would have stood up for her husband against all the world.
"Thank you, my pet." She stooped to the little three-year-old girl who trotted to and fro, offering to each of these mysteriously, deplorably preoccupied persons a flower without a stalk.
It was at this moment that Brodrick arrived from the station with Miss Holland.
"Is it a garden-party?" Jane inquired.
"No," said Brodrick, "it's my family."
She came on with him over the lawn. And the group rose to its feet; it broke up with little movements and murmurs, in a restrained, dignified expectancy. Jane had the sense of being led towards some unaccountable triumph and acclamation.
They closed round her, these unknown Brodricks, inaudibly stirred, with some unspoken, incomprehensible emotion in the men's gaze and in the women's touch. The big boy and girl shared it as they came forward in their shyness, with affectionate faces and clumsy, abortive encounters of the hand.
It was the whole Brodrick family moved to its depths, feeling as one. It could only be so moved by the spectacle of integrity and honour and incorruptible loyalty to It.
Still moved, it was surrounding Jane when a maid arrived with the tea-table, and the white cloth waved a signal to Miss Collett across the lawn. There was then a perceptible pause in the ovation as Brodrick's secretary appeared.
Even across the lawn Jane could discern trouble in Miss Collett's face. But Miss Collett's face was plastic in readjustments, and by the time she was fairly on the scene it had recaptured the habit of its smile. The smile, in greeting, covered and carried off the betraying reluctance of her hand. It implied that, if Miss Holland was to be set up in a high place and worshipped, Miss Collett was anxious to observe the appropriate ritual. Having observed it, she took, with her quiet, inconspicuous assurance, the place that was her own. She gave but one sign of her trouble when Dr. Brodrick was heard congratulating their guest on the great serial which, said he, by "saving" the magazine, had "saved" his brother. Then Gertrude quivered slightly, and the blood flushed in her set face and passed as fierce heat passes through iron.
While they were talking Jane had opportunity to watch and wonder at the firm, consolidated society that was Brodrick's family. These faces proclaimed by their resemblance the material link. Mr. John Brodrick was a more thick-set, an older, graver-lined, and grizzled Hugh, a Hugh who had lost his sombre fixity of gaze. Dr. Henry Brodrick was a tall, attenuated John, with a slightly, ever so slightly receding chin. Mrs. Heron was Hugh again made feminine and slender. She had Hugh's features, refined and diminished. She had Hugh's eyes, filled with some tragic sorrow of her own. Her hair was white, every thread of it, though she could not have been more than forty-five.
These likenesses were not so apparent at first sight in Mrs. Levine, the golden, full-blown flower of the Brodricks. They had mixed so thoroughly and subtly that they merged in her smoothness and her roundness. And still the facial substance showed in the firm opacity of her skin, the racial soul asserted itself in her poised complacence and decision.
"You don't know," she was saying, "how we're all sitting at your feet."
"We are indeed," said Mr. John Brodrick.
"Very much so," said the Doctor.
"Even little Cissy," said Hugh.
For little Cissy was bringing all her stalkless flowers to Jane; smiling at her as if she alone possessed the secret of this play. Brodrick watched, well-pleased, the silent traffic of their tendernesses.
The others were talking about Hambleby now. They had all read him. They had all enjoyed him. They all wanted more of him.
"If we could only have had Hambleby, Miss Holland," said Levine. "It wasn't my fault that we didn't get him."
Jane remembered that this was the brother-in-law whom Brodrick had wanted to keep out. He had the air of being persistently, permanently in.
"Of course it wasn't your fault," said she.
Levine then thought it necessary to say things about Jane's celebrity till Brodrick cut him short.
"Miss Holland," he said, "doesn't like her celebrity. You needn't talk about it."
John and Henry looked graver than ever, and Sophy made sweet eyes at Jane. Sophy's eyes—when they looked at you—were very sweet. It was through her eyes only that she apologized for her husband, whose own eyes were manifestly incapable of apologizing for anything. The Brodricks seemed to tolerate their brother-in-law; and he seemed, more sublimely, to tolerate their tolerance.
