Every year, about the middle of August, Brodrick's family dispersed for the summer holidays. Every year, about the middle of September, its return was celebrated at a garden-party given by the Levines.
Brodrick's brother-in-law lived with an extreme simplicity in one of those square white houses in St. John's Wood, houses secluded behind high, mysterious walls, where you entered, as by secret, through a narrow door.
The party had streamed through this door, over the flagged path and through the house, into the small, dark, green garden at the back, a garden that seemed to guard, like the house, its secret and its mystery. There, on this yearly festival, you were certain to find all the Brodricks, packed rather tight among a crowd of Levines and their collaterals from Fitzjohn's Avenue, a crowd of very dark, very large-eyed, very curly-haired persons, persons attired with sobriety, almost with austerity, by way of protest against the notorious excesses of their race.
And with them there was always, on this occasion, a troop of little boys and girls, dark, solemn-eyed little boys and girls, with incredibly curly hair, and strange, unchildlike noses.
Moving restlessly among them, or grouped apart, you came upon friends of the Brodricks and Levines, and here and there a few journalists, conspicuously tired young men who toiled nocturnally on the "Morning Telegraph."
This year it was understood that the party would be brilliant. The young men turned up in large numbers and endeavoured to look for the occasion a little less tired than they were. All the great writers on the "Monthly Review" had been invited and many of them came.
Caro Bickersteth was there; she came early, and Sophy Levine, in a discreet aside, implored her to give her a hand with the authors. Authors, Sophy intimated, were too much for her, and there would be a lot of them. There was Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning, and Jane Holland, of course——
"Of course," said Caro, twinkling.
"And Mr. Tanqueray."
At that name Caro raised her eyebrows and remarked that Sophy was a lucky lady to get Him, for He never went anywhere. Then Caro became abstracted, wondering why George Tanqueray was coming, and to this particular show.
"Will his wife be here?" she inquired.
"Dear me," said Sophy, "I never asked her. You don't somehow think of him as married."
"I doubt," said Caro; "if he thinks so of himself. There never was a man who looked it less."
Most singularly unattached he looked, as he stood there, beside Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning, drawn to them, but taking hardly more notice of them than of any Brodrick or Levine. He was watching Jinny as she moved about in the party. She had arrived somewhat conspicuously, attended by Brodrick, by Winny Heron and by Eddy, with the two elder little Levines clinging to her gown.
Jane was aware that Nina and Laura were observing her; she was aware of a shade of anxiety in their concentration. Then she knew that Tanqueray was there, too, that he was watching her, that his eyes never left her.
He did not seek her out after their first greeting. He preferred to stand aside and watch her. He had arrived later and he was staying late. Jane felt that it would become her not to stay. But Brodrick would not let her go. He took possession of her. He paraded her as his possession under Tanqueray's eyes; eyes that were fixed always upon Jane, vigilantly, anxiously, as if he saw her caught in the toils.
An hour passed. The party dwindled and dissolved around them. The strangers were gone. The hordes of Levines had scattered to their houses in Fitzjohn's Avenue. The little Levines had been gathered away by their nurses from the scene. Only Brodrick and his family remained, and Jane with them, and Tanqueray who kept on looking at the two while he talked vaguely to Levine.
Brodrick's family was not less interested or less observant. It had accepted without surprise what it now recognized as inevitable. It could no longer hope that Hugh would cease from his insane pursuit of Jane Holland, after making the thing thus public, flourishing his intentions in the face of his family. With a dexterity in man[oe]uvre, an audacity, an obstinacy that was all his own, Hugh had resisted every attempt to separate him from Miss Holland. He only let go his hold when Sophy Levine, approaching with an admirable air of innocence in guile, announced that Baby was being put to bed. She suggested that Jane might like to see him in his—well, in his perfection. It was impossible, Sophy maintained, for anybody not to desire above all things to see him.
Up-stairs in the nursery, Winny and Mrs. Heron were worshipping Baby as he lay on the nurse's lap, in his perfection, naked from his bath. Sophy could not wait till he was given up to her. She seized him, in the impatience of maternal passion. She bent over him, hiding her face with his soft body.
Presently her eyes, Sophy's beautiful, loving eyes, looked up at Jane over the child's shoulder, and their gaze had guile as well as love in it. Jane stood before it motionless, impassive, impenetrable.
Winny fell on her knees in a rapture.
"Oh, Miss Holland!" she cried. "Don't you love him?"
Jane admitted that she rather liked him.
"She's a wretch," said Sophy. "Baby duckums, she says she rather likes you."
Baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of Jane's moderation.
"Oh, don't you want," said Winny, "don't you want to kiss his little feet? Wouldn't you love to have him for your very own?"
"No, Winny, I shouldn't know what to do with him."
"Wouldn't you?" said Mrs. Heron.
"Feel," said Winny, "how soft he is. He's got teeny, teeny hairs, like down, golden down, just there, on his little back."
Jane stooped and stroked the golden down. And at the touch of the child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she drew back, as one who feels, for the first time, the touch of life, terrible and tender.
"Oh, Jane," said Sophy, "what are you made of?"
"I wonder——" said Mrs. Heron.
Jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and that Sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. She continued in her impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile.
"She looks," said Sophy, "as if she knew a great deal. And she doesn't know, Baby dear, she doesn't know anything at all."
"Wait," said Mrs. Heron, "till she's got babies of her own. Then she'll know."
"I know now," said Jane calmly.
"Not you," said Sophy almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing away to his bed beside her own. Winny and the nurse followed her. Jane was alone with Frances Heron.
"No woman," said Frances, "knows anything till she's had a child."
"Oh, you married women!"
"Even a married woman. She doesn't know what her love for her husband is until she's held his child at her breast. And she may be as stupid as you please; but she knows more than you."
"I know what she knows—I was born knowing. But if I were married, if I had children, I should know nothing, nothing any more."
Frances was silent.
"They—they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing—not even them."
"Don't you want them to press?"
"It doesn't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they wouldn't let me see."
"They'd make you feel," said Frances.
"Feel? I should think they would. I should feelthem, I should feel for them, I should feel nothing else besides."
"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."
"Do you think I don't?" said Jane.
"Well, there are some things—I don't see how you can—without experience."
"Experience? Experience is no good—the experience you mean—if you're an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you, twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know women—artists—who have never got over their experience, women who'll never do anything again because of it."
"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a light of sword-play in her eyes.
"I do say it—if they're thinking of their genius."
"Would you say it to Hugh?"
The thrust flashed sharp and straight.
"Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.
Sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. They held her at parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable. Their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved.
Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home, he said. He wanted to talk to her. They could walk through Regent's Park towards Baker Street.
They had left the Levines' some way behind them when he turned to her.
"Jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?"
"What are you doing in it yourself, George?"
"I? I came to see you. I was told you would be there. You know, youdolet yourself in for people."
"Do I?"
"You do. And these Brodricks aren't your sort. No good can come of your being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.
"They're kind to me," she pleaded.
"Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for that fellow and his magazine."
"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he'd rather his magazine smashed than I did."
"And you believed him?"
"I believed him."
"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."
His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil. "Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.
"Do I like him? Yes."
"Why do you like him?"
"I think, perhaps, because he's good."
"That's how he has you, is it?"
He paused.
"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."
"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."
"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."
He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the gravel measured the moments of his thought.
"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."
"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs. Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because you're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need, the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary, passing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do. Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."
He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.
"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."
"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."
"That's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself."
It was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her.
"Think—think, before you're drawn in."
"I am thinking," she said.
Tanqueray's voice insisted. "It's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly easy to get out."
"And if I don't want," she murmured, "to get out——?"
He looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw in her.
"It's your confounded Jinniness!"
At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it, as a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.
"It'll always tug you one way and your genius another. I'm only asking you which is likely to be stronger?"
"Do I know, George? Doyouknow?"
"I've told you," he said. "I think I do."
Three weeks later, one afternoon in October, Jane found herself going at a terrific pace through Kensington Gardens. Brodrick had sent word that he would see her at five o'clock, and it wanted but a few minutes of that hour.
When Tanqueray sounded his warning, he did not measure the effect of the illumination that it wrought. The passion he divined in her had had a chance to sleep as long as it was kept in the dark. Now it was wide awake, and superbly aware of itself and of its hour.
After she had parted from him Jane saw clearly how she had been drawn, and why. There was no doubt that the folly had come upon her; the folly that Tanqueray told her she would think divine. She not only thought it divine, she felt it to be divine with a certainty that Tanqueray himself could not take away from her.
Very swiftly the divine folly had come upon her. She could not say precisely at what moment, unless it were three weeks ago, when she had stood dumb before the wise women, smitten by a mortal pang, invaded by an inexplicable helplessness and tenderness. It was then that she had been caught in the toils of life, the snares of the folly.
For all its swiftness, she must have had a premonition of it. That was why she had tried so desperately to build the house of life for Brodrick and Miss Collett. She had laboured at the fantastic, monstrous fabrication, as if in that way only she could save herself.
She had been afraid of it. She had fought it desperately. In the teeth of it she had sat down to write, to perfect a phrase, to finish a paragraph abandoned the night before; and she had found herself meditating on Brodrick's moral beauty.
She knew it for the divine folly by the way it dealt with her. It made her the victim of preposterous illusions. The entire district round about Putney became for her a land of magic and of splendour. She could not see the word Putney posted on a hoarding without a stirring of the spirit and a beating of the heart. When she closed her eyes she saw in a vision the green grass plots and sinuous gravel walks of Brodrick's garden, she heard as in a vision the silver chiming of the clock, an unearthly clock, measuring immortal hours.
The great wonder of this folly was that it took the place of the creative impulse. Not only did it possess her to the exclusion of all other interests, but the rapture of it was marvellously akin to the creative ecstasy.
It drove her now at a furious pace through the Gardens and along the High Street. It caused her to exult in the face of the great golden October sunset piled high in the west. It made her see Brodrick everywhere. The Gardens were a green paradise with the spirit of Brodrick moving in them like a god. The High Street was a golden road with Brodrick at the end of it. The whole world built itself into a golden shrine for Brodrick. He was coming to see her at five o'clock.
