I
Three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he
there for? And at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the
first time that evening, as if they said that he would see.
She had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table
between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him,
George Tanqueray, to meet.
Everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with
Jane Holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than
he. It was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by
Gisborne, R.A. He had given most of his attention to the portrait.
Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not
Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face,
broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a
straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her
genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her
features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened
queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the
bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight
enough when her will was dominant. He had got her hair, the darkness and
the mass of it. Tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that Gisborne
had put his best work into that, and when Gisborne resented it he had
told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted Jane
Holland's hair. (This was in the days when Gisborne was celebrated and
Tanqueray was not.)
If Jane had had the face that Gisborne gave her she would never have had
any charm for Tanqueray. For what Gisborne had tried to get was that
oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. Not a hint had he caught
of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy
possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden
gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine,
deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight.
When Tanqueray wanted to annoy Jane he told her that she looked like her
portrait by Gisborne, R.A.
They were all going to the play together. But at the last moment, she,
to Tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. She was too tired, she said,
to go.
The celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course,
if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would
sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They
bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration.
And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and
Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get
rid of them.
She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for.
Her tired eyes helped her.
Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.
"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"
"I am certainly not going with them----" He paused, hesitating.
"Then--you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she
hesitated too.
"But you're tired?" he said.
"Not now."
She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her
appeal.
That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose
to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though
he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the
moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted
to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but
one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.
That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the
first time in many weeks.
She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go
that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would
not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified
her.
Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six
weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him.
There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six
weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping
him.
"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.
"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."
"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"
"It won't work."
"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."
She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived
alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.
There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in
Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut
herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at
the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the
place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of
honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her
writing-table. His "Works"--five novels--were on a shelf by themselves
at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.
For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was
the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her
charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable
innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great
nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary
taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their
nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right
people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even
of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility
and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have
touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with
its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had
discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the
Master, told her was "_the_ unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred
and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on
his tremendous height.
But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.
"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"
"What hasn't?"
"Your pop--your celebrity."
"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they----"
"_They_ needn't. I must. Celebrity--you observe that I call it by no
harsher name--celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to
end that way."
"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I
hate it sometimes."
"You hate it, yet you're drawn."
"By what? By my vanity?"
"Not by your vanity, though there is that."
"By what, then?"
"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."
"Mayn't I be?"
"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."
For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was
silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.
"Because you've genius."
"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"