Great efforts were now made to divert Levine from the magazine. Mr. John Brodrick headed him off with motors and their makers; the Doctor kept his half-resentful spirit moving briskly round the Wimbledon golf-links; and Hugh, with considerable dexterity, landed him securely on the fiscal question, where he might be relied upon to stay.
But it was the Baby who saw what was to be done if his parent was to be delivered from his own offensiveness.
"Oh, look!" cried Winny. "Look at Baby. Making such a ducky angel of himself."
The Baby, having sat down abruptly on the grass, was making a ducky angel of himself by wriggling along it, obliquely, as he sat.
At the sight of him all the Brodricks instantaneously lost their seriousness and sanity. He was captured and established as the centre of the group. And, in the great act of adoration of the Baby, Levine was once more united to his wife's family.
His wife's family, like his wife, could forgive anything to Louis Levine because of the babies. It reserved its disapproval for Mrs. John Brodrick who had never had any; who had never done anything that was expected of her. Mrs. John looked as if she had cried a great deal because of the things she had not done. She had small hazel eyes with inflamed lids, and a small high nose that was always rather red. She was well born, and she carried her low-browed, bird-like head among the Brodricks with a solitary grace, and the motions of a dignified, distinguished bird.
And now, in mute penitence and wistful worship, she prostrated herself before their divinity, the Baby.
And in the middle of it all, with amazing smiles and chuckles, the Baby suddenly renounced his family and held out his arms to Jane. And suddenly all the Brodricks laughed. His mother laughed more than any of them. She took the Baby, and set him at Jane's feet; and he sat there, looking at Jane, as at some object of extraordinary interest and wonder and fascination. And Brodrick looked at both of them with something of the same naïf expression, and the Doctor, the attenuated, meditative Doctor, looked at all three, but especially at his brother. Gertrude Collett looked, now at Brodrick and now at Jane.
Brodrick did not see the Doctor or Gertrude either. It had just struck him that Jane was not in the least like her portrait,theportrait. He was thinking, as Tanqueray had once thought, that Gisborne, R. A., was an ass, and that if he could have her painted he would have her painted as she looked now.
As he was trying to catch the look, Gertrude came and said it was the Baby's tea-time, and carried him away. And the look went from Jane's face, and Brodrick felt annoyed with Gertrude because she had made it go.
Then Mrs. John came up and tried very hard to talk to Jane. She was nervously aware that conversation was expected of her as the wife of the head of the family, and that in this thing also she had failed him. She was further oppressed by Miss Holland's celebrity, and by the idea she had that Miss Holland must be always thinking of it and would not like to see it thus obscured by any other interest.
And while Mrs. John sat beside her, painfully and pensively endeavouring to converse, Jane heard Brodrick talking to Mrs. Levine.
"Where's Gertrude gone?" he said.
And Mrs. Levine answered, "She's indoors with the children."
Mrs. John was saying that Miss Holland must have known Hambleby; and then again that no, that wasn't likely. That was what made it so wonderful that she should know. Mrs. John could not have done it. She recounted sorrowfully the number of things she could not do. And through it all Jane heard the others talking about Gertrude.
"Gertrude looks very ill," said Mrs. Levine. "What's the matter with her?"
"How should I know?" said Brodrick. "Ask Henry."
"Miss Collett," said the Doctor solemnly, "has not consulted me."
At this point Mrs. Heron delivered Jane from Mrs. John. She said she wanted Miss Holland to see the sweet-peas in the kitchen garden.
And in the kitchen garden, among the sweet-peas, Mrs. Heron thanked Jane on her own account for what she had done, while Jane kept on saying that she had done nothing. All down the kitchen garden there was an alley of sweet-peas with a seat at the end of it, and there they sat while Mrs. Heron talked about her brother Hugh who had been so good to her and to her children. This praise of Brodrick mingled with the scent of the sweet-peas, so that Jane could never again smell sweet-peas in a hot garden without hearing Brodrick's praise.
Mrs. Heron stopped abruptly, as if she could say no more, as if, indeed, she had said too much, as if she were not used to saying such things.
"My brother thinks I may ask you to come and see me. Will you? Will you come some day and stay with me?"