He was not there, in her room, when she arrived. But he had been there so often that he pervaded and dominated the place, as Tanqueray had once dominated and pervaded it. He had created such a habit, such a superstition of himself that his bodily presence was no longer necessary to its support. There was a chair by the fireplace, next the window. She could not see it now without seeing Brodrick, without seeing a look he had, when, as he sat there silent, his eyes had held her, covered her, caressed her. There were times when he had the gestures and the manner of a man sitting by his own fireside, taking her and all that she signified for granted, establishing between them a communion in which the poignant, ultimate things were not said because they were so profoundly felt.
She caught herself smiling now at the things she was going to say to him.
Her bell rang with the dreadful, startling noise that made her heart leap in her breast.
He came in slowly like a man preoccupied with grave business of his own. And at the sight of him Jane's heart, which had leaped so madly, dragged in her breast and drew the tide of her blood after it.
He took her hand, but not with any eagerness. His face was more than ever sombre, as if with some inward darkness and concern. He turned from her and became interested in finding a suitable place for his hat. (Jane noticed that it was a new one.) Then he sat down and remained seated.
He let her get up and cross the room and ring the bell for herself, so fixed was he in his dream. Only, as her gown brushed him in her passing back, he was aware of it and shrank. She heard him draw in a hard breath, and when she looked at him again she saw the sweat standing on his forehead.
"You've hurried," she said.
"I haven't," said Brodrick. "I never hurry."
"Of course not. You never do anything undignified."
That was not one of the things that she had meant to say.
"Never," said Brodrick, "if I can help it." And he wiped his forehead.
Jane caught herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick, she felt, ridiculously, for Brodrick's hat.
It was, of course, ridiculous, that she, Jane Holland, should feel a passion for a man's hat, a passion that brought her heart into her mouth, so that she could not say any of the things that she had thought of.
Brodrick's hat on an arm-chair beside him was shining in the firelight. On his uncomfortable seat Brodrick lowered and darkened, an incarnate gloom.
"How happy your hat looks," said Jane, smiling at it again.
"I'm glad it amuses you," said Brodrick.
Jane made tea.
He rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. He sat down again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there as an offering to the hat. Then, with an immense, sustained politeness, he began to talk.
Now that Hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition was almost satisfied.
It was so much so, Jane said, that she was tired of hearing about Hambleby. Whereupon Brodrick inquired with positively formidable politeness, how the new serial was getting on.
"Very well," said Jane. "How's the 'Monthly Review'?"
Brodrick intimated that the state of the "Monthly Review" was prosperity itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from Mr. Prothero?
Jane said that she had had a long letter from Mr. Prothero the other day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for Mr. Prothero at home. Brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not think of any appointment more suitable for Mr. Prothero than the one he had already got for him.
Then there was a silence, and when Jane with competitive urbanity inquired after Brodrick's sisters, Brodrick's manner gave her to understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and personal. And while she was wondering what she could say next Brodrick took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never hurried.
Jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place where his hat had been. And her heart drew its doors together and shut them against Brodrick.
She had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front door; and then, under her windows, his feet on the pavement of the Square. She went to the window, and stared at the weeping ash-trees in the garden and thought of how Brodrick had said that it was no wonder that they wept. And at the memory of his voice she felt a little pricking, wounding pain under her eyelids, the birth-pang of unwilling tears.
There were feet, hurrying feet on the pavement again, and again the bell cried out with its nervous electric scream. Her staircase door was opened quickly and shut again, but Jane heard nothing until Brodrick stood still in the room and spoke her name.
She turned, and he came forward, and she met him, holding her head high to keep back her tears. She came slowly, with shy feet and with fear in her eyes, and the desire of her heart on her lips, lifting them like wings.
He took her two hands, surrendered to his, and raised and kissed them. For a moment they stood so, held together, without any movement or any speech.
"Jinny," he said thickly, and she looked down and saw her own tears, dreadful drops, rolling off Brodrick's hands.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to do that."
Her hands struggled in his, and for pity he let them go.
"You can't be more surprised at me than I am myself," said she.
"But I'm not surprised," said Brodrick. "I never am."
And still she doubted.
"What did you come back for?"
"This, of course."
He had drawn her to the long seat by the fireplace.
"Why did you go away," she said, "and make me cry?"
"Because, for the first time in my life, I was uncertain."
"Of yourself?" Doubt, dying hard, stabbed her.
"I am never uncertain of myself," said Brodrick.
"Of what, then?"
"Of you."
"But you never told me."
"I've been trying to tell you the whole time."
Yet even in his arms her doubt stirred.
"What are you going to do now?" she whispered.
"You'regoing to marry me," he said.
He had been certain of it the whole time.
"I thought," she said an hour later, "that you were going to marry Gertrude."
"Oh, so that was it, was it? You were afraid——"
"I wasn't afraid. I knew it was the best thing you could do."
"The best thing I could do? To marry Gertrude?"
"My dear—it would be far, far better than marrying me."
"But I don't want," said he, "to marry Gertrude."
"Of course,shedoesn't want to marry you."
"I never supposed for a moment that she did."
"All the same, I thought it was going to happen."
"If it was going to happen," he said, "it would have happened long ago."
