"I'm not so sure," said she.
"Anyhow, you were safe with me."
"From what?"
"From being 'had.' But now you've begun knowing all sorts of people----"
"Is that why you've kept away from me?"
He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable,
pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the
persecutors, the pursuers. Did _I_ ever pursue you?"
"No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any
one."
"_They_ will. And they'll have you at every turn."
"No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them."
"They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'"
"Do I?" She said it defiantly.
"No. You never lend--you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let
everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you."
"Oh--you----"
"And yet," he said, "I wonder----"
He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes.
"Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your
books?"
"Where you get yours," she said.
Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these
dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people."
She smiled, recognizing them.
"Look at _me_," he said.
"Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation.
"Yes, me. I was born out of it."
"And I--wasn't I born? Look at _me_?" She turned to him, holding her
head high.
"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening--and I
see a difference already."
"What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in
me."
It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the
secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever
and the brilliance fever brought.
She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly
alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair,
close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his
face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent,
sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full,
pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip
accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his
features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind,
suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his
difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost
something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet
somehow more obscure.
Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven.
He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the
hills, questing the visionary maid.
It was not she. His trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. She
saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was
not she. She saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason,
that it was not she. That showed that he was approaching headlong the
point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him
back. He was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that
insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. Any
woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand.
And between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey,
dumb, and holding them dumb. She searched for words to dispel it, but no
words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. That was
not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart.
He tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking
about the room and examining the things in it. There were some that it
had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in
material prosperity. Yes. He had liked her better when she had worked
harder and was as poor as he. They had come to look on poverty as their
protection from the ruinous world. He now realized that it had also been
their protection from each other. He was too poor to marry.
He reflected with some bitterness that Jane was not, now.
She in her corner called him from his wanderings. She had made the
coffee. He drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old
place on the sofa by her side.
She brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. She had man[oe]uvred to
keep him. And now she wished that she had let him go.
"Aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said.
"No. I shan't sleep if I do."
"Haven't you been sleeping?"
"Not very well."
"That's why you're looking like your portrait. That man isn't such a
silly ass as I thought he was."
"I wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and
everything."
"Everything?"
"You know what I mean. The horrid thing that's happened to me. My--my
celebrity." She brought it out with a little shiver of revolt.
He laughed. "But when you remind me of it every minute? When it's
everlastingly, if I may say so, on the carpet?"
Her eyes followed his. It was evident that she had bought a new one.
"It doesn't mean what you think it does. It isn't, it really isn't as
bad as that----"
"I was afraid."
"You needn't be. I'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger
mouthfuls."
"Why apologize?"
"I can't help it. You make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu."
"_I_ make you feel----?"
"Yes. You--you. You don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded.
"You know what I think you."
"I don't. I only know what you used to think me."
"I think the same."
"Tell me--tell me."
"I think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years,
you'll write a superb book, Jinny. But it all depends on what you do
with yourself in the next five years."
He paused.
"At the present moment there's hardly any one--of our generation, mind
you--who counts except you and I."
He paused again.
"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our
families have cast us off."
"Mine hasn't yet."
"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.
He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the
rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in
such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray
said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his
first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake.
He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him
from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the
"consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.
Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and
inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm
and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.
"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet
that's our temptation, yours and mine."
Again he paused.
"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws
them by one divine sense. Ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the
very soul, into the thick of it. _The_ unpardonable sin is separating
literature from life. You know that as well as I do."
She did. She worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls
of men. There was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the
serene, inspired audacity of Jane Holland. Her genius seemed to have
kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation.
Tanqueray continued in his theme. Talking like this allayed his
excitement.
"We're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. They're the stuff
we work in. It's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. We're
being tempted all the time. People--people--people--we can't have enough
of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. The thing is--to keep 'em off us. And
Jane, I _know_--they're getting at you."
She did not deny it. They were.
"And you haven't the--the nerve to stand up against it."
"I have stood up against it."
"You have. So have I. When we were both poor."
"You want me to be poor?"
"I don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just
pleasantly short of cash. There's nothing like that for keeping you out
of it."
"You want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? Deprived of everything that
makes life amusing?"
"Thoroughly uncomfortable. Deprived of everything that stands in the way
of your genius."
She felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing
that had been tacked on to her. He cared for it and could be tender to
it, but not to her.
"You're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain.
"My cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the
cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be
prepared to be burnt."
"It's all very well for you, George. I don't like being burnt."
That roused him; it stirred the devil in him.
"Do you suppose _I_ like it? Why, you--you don't know what burning _is_.
It means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink
themselves drunk."
"You don't want to be drunk, George. Any more than I do."
"I do not, thank God. But it would be all the same if I did. I can't get
a single thing I do want."
"Can't you? I should have thought you could have got most things you
really wanted."
"I could if I were a grocer or a draper. Why, a hair-dresser has more
mastery of the means of life."
He was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the
matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration
there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit.
He began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from
his mood. Now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them,
only that dark, unhappy fire.
He was quiet now. He had caught sight of some sheets of manuscript lying
on her desk.
"What's this?" he said.
"Only the last thing I've written."
"May I look?"
"You may."
He took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the
leaves over with a nervous hand. He was not reading. There was no
thought in his eyes.
He looked at her again. She saw that he was at the mercy of his moment,
and of hers.
For it was her moment. There was a power that every woman had, if she
cared to use it and knew how. There was a charm that had nothing to do
with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. These things had
their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other
power. His senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her.
She knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. She had
only to kindle her flame, send out her signal.
And she said to herself, "I can't. I can't take him like this. He isn't
himself. It would be hateful of me."
In that moment she had no fear. Love held her back and burning honour
that hardly knew itself from shame. It accused her of having
man[oe]uvred for that moment. It said, "You can't let him come in like
this and trap him."
Another voice in her whispered, "You fool. If you don't marry him some
other woman will--in this mood of his." And honour cried, answering it,
"Let her. So long as it isn't I."
She had a torturing sense of his presence. And with it her fear came
back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from
him.
He flung the manuscript into the place she had left, and bowed forward,
hiding his face in his hands. He rose too, and she knew that his moment
had gone. She had let it go.
Then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to
her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart.
"Do you know what I should like to do?" she said. "I should like to
sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for nobody
to come near me but you, nobody to read me but you, nobody to talk about
me but you. Do you remember?"
He did, but he was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his
mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held
immorality.
"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"
"I've told you why."
"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you----"
He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the
physician who knew her malady.
"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be
worst of all."
And so he left her.