In spite of the voice that told her that she was being drawn, that this family of Brodrick's was formidable, that she must be on her guard against all arms, stretched out to her, before she knew what she was doing Jane had said, Yes; she would be very glad.
Voices came to them then, and down the long alley between the sweet-peas she saw Brodrick coming towards them with Miss Collett and Winny Heron; and Jane was suddenly aware that it was getting late.
It was cold, too. She shivered. Miss Collett offered a wrap.
For a moment, in the hall of the house, Jane was alone with Brodrick's secretary. Through the open door they could see Brodrick standing on the lawn, talking to his sister. Mrs. Heron held him by one arm, Winny dragged on the other.
"Those two seem devoted to Mr. Brodrick," said Jane.
"They ought to be," said Miss Collett, "with all he does for them. And they are. The Brodricks are all like that." She looked hard at Jane. "If you've done anything for them, they never forget it. They keep on paying back."
Jane smiled.
"I imagine Mr. Hugh Brodrick would be quite absurd about it."
"Oh,he——" Gertrude raised her head. Her eyes adored him.
As if her pause were too profoundly revealing, she filled it up. "He'll always give more than he gets. It isn't foryouhe gives, it's for himself. He likes giving. And when it comes to paying him back——."
"That's where he has you?"
"Yes."
And Jane thought, "My dear lady, if you wouldn't treat him quite so like a god, he might have a chance to discover that he's mortal."
She would have liked to have said that to Miss Collett. She would have liked to have taken Brodrick to the seat at the end of the alley and have said to him, "It's all perfectly right. Don't be an idiot and miss it. You can't do a better thing for yourself than marry her, and it's the only way, you know, you can pay her back. Don't you see that you're cruel to her? That it's you that's making her ill? She can't look pretty when she's ill, but she'd be quite pretty if you made her happy."
But all she said was, "He's like that, is he?" And she went out to where he waited for her.
"Have yougotto go?" he said.
She said, Yes, she was half expecting Nina Lempriere.
"The fiery lady?"
"Yes."
"You may as well stay. She won't be there," said Brodrick.
But Jane did not stay.
The whole family turned out on to the Heath to see them go. At the end of the road they looked back and saw it there. Sophy Levine was holding up the Baby to make him wave to Jane.
"Why did you tell them?" she said reproachfully to Brodrick.
"Because I wanted them to like you."
"Am I so disagreeable that they couldn't—without that?"
"I wanted you," he said, "to likethem."
"I do like them."
He glanced at her sidelong and softly.
"Tell me," she said. "What have they done to look so happy, and so perfectly at peace?"
"That's it. They haven't done anything."
"Not to do things—that's the secret, is it?"
"Yes," he said, "I almost think it is."
"I wonder," said she.
Brodrick was right. Nina was not there.
At the moment when Jane arrived, anxious and expectant, in Kensington Square, Nina and Tanqueray were sitting by the window of the room in Adelphi Terrace.
They were both silent, both immobile in the same attitude, bowed forward, listening intently, the antagonistic pair made one in their enchantment, their absorption.
A young man stood before Tanqueray. He stood a little behind Nina where she sat in the window-seat. One shoulder leaned beside her against the shutter. He was very tall, and as he stood there his voice, deep and rhythmic, flowed and vibrated above them, giving utterance to the thing that held them.
Nina could not see him where she sat. It was Tanqueray who kept on looking at him with clear, contemplative eyes under brows no longer irritable.
He was, Tanqueray thought, rather extraordinary to look at. Dressed in a loosely-fitting suit of all seasons, he held himself very straight from the waist, as if in defiance of the slackness of his build. His eyes, his alien, star-gazing eyes, were blue and uncannily clear under their dark and delicate brows. He had the face of a Celt, with high cheek-bones, and a short high nose; the bone between the nostrils, slightly prominent like a buttress, saved the bridge of it from the final droop. He had the wide mouth of a Celt, long-lipped, but beautifully cut. His thick hair, his moustache, his close-clipped, pointed beard, were dark and dry. His face showed a sunburn whitening. It had passed through strange climates. He had the look, this poet, of a man who had left some stupendous experience behind him; who had left many things behind him, to stride, star-gazing, on. His face revealed him as he chanted his poems. Unbeautiful in detail, its effect as a whole was one of extraordinary beauty, as of some marvellously pure vessel for the spiritual fire. Beside him, it struck Tanqueray that Nina showed more than ever a murky flame.