She insisted. "It would have been nicer for you, dear, if it had."
"And when I'd met you afterwards—you thinkthatwould have been nicer—for all three of us?"
His voice was low, shaken, surcharged and crushed with passion. But he could see things plainly. It was with the certainty, the terrible lucidity of passion that he saw himself. The vision was disastrous to all ideas of integrity, of propriety and honour; it destroyed the long tradition of the Brodricks. But he saw true.
Jane's eyes were searching his while her mouth smiled at him.
"And is it really," she said, "as bad as that?"
"It always is as bad as that, when you're determined to get the thing you want. Luckily for me I've only really wanted one thing."
"One thing?"
"You—or a woman like you. Only there never was a woman like you."
"I see.That'swhy you care for me?"
"Does it matter why?"
"Not a bit. I only wondered."
He looked at her almost as if he also wondered. Then they were silent. Jane was content to let her wonder die, but Brodrick's mind was still groping in obscurity. At last he seemed to have got hold of something, and he spoke.
"Of course, there's your genius, Jinny. If I don't say much about it, you mustn't think I don't care."
"Do you? There are moments whenIhate it."
Her face was set to the mood of hatred.
"Hugh dear, you're a brave man to marry it."
"I wouldn't marry it, if I didn't think I could look after it."
"You needn't bother. It can look after itself."
She paused, looking down where her finger traced and traced again the pattern of the sofa-cover.
"Did you think I cared for it so frightfully?" she said.
"I know you did."
"I care for it still." She turned to him with her set face. "But I could kill it if it came between you and me."
Jane had been married for three months, married with a completeness that even Tanqueray had not foreseen. She herself had been unaware of her capacity for surrender. She rejoiced in it like a saint who beholds in himself the mystic, supreme transmutation of desire. One by one there fell from her the things that had stood between her and the object of her adoration.
For the forms of imagination had withdrawn themselves; once visible, audible, tangible, they became evasive, fugitive presences, discernible on some verge between creation and oblivion. This withdrawal had once been her agony, the dissolution of her world; she had struggled against it, striving with a vain and ruinous tension to hold the perishing vision, to preserve it from destruction. Now she contemplated its disappearance with a curious indifference. She had no desire to recover it.
She remembered how she had once regarded the immolation of her genius as the thing of all things most dangerous, most difficult, a form of terrible self-destruction, the sundering of passionate life from life. That sacrifice, she had said, would be the test of her love for Hugh Brodrick. And now, this thing so difficult, so dangerous, so impossible, had accomplished itself without effort and without pain. Her genius had ceased from violence and importunity; it had let go its hold; it no longer moved her.
Nothing moved her but Brodrick; nothing mattered but Brodrick; nothing had the full prestige of reality apart from him. Her heart went out to the things that he had touched or worn; things that were wonderful, adorable, and at the same time absurd. His overcoat hanging in the hall called on her for a caress. Henry, arriving suddenly one afternoon, found her rubbing her cheek against its sleeve. His gloves, which had taken on the shape of Brodrick's hands, were things to be stroked tenderly in passing.
And this house that contained him, white-walled, green-shuttered, red-roofed, it wore the high colours of reality; the Heath was drenched in the poignant, tender light of it.
That house on the Heath continued in its incomprehensible beauty. It was not to be approached without excitement, a beating of the heart. She marvelled at the power that, out of things actual and trivial, things ordinary and suburban, had made for her these radiances and immortalities. She could not detect the work of her imagination in the production of this state. It was her senses that were so exquisitely acute. She suffered an exaltation of all the powers of life. Her state was bliss. She loved these hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock. She had discovered that it struck the quarters. She said to herself how odd it was that she could bear to live with a clock that struck the quarters.
She was trying hard to be as punctual and perfect as Gertrude Collett. She had gone to Gertrude to learn the secret of these ordered hours. She had found out from Gertrude what Brodrick liked best for dinner. She had listened humbly while Gertrude read to her and expounded the legend of the sacred Books. She had stood like a child, breathless with attention, when Gertrude unlocked the inner door of the writing-table and showed her the little squat god in his shrine.
She played with this house of Brodrick's like a child, making believe that she adored the little squat god and respected all the paraphernalia of his service. She knew that Gertrude doubted her seriousness and sincerity in relation to the god.
And all the time she was overcome by the pathos of Gertrude who had been so serious and so sincere, who was leaving these things for ever. But though she was sorry for Gertrude, her heart exulted and cried out in her, "Do you think He cares for the little squat god? He cares for nothing in the world but me!"
All would have been well if Brodrick had not committed the grave error of asking to look at the Books, just to see that she had got them all right. Like Gertrude he doubted.
She brought them to him; presenting first the Book marked "Household." He turned from the beginning of this Book to the end. The pages of Gertrude's housekeeping looked like what they were, a perfect and simple system of accounts. Jinny's pages looked like a wild, straggling lyric, flung off in a rapture and meticulously revised.
Brodrick smiled at it—at first.
"At any rate," said she, "it shows how hard I've tried."
For all answer he laid before her Gertrude's flawless work.
"Is it any use trying to bring it up to Gertrude's standard?" she said. "Wouldn't it be better just to accept the fact that she was wonderful?"
(He ignored the suggestion.)
"I suppose you never realized till now how wonderful that woman was?"
Brodrick said gravely he would have to go into it to see.
Brodrick, going in deeper, became very grave. It seemed that each week Jane's expenditure overlapped her allowance with appalling regularity. It was the only regularity she had.
"Have you any idea, Jinny, how it goes?"
She shook her head sadly.
"If it's gone, it's gone. Why should weseekto know?"
"Just go into it with me," he said.
She went into it and emerged with an idea.
"It looks," said Jinny, "as if I ate more than Gertrude. Do I?"
Still abstracted, he suggested the advisability of saving.
"Can it be done?" said Jinny.
"It can," said Brodrick, "because Gertrude did it."
"Must I do it?"
"Not if it bothers you. I was only saying it can be done."
"And you'd like it?"
"Well—I should like to know where I am."
"But—darling—It'ssomuch better not to."
He sighed. So did Jinny.
"I can see," she said, "what I've done. I've crumpledallthe rose-leaves, and you'll never be able to lie on them any more."
Then she had another idea.
"Hugh! It's just occurred to me. Talk of saving! I've been saving all the time like fury. I save you Gertrude's salary."
At this Brodrick became angry, as Jane might have seen, only she was too entirely taken up with her discovery to look at him.
"Here I have been working for months, trying how not to be extravagant, and thinking how incompetent I am and how much more advantageous it would have been for you to have married Gertrude. And I come lots cheaper. I really do. Wasn't it funny of us never to have thought of it before?"
He was very angry, but he had to smile. Then by way of correction he reminded her that the servants were getting rather slack. Didn't she think it was about time to haul them up?
She didn't. She didn't like the poor things to feel that they were driven. She liked to see happy faces all around her.
"But they're so unpunctual—those faces," Brodrick said. And while theywereon the subject there was the clock. The clock that Gertrude always used to wind, that Brodrick sometimes forgot to wind, but that Jinny never by any chance wound at all.
"I'm happier," said Jane, "when it's not wound."
"But why——" His face was one vast amazement.
"Because," she said, "it chimes. And it strikes the quarters."
He had thought that was the great merit of his incomparable clock.
She seemed incorrigible. Then, miraculously, for two months all went well, really well.
It was not for nothing that Hambleby sold and was selling. The weekly deficit continued, appalling, palpable even to Jane; but she made it up secretly. Secretly, she seemed to save.
But Brodrick found that out and stopped it. Jane was not allowed, and she knew it, to use her own income for the house or for anything else but herself and her people. It wasn't for that he had married her. Besides, he objected to her method. It was too expensive.
Jane was disposed to argue the matter.
"Don't you see, dear, that it's the price of peace? Peace is the most expensive thing on this earth—any stupid politician will tell you that. If you won't pay for peace, what will you pay for?"
"My dear child, there used to be more peace and considerable less pay when Miss Collett did things."
"Yes. But she was wonderful."
(Her lips lifted at the corners. There was a flash of irony in her tone, this time.)
"Not half so wonderful as you," he said.
"But—Hugh—angel—as long as it'smewho pays——"
"That's what I won't have—your paying."
"It's formypeace," she said.
"It certainly isn't for mine," said Brodrick.
She considered him pensively. She knew that he didn't care a rap about the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness—in other people.
"Poor darling—how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves crumpled under him. Irritating him."
She came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled.
"I told you at the time you ought to have married Gertrude. What on earth possessed you to go and marry me?"
He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.
The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in triumph.
"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it shows that Icansave when I give my mind to it."
He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.
As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing, desperately, because of her divine folly.
In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be greater than Hambleby.
She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar, unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.
She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She spoke of it to Brodrick.
They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.
"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"
He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."
"Yes, all day long."
"It's not as if I bothered you—I say,theydon't bother you, do they?"
She understood him as referring to the frequent, the very frequent incursions of his family.
"You mustn't let them. You must harden your heart."
"It isn't they. It isn't anybody."
"What is it then?"
"Only that everything's different. I'm different."
He regarded her for a long time. Shewasdifferent. It was part of her queerness, this capacity she had for being different. He could see nothing now but her wild fawn look, the softness and the flush of life. It was his miracle on her.
He remained silent, brooding over it. In the stillness she could hear his deep breathing; she could just discern his face, heavy but tender.
"It doesn't mean that you're not well, Jinny?" He remembered that once or twice since he had known her it had meant that.
She smiled. "Oh no, not that."
"It doesn't make you unhappy?"
"No, not if—if it wasn't for that you cared."
"You know it wasn't."
She knew. She had always known it.
They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for Brodrick and all things that were his.
At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden towards the house.
Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.
This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.
In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who watched him.
The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets following hot days; stillness of grass-plots flooded by flat light; stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light, divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fashion and the colour of it, and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. She was writing, this solitary woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. Jane found herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger, admiring as she would have admired a stranger. The solitary woman knew nothing of Hugh Brodrick or of his house at Putney, and cared less; she had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. That seemed to Jane most curious.