The voice ceased, but the two remained silent for a moment.
Then Tanqueray spoke one word, "Splendid!"
Nina turned her head and looked up at the poet. His eyes were still following his vision. Her voice recalled him.
"Owen," she said, "will you bring the rest? Bring down all you've got."
Tanqueray saw as she spoke to him that there came again that betraying tenderness about her mouth; as she looked at him, her eyes lifted their hoods, revealing the sudden softness and surrender.
And as Tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man were turned on him, rather than on Nina. They looked through him, as if they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was going on in Tanqueray's soul.
He said something inaudible to Nina and went out of the room with a light, energetic stride.
"How can you stand his eyes?" said Tanqueray; "it's like being exposed to the everlasting stare of God."
"It is, rather."
"What's his name again?"
"Owen Prothero."
"What do you know about him."
She told him what she knew. Prothero was, as Tanqueray saw, an unlicked Celt. He had been, if Tanqueray would believe it, in the Indian Medical Service, and had flung it up before he got his pension. He had been to British Central Africa on a commission for investigating sleeping sickness; he spoke of it casually as if it were the sort of thing you naturally were on. He had volunteered as a surgeon in the Boer War. And with it all he was what Tanqueray saw.
"And his address?" Tanqueray inquired.
"He lives here."
"Why shouldn't he?" He answered her challenging eyes. They shot light at him.
"He is a great poet? Iwasright?"
"Absolutely. He's great enough for anybody. How on earth did you get hold of him?"
She was silent. She seemed to be listening for the sound of Prothero's feet on the stair.
He was soon with them, bringing his sheaf of manuscript. He had brought all he had got. The chanting began again and continued till the light failed.
And as Tanqueray listened the restless, irritable devilry passed from his face. Salient, thrust forward toward Prothero, it was the face of a winged creature in adoration, caught suddenly into heaven, breasting the flood of the supernal light. For Tanqueray could be cruel in his contempt for all clevernesses and littlenesses, for all achievements that had the literary taint; but he was on his knees in a moment before the incorruptible divinities. He had the immortal's scent for immortality.
When the chanting ceased they talked.
Tanqueray warned Prothero of the horrors of premature renown. Prothero declared that he had none. Nobody knew his name.
"Good," said Tanqueray. "Celebrity's all very well at the end, when you've done the things you want to do. It's a bad beginning. It doesn't matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to know you're celebrated till you're dead. But if youwilllive in London, your only chance is to remain obscure."
"There are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other. Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat——"
"Don't, George!" cried Nina.
"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere? Horrid used-up air that authors—beasts!—have breathed over and over and over again."
"As if," said Nina, "weweren't authors."
"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."
"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."
"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."
At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.
Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were. He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired. They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord.
It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that Tanqueray could get it for him.
He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them into letter-boxes. As to what became of them, Tanqueray had never seen anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event.
He went away with Prothero's poems in his pocket.
Nina followed him and held him on the doorstep.
"You do believe in him?" she said.
"What's the good ofmybelieving in him? I can't help him. I can't help myself. He's got to wait, Nina, like the rest of us. It won't hurt him."
"It will. He can't wait, George. He's desperately poor. You must do something."
"What can I do?"
"There are things," she said, "that people always do."
"I could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it."
"No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him to meet that man of yours."
"What man?"
"That magazine man, Brodrick."
He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine! Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane about Prothero?"
"No."
A faint flame leaped in her face and died.
"You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?"
"I haven't seen her for six months."
"Is that your fault or hers?"
"Neither."
"He's had to wait, then, six months?"
There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.
"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her."
Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.
"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.
"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."
Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He lingered.
"I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of me, and I can't blame him, poor devil."
"It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland."
"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."
He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her. She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.
Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of his own youth.
He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.
It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina Lempriere.
The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper.
There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen him.
He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.