Then suddenly she was aware that she, Jane Brodrick, and this woman, Jane Holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. For a moment her memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became strange to her and empty of all significance. As for her own presence in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious wonder at its reality. What she felt was a shock of surprise, of spiritual dislocation. She was positively asking herself, "What am I doing here?"
The wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain.
But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked about the genius of Jane Holland.
For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed to own.
She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal strength.
It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches," showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that the Master praised her.
And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible will.
It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.
She could trace the stages of its dissolution.
Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection; further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place; there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.
After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.
And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever made. It was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that this time she would achieve popularity. It was just the sort of terrible, ironic thing that happened. If it did happen she would not be able to look George Tanqueray in the face.
The date of the Event was fixed now, the fifteenth of July. It was like death. She had never thought of it as a personal experience so long as its hour remained far-off in time. But the terror of it was on her, now that the thing was imminent, that she could count the hours.
The day came, the Birthday, as Brodrick called it, of the Great Book. He had told Tanqueray long ago that it was the biggest thing she had done yet. He bore himself, this husband of Jane's, with an air of triumphant paternity, as if (Tanqueray reflected) he had had a hand in it. He had even sent Tanqueray an early copy. Tanqueray owned that the fellow was justified. He thought he could see very plainly Brodrick's hand, his power over the infatuated Jinny.
By way of celebrating the fifteenth he had asked Tanqueray to dinner.
The Levines were there and the John Brodricks, Dr. Henry Brodrick and Mrs. Heron. But for the presence of the novelist, the birthday dinner was indistinguishable, from any family festival of Brodricks. Solemn it was and ceremonial, yet intimate, relieved by the minute absurdities, the tender follies of people who were, as Tanqueray owned, incomparably untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness in the man.
And only the supreme levity of innocence could have devised and accomplished this amazing celebration. It took, Tanqueray said to himself, a mind like Brodrick's to be unaware of Jinny's tragedy, to be unaware of Jinny.
He himself was insupportably aware of her, as she sat, doomed and agonizing, in her chair at the head of Brodrick's table.
They had stuck him, of course, at her left, in the place of honour. Unprofitable as he was, they acknowledged him as a great man. He was there on the ground and on the sanction of his greatness. Nobody else, their manner had suggested, was great enough to be set beside Jinny in her splendid hour. His stature was prized because it gave the measure of hers. He was there also to officiate. He was the high priest of the unspeakable ritual. He would be expected presently to say something, to perform the supreme and final act of consecration.
And for the life of him he could not think of anything to say. The things he thought could not be said while he sat there, at Brodrick's table. Afterwards, perhaps, when he and she were alone, if she insisted.
But she would not insist. Far from it. She would not expect him to say anything. What touched him was her utter absence of any expectation, the candour with which she received his silence as her doom.
The ceremony was growing more and more awful. Champagne had been brought. They were going—he might have foreseen it—they were going to drink to the long life of the Book.
John Brodrick rose first, then Henry, then Levine. They raised their glasses. Jane's terrified eyes met theirs.
"To the Book!" they said. "To the Book!" Tanqueray found himself gazing in agony at his glass where the bubbles danced and glittered, calling him to the toast. For the life of him he could not rise.
Brodrick was drinking now, his eyes fixed upon his wife. And Tanqueray, for the life of him, could not help looking at Jane, to see how she would take it.
She took it well. She faced the torture smiling, with a courage that was proof, if he had wanted proof, of her loyalty to Brodrick. Her smile trembled as it met Brodrick's eyes across the table, and the tenderness of it went to Tanqueray's heart. She held out her glass; and as she raised it she turned and looked full in Tanqueray's face, and smiled again, steadily.
"To the Book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You can drink now, George."
He met her look.
"Here's to you. You immortal Jinny."
Lucid and comprehending, over the tilted glass his eyes approved her, adored her. She flushed under the unveiled, deliberate gaze.
"Didn't I get you out of that nicely?" she said, an hour later, outside in the darkening garden, as she paced the terrace with him alone. The others, at Brodrick's suggestion, had left them to their communion. Brodrick's idea evidently was that the novelist would break silence only under cover of the night.
"Yes," he said. "It was like your sweetness."
"You can't say," she continued, "that I'm not appreciated in my family."
Through the dark, as her face flashed towards him, he saw the little devil that sat laughing in her eyes.
"You needn't be afraid to talk about it," she said. "And you needn't lie to me. I know it's a tragedy."
He had never lied to her. It was not in him to fashion for her any tender lie.
"It's worse than a tragedy. It's a sin, Jinny. And that's what I would have saved you from. Other people can sin and not suffer. You can't. There's your tragedy."
She raised her head.
"There shall be no more tragedies."
He went on as if he had not heard her. "It wouldn't have mattered if it had been bad all through. But neither you nor I, Jinny, have ever written, probably we never shall write, anything to compare with the beginning of that book. My God! To think that there were only six months—six months—between that beginning and that end."
She smiled, saying to herself, "Only six months. Yes. But what months!"
"You've killed a masterpiece," he said, "between you."
"Do you mean Hugh?" she said. "What had he to do with it?"
"He married you."
"My crime was committed before he married me."
"Exactly." She was aware of the queer, nervous, upward jerk of his moustache, precluding the impermissible—"When you were in love with him."