He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.
It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.
She would have suggested his meeting Brodrick, but that the way to Brodrick lay through Jane Holland. She remembered that the gods had thrust Jane Holland between her and George Tanqueray; and she was determined that they should put no woman between her and Owen Prothero. She had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself. The supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. It dominated her desire to serve his interests. But she had not refused him when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see George Tanqueray, the only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any sweep, any clearness of vision.
It was Tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. She had no right to keep Owen to herself. He was too valuable.
His innocence had given a sting to her remorse. He had remained so completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. Things came, he seemed to say, or they didn't come. If you were wise you waited.
With his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs, standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina as she entered.
She called him to the supper she had made ready for him. He swung round, returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her.
He was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. It was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred.
Nina began it. "Owen," she said, "how did George Tanqueray strike you?"
He paused before he spoke. "I think," he said, "I never in my life saw anybody more on the look-out. It's terrible, that prowling genius, always ready to spring."
"I know," she said, "he sees everything."
"No, Nina, he doesn't. He's a man whose genius has made away with one half of his capacity for seeing. That's his curse! If your eyes are incessantly looking out they lose the power of looking in."
"And yet, he's the only really great psychologist we've got. He and Jane Holland."
"Yes, as they go, your psychologists. Tanqueray sees so much inside other people that he can't see inside himself. What's worse, I shouldn't think he'd see far inside the people who really touch him. It comes of perpetually looking away."
"You don't know him. How can you tell?"
"Because I never look away."
"Can you see what's going on insideme?"
"Sometimes. I don't always look."
"Can you help looking?"
"Of course you can."
"Youmaylook. I don't think I mind your looking. Why," she asked abruptly, "don't I mind?"
Her voice had an accent that betrayed her.
"Because there's nothing inside you that you're ashamed of."
She reddened with shame; shame of the fierce, base instinct that had made her keep him to herself. She knew that nothing escaped him. He had the keen, comprehending eyes of the physician who knows the sad secrets of the body; and he had other eyes that saw inward, that held and drew to confession the terrified, reluctant soul. She had an insane longing to throw herself at his feet in confession.
"Yes," she said, "but there arethings——And yet——"
He stopped her. "Nothing, Nina, if you really knew yourself."
"Owen—it's not that. It's not because I don't know myself. It's because I know you. I know that, whatever there might be in me, whatever I did, however low I sank—if I could sink—your charity would be there to hold me up. And it wouldn't be your charity, either. I couldn't stand your charity. It wouldn't even be understanding. You don't understand me. It would be some knowledge of me that I couldn't have myself, that nobody but you could have. As if whatever you saw you'd say, 'That isn't really Nina.'"
"I should say, 'That's really Nina, so it's all right.'"
She paused, brooding on the possibilities he saw, that he was bound to see, if he saw anything. Did he, she wondered, really see what was in her, her hidden shames and insanities, the course of the wild blood that he knew must flow from all the Lemprieres to her? She lived, to be sure, the life of an ascetic and took it out in dreams. Yet he must see how her savage, solitary passion clung to him, and would not let go. Did he see, and yet did he not condemn her?
"Owen," she said suddenly, "do you mind seeing?"
"Sometimes I hate it. These aren't the things, you know, I want to see."
She lowered her eyes. Her nervous hand moved slowly to and fro along the window-sill, measuring her next words.
"What—do you want—to see?"
He rose to his feet and looked at her. At her, not through her, and she wondered, had he seen enough? It was as if he withdrew himself before some thought that stirred in her, menacing to peace.
"I can't tell you," he said. "I can't talk about it."
Then she knew what he meant. He was thinking of his vision, his vision of God.
He could not speak of it to her. She had never known him. This soul, with which her own claimed kindred, was hidden from her by all the veils of heaven.
"I know," she said. "Only tell me one thing. Was that what you went out to India and Central Africa to see?"
That drew him.
"No. I went out not to see it. To get away from it. I meant to give things their chance. That's why I went in for medicine. I wasn't going to shirk. I wanted to be a man. Not a long-haired, weedy thing in a soft hat."
"Was it any good?"