Her face darkened as she turned to him.
"Let's talk about Nina's book. George—there isn't anybody like her. And I knew, I knew she'd do it."
"Did you know that she did it before she saw Prothero."
"I know."
"And that she's never written a line since?"
"When she does it will be immense. Because of him."
"Possibly. She hasn't married him."
"After all, George, if it comes to that, you're married too."
"Yes. But I married a woman who can't do me any harm."
"Could anybody."
She stood still there, on the terrace, fronting him with the scorn of her question.
He did not answer her at first. His face changed and was silent as his thought. As they paced up and down again he spoke.
"I don't mind, Jinny; if you're happy; if you're really content."
"You see that I am."
Her voice throbbed. He caught the pure, the virginal tremor, and knew it for the vibration of her soul. It stirred in him a subtle, unaccountable pang.
She paused, brooding.
"I shall be," she said, "even if I never do anything again."
"Nothing," he assured her, "can take from you the things you have done. Look at Hambleby. He's enough. After all, Jinny, you might have died young and just left us that. We ought to be glad that, as it is, we've got so much of you."
"So much——"
Almost he could have said she sighed.
"Nothing can touch Hambleby or the genius that made him."
"George—do you think it'll ever come back to me?"
She stood still again. He was aware now, through her voice, of something tense, something perturbed and tormented in her soul. He rejoiced, for it was he who had stirred her; it was he who had made her feel.
"Of course," he said, "it'll come back. If you choose—if you let it. But you'll have to pay your price."
She was silent. They talked of other things. Presently the John Brodricks, the Levines and Mrs. Heron came out into the garden and said good-night, and Tanqueray followed them and went.
She found Hugh closeted with Henry in the library where invariably the doctor lingered. Brodrick made a sign to his brother-in-law as she entered.
"Well," he said, "you've had your talk."
"Oh yes, we've had it."
She lay back in her seat as if exhausted by hard physical exercise, supporting the limp length of her arms on the sides of the chair.
The doctor, after a somewhat prolonged observation of her posture, remarked that she should make a point of going to bed at ten.
Brodrick pleaded the Birthday of the Book. And at the memory of the intolerable scene, and of Tanqueray's presence in it, her agony broke out.
"Don't talk about it. I don't want ever to hear of it again."
"What's he been saying to you?" said Brodrick.
"He'd no need to say anything. Do you suppose I don't know? Can't you see how awful it is for me?"
Brodrick raised the eyebrows of innocence amazed.
"It's as if I'd brought something deformed and horrible into the world——"
The doctor leaned forward, more than ever attentive.
"And youwouldgo and drag it out, all of you, when I was sitting there in shame and misery. And before George Tanqueray—How could you?"
"My dear Jinny——"
Brodrick was leaning forward too now, looking at her with affectionate concern.
Her brother-in-law rose and held out his hand. He detained hers for an appreciable moment, thoughtfully, professionally.
"I think," he said, "really, you'd better go to bed."
Outside in the hall she could hear him talking to Hugh.
"It's physical, it's physical," he said. "It won't do to upset her. You must take great care."
The doctor's voice grew mysterious, then inaudible, and she heard Hugh saying he supposed that it was so; and Henry murmured and mumbled himself away. Outside their voices still retreated with their footsteps, down the garden path, and out at the terrace gate. Hugh was seeing Henry home.
When he came back he found Jane in the library, sitting up for him. She was excited and a little flushed.
"So you've hadyourtalk, have you?" she said.
"Yes."
He came to her and put his hands on her forehead.
"Look here. You ought to have gone to bed."
She took his hand and drew him to her.
"Henry doesn't think I'm any good," she said.
"Henry's very fond of you."
She shook her head.
"To Henry I'm nothing but a highly interesting neurotic. He watches me as if he were on the look-out for some abnormal manifestation, with that delightful air he has of never being surprised at anything, as if he could calculate the very moment."
"My dear——"
"I'm used to it. My people took me that way, too. Only they hadn't a scientific turn of mind, like Henry. They didn't think it interesting; and they haven't Henry's angelic patience and forbearance. I was the only one of the family, don't you know, who wasn't quite sane; and yet—so unlike Henry—they considered me rather more responsible than any of them. I couldn't get off anything on the grounds of my insanity."
All the time, while thus tormenting him, she seemed profoundly occupied with the hand she held, caressing it with swift, nervous, tender touches.
"After all," she said, "I haven't turned out so badly; even from Henry's point of view, have I?"
He laughed. "What is Henry's point of view?"
She looked up at him quickly. "You know, and I know that Henry didn't want you to marry me."
The uncaptured hand closed over hers, holding it tighter than she herself could hold.
"No," she said. "I'm not the sort of woman Henrywouldwant you to marry. To please Henry——"
"I didn't marry to please Henry."
"To please Henry you should have married placable flesh and blood, very large and handsome, without a nerve in her body. The sort of woman who has any amount of large and handsome flesh-and-blood children, and lives to have them, thrives on them. That's Henry's idea of the right woman."
He admitted that it had once been his. He had seen his wife that was to be, placable, as Jinny said, sane flesh and blood, the mother of perfect children.
"And so, of course," said Jinny, "you go and marry me."
"Of course," said Brodrick. He said it in the voice she loved.
"Why didn't you marry her?Shewouldn't have bothered your life out." She paused. "On the other hand, she wouldn't have cared for you as I do. That sort of woman only cares for her children."
"Won't you care for them, Jinny?"
"Not as I care for you," said Jinny.
And to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and cried.
Tanqueray's book was out. Times and seasons mattered little in a case so hopeless. There was no rivalry between George Tanqueray and his contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce him in the same month as Jane Holland. They handled any work of his with the apathy of despair.
He himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. The perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would not be recognized. He did not suppose for a moment that it would be.Histide would never turn.
His first intimation that it was turning came from Jane, in a pencil note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review. "Poor George," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. But it's coming—it's come. You needn't think you're going to be so very posthumous, after all." He marvelled that Jinny should attach so much importance to the printed word.
But Jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the tides. It looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected it, as if (as dear Jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being posthumous. Not only was he aware that this book of his was a masterpiece, but other people were aware. There was one man, even Tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would be placed. And lesser men followed, praising him; some with the constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered unwillingly under judicial pressure. And there were others, lesser still, men who had hated Tanqueray. They postured now in attitudes of prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of English letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. They would, if they could, have passed him by.
It was Caro Bickersteth who said of Tanqueray that he played upon the imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts.
And so it went on. One took off a conventional hat to Mr. Tanqueray's sincerity; and one complained of "Mr. Tanqueray's own somewhat undraped attitude toward the naked truth," observing that truth was not nearly so naked as "Mr. Tanqueray would have us think." Another praised "his large undecorated splendour." They split him up into all his attributes and antitheses. They found wonder in his union of tenderness and brutality. They spoke of "the steady beat of his style," and his touch, "the delicate, velvet stroke of the hammer, driven by the purring dynamo." Articles appeared ("The Novels of George Tanqueray;" "George Tanqueray: an Appreciation;" "George Tanqueray: an Apology and a Protest"); with the result that his publishers reported a slight, a very slight improvement in his sales.
Besides this alien tribute there was Caro Bickersteth's large column in the "Morning Telegraph," and Nicky's inspired eulogy in the "Monthly Review." For, somehow, by the eternal irony that pursued him, Nicky's reviews of other people could get in all right, while his own poems never did and never would. And there was the letter that had preceded Jinny's note, the letter that she wrote to him, as she said, "out of the abyss." It brought him to her feet, where he declared he would be glad to remain, whether Jinny's feet were in or out of the abyss.
Rose revived a little under this praise of Tanqueray. Not that she said very much about it to him. She was too hurt by the way he thrust all his reviews into the waste-paper basket, without showing them to her. But she went and picked them out of the waste-paper basket when he wasn't looking, and pasted all the good ones into a book, and burnt all the bad ones in the kitchen fire. And she brought the reviews, and made her boast of him to Aunt and Uncle, and told them of the nice sum of money that his book had "fetched," this time. This was all he had been waiting for, she said, before he took a little house at Hampstead.
For he had taken it at last, that little house. It was one of a terrace of three that stood high above the suburb, close to the elm-tree walk overlooking the West Heath. A diminutive brown-brick house, with jasmine climbing all over it, and a little square of glass laid like a mat in front of it, and a little garden of grass and flower-borders behind. Inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did Rose want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? But there was a beautiful study for Tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a kitchen for Rose below.
Rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that Tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to Laura Gunning's room in Camden Town, while Rose's dining-room recalled vividly Mrs. Henderson's dining-room at Fleet.
Though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about getting the furniture all in. The awful thing was moving Tanqueray and his books. It was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his birthday. And in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, Tanqueray announced that he had asked some people to dine that night.
"Wot, a dinner-party?" said Rose (she was trying not to cry).
"No, not a party. Only six."
"Six," said Rose, "isa dinner-party."
"Twenty-six might be."
Rose sat down and looked at him and said, "Oh dear, oh dear." But she had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of anticipation.
Then Tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and said it was his birthday. He always did ask people to dine on his birthday. There would only be the Brodricks and Nicky and Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning—No, Laura Gunning couldn't come. That, with themselves, made six.
"Well——" said Rose placidly.
"I can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. But I thought it would be so nice to have them in our own house. When it's my birthday."
She smiled. She was taking it all in. In her eyes, for once, he was like a child, with his birthday and his party. How could she refuse him anything on his birthday? And all through the removal he had been so good.
Already she was measuring spaces with her eye.
"It'll 'old six," she said—"squeezin'."
She sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the dinner.
"There must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint, an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow."
"Oh Lord, no. Give 'em bread and cheese. They're none of 'em greedy."
"I'll give you something better than that," said Rose; "on your birthday—the idea!"
Dinner was to be at eight o'clock. The lateness of the hour enabled Mr. and Mrs. Eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the dishing-up. They had softened towards Tanqueray since he had taken that little house. That he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.
The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his birthday like a child, and laughing—she had never heard him laugh like that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out, laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner, she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came she felt that she could talk a little.
For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear, patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?
"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me, and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my legs?"
Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room. But you should see 'is study."