"Yes. I proved the unreality of things. I proved it up to the hilt. And Ididn't shirk."
"But you wanted to escape, all the time?"
"I didn't escape. I couldn't. I couldn't catch cholera, or plague,orsleeping sickness. I couldn't catch anything."
"You tried?"
"Oh, yes, I gavemyselfa chance. That was only fair. But it was no use. I couldn't even get frightened."
"Owen—some people would say you were morbid."
"No, they wouldn't. They'd say I was mad. Theywillsay it when I've published those poems."
"Did you mind my showing them to George Tanqueray?"
"No. But it's no use. Nobody knows my name."
"May I show them to Jane Holland?"
"Show them to any one you like. It'll be no use either."
"Owen—does it never occur to you that any human being can be of use?"
"No." He considered the point. "No, I can't say it ever does."
He stood before her, wrapped in his dream, removed from her, utterly forgetful.
She had her moment of pain in contemplating him. He saw it in her face, and as it were came back to her.
"Don't imagine," he said, "that I don't know whatyou've done. Now that I do know you."
She turned, almost in anger. "I've done nothing. You don't know me." She added, "I am going to write to Jane Holland."
When he had left her she sat a long while by the window, brooding on the thing that had happened to her a second time.
She had fallen in love; fallen with the fatality of the Lemprieres, and with the fine precipitate sweep of her own genius. And she had let herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces. Owen's nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences of her sex. They were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and disembodied.
She knew that in his way, his remote and disembodied way, he cared for her. She knew that in whatever place he held her she was alone there. She was the only woman for whom as yet he had cared. His way was not Tanqueray's way. It was a way that kept her safe. She had sworn that there were to be no more George Tanquerays; and there were none. She had done with that.
Not but that she was afraid of Owen. She had taken possession of him in fear, a secret, unallowed possession, a holding with hands invisible, intangible. For she had wisdom, the sad wisdom of the frustrate; it, and the insight of her genius, told her that Owen would not endure a tie less spiritual than friendship. She knew George Tanqueray's opinion of her. He was justified.
But though she sacrificed so far to spirit, it was her flesh and blood that shrank from the possible communion of Owen Prothero and Jane Holland. For Jinny, as Tanqueray said, had a way with her; and she knew Jinny's way. Jinny would take Owen Prothero from her as she had taken George, not deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she was Jinny and had a way. Besides, Jane could do for him what she with her bare genius could not do, and that thought was insupportable to Nina. Yesterday she had been everything to him. Tomorrow Jane would be as much, or more.
And there were other women. They would be as ready as she to take possession. They would claim his friendship, and more than she had claimed, as the reward of having recognized him. There was no reason why she should give Owen up, and hand him over to them. And this was what she would do if she wrote that letter to Jane Holland.
She rose, and went to her desk and wrote it.
Jane answered at once. If Nina would bring Prothero to Kensington on Friday at four o'clock he would meet Hugh Brodrick.
But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about women's drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you harm. He wanted to hold on to what he'd got. It was tricky; it came and went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.
Nina assured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was, she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the manuscript, should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly, were all about God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. Owen Prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she said, to handicap him.
Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson. Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were very far from appreciating him. He knew a multitude of little men on papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it, might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote for the papers.
The reading was fixed for Friday at four o'clock. Tanqueray, who detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero's sake. His letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally. She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things were going badly at the moment.
Laura, however, was the first to arrive.
"Who is this man of Nina's?" said she.
"I don't know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."
She showed her Nina's letter.
Laura's face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.
"But why God?" was her profane comment.
"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."
Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George Tanqueray.
Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.
He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt, impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray, too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him. There was Brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small thing and an easy thing for her to do.
It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank, in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women. He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.
And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected in the sorrow of this thought.
Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.
As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.
And Jane, who knew what passed in Brodrick's mind, was downcast in her turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him, that she was always trying to get at him.
Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the manuscript. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at Tanqueray over Nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her; Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they could look at Jane.
It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero's poems of the Vision of God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane, absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; to Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.
They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul's mortal terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul, of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of God.
Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude of extreme depression. His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his desire, sublimely renouncing.
Brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his lowering brows, looked up at Jane's, gathering from them her judgment of Owen Prothero. Prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp flame of the spirit.
It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader's voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.
Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.
And Laura, who did not believe in God, Laura sat motionless, her small insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.
She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had sunk into. Everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating passage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic and curt.
Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "Heisgreat," said poor Nicky.
"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."
Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and Jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him.
Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she turned eastwards with Nina.
"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.
"It depends," said Nina. "He's seen George."
"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know him."
Nina's face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it said.
"He hasn't got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was overwrought. "He's got to be heard. You've heard him."
"It's because I've heard him that I want to see him."
Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen suffering, its despondency, its doubt.
Nina was stung by compassion.
"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.
"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't."
"All right. You shall. I'll make him come."
Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the autumn, at their own and not Prothero's expense.
How the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and Tanqueray was careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance of Jinny's way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray's hands, had been meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr. Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them. They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own sake, she would reconsider it.
Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.
"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you're paying for Prothero's poems?"
To that Jinny had replied, "It's what I wanted to do, and there wasn't any other way."
Owen Prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. His innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his innocence. Tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant; Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had not met him.
It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept Nina's unlicked Celt outside women's drawing-rooms.
She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than not, at Tanqueray's rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray's wife did not count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray's wife.
One afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.
But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across, obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before the door.
Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs. Tanqueray.
She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the doctor was.
"Don't go, Jinny," he said.
She searched his face.
"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"
He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from him.
"Oh, dear me, no," he said.
"May I see her—afterwards?"
"Of course you may see her. But"—he smiled—"if you'll come up-stairs you'll see Prothero."
She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high above Rose and her movements and her troubles.
He paused at the door.
"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of you."
"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"
"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."
"George, is he really there?"
"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away from you."
"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."
He laughed and they went in.
The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by the guile she judged dishonourable.
Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.
They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.
It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed through strange climates.
It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself secretly defining it. Tuberculosis—that was it; that was the certain and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion. When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made swift by hunger.
Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also suggested the thing she at last said.
"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."
Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had been.
"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint and——"
She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"
"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"
"It's natural," she pleaded.
"Natural? It's one of the most unnatural marriages I've ever come across. It's a crime against nature for a man like Tanqueray to have taken that poor little woman—who is nature pure and simple—and condemn her to——"
She drew back visibly. "I know. He doesn't see it," she said.
"He doesn't see anything. He doesn't even know she's there. How can he? His genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of it outside his own imagination. That's where you are with your great realists."
She gazed at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact.
"You mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?"
He shrugged his shoulders at her reference.
"He would have more room," he said, "that would be all. He could at any rate afford to take more risks."
They were silent again.
"I believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. I shall have to go."
Jane turned her head. The sounds he heard so distinctly were inaudible to her.
They proved to be footsteps on the staircase, footsteps that could never have been Rose's nor yet Tanqueray's. They paused heavily at the door. Some one was standing there, breathing.
A large woman entered very slowly, and Jane arrived, also slowly, at the conclusion that it must be Mrs. Eldred, George's wife's aunt.
Mrs. Eldred acknowledged her presence and Prothero's by a vague movement of respect. It was not till Prothero had gone that she admitted that she would be glad to take a chair. She explained that she was Rose's aunt, and that she had never been up them stairs before and found them tryin'.
Jane expressed sorrow for that fact and for Rose's illness.
Mrs. Eldred sighed an expository sigh.
"She's frettin' an' she's worritin'. She's worritin' about 'Im. It isn't natch'ral, that life 'E leads, and it's tellin' on 'er."
"Something's telling on her."
Mrs. Eldred leaned forward and lowered her voice. "It's this way, miss. 'E isn't properly a 'usban' to 'er."
"You shouldn't say that, Mrs. Eldred. He's very fond of her."
"Fond of 'er I dare say 'E may be. But 'E neglec's 'er."
"You shouldn't say that, either."
"Well, miss, I can't 'elp sayin' it. Wot elseisit, when 'E shuts 'imself up with 'is writin' all day long and 'alf the night, and she a-settin' and a-frettin'?"