II

He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to

think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so

much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him

alone and insisted on his letting her alone.

This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an attitude as

an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption

in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of

sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked

with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the

eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that

plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.

His device was, "Look and let go." He had never allowed himself to hold

on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you

were stifled by the stuff you worked in. Your senses, he maintained,

were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it

with the first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many

degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use

to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was

even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine,

rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. It yearned

perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no

more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the

undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be

its own. The live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in

any other way. Genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. It

was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the

sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with

experience to do their work for them.

And yet there was no more assiduous devotee of experience than George

Tanqueray. He repudiated with furious contempt any charge of

inspiration. There was no such thing as inspiration. There was instinct,

and there was eyesight. The rest was all infernal torment and labour in

the sweat of your brow. All this Tanqueray believed sincerely.

It would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same

time so unsophisticated as he.

For five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined

to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it,

among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for

their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk

perceptibly from their advances. He condemned their manner as a shade

too patronizing to his proud obscurity. And now, at two-and-thirty, of

three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, Jane

Holland.

He had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode

incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country

back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people,

persistent, insufferable people.

For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead. The

charm of Hampstead was that nobody whom he knew lived there.

He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too

steep for traffic. He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a

green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at

the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low

hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the grass of his slope

turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to

purple. He looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded

himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in Hampstead whom he

knew. And that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last

he had found peace. He would stay there for ever, in those two rooms.

Here, on the morning after he had dined with Jane Holland, he sat down

to write. And he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it

created. In those days Tanqueray could never count upon his genius. The

thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never

let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. At times it

seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times

it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. He courted it, and

it avoided him. He let it go, and it came back to him, caressing and

tormenting him, compelling his embrace. There were days when it pursued

and captured him, and then it had wings that swept him divinely to its

end. There were days when he had to go out and find it, and lure the

winged thing back to him. Once caught, it was unswerving in its

operations.

But Tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius

failed him. And apparently it had failed him now. In forty-eight hours

he had accomplished nothing.

At the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what

he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. His genius

had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. But still he

had cared for it supremely. Now, the horrible thing was that he did not

care. His genius was of all things that which interested him least. He

was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating

because it was aimless and obscure.

That came of dining with Jane Holland.

He was not in love with Jane. On the contrary, he was very angry with

her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. And he

was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could

not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was

not in it.

But wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were

always running upon Jane. They ran on her now. He conceived of her more

than ever as the unfit. "She's too damnably clever," he kept saying to

himself, "too damnably clever." And he took up her last book just to see

again how damnably clever she was.

In an instant he was at her feet. She wasn't clever when she wrote that.

What a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. It

matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. Almost as

clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. Reading Jane Holland, Tanqueray

became depressed or exalted according to his mood. He was now depressed.

But he could not leave her. In spirit he remained at her feet. He bowed

himself in the dust. "I couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my

life. I shall never do anything like that."

He wrote and told her so. But he did not go to see her, as he would have

done six weeks ago.

And then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did

not feel them. "I don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. She's

like me." Too like him to be altogether fit.

So he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her,

while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day.

He went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond Hampstead.

He lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think

about Jane. For all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible

for him to think of anything else. And when he got back into his room

its solitude was intolerable. For ten days he had not spoken to any

woman but his landlady. Every morning, before he sat down to write, he

had to struggle with his terror of Mrs. Eldred. It was growing on him

like a nervous malady.

An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a

large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The

appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and

demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it

was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things

unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out

to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became

tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her

figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed,

rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For

though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it

quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed.

He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could

call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced

himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he

forgot himself so far as to implore her for God's sake not to talk to

him.

The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to

her, it would not be necessary for her to talk.

He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him

at a figure which surprised him by its moderation.

Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill,

frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the

obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk,

bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands.

He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other

end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because,

being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from

Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from

things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that

dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of

creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge.

It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or

three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the

sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of

self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of

inimitable remoteness.

He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably

feminine. He smiled, simply to reassure it.

"How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?"

"I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak."

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to

play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose

Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty,

yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from

some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have

achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only

grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose

as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her

face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large

for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a

thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a

feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All

but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft,

so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners,

and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards

it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as

delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness,

when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust

largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she

tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and

smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. Mouse-colored hair

it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that

curled away under the coil.

She wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a

knot of brown ribbon at her throat.

Thus attired, for three days Rose waited on him. For three days she

never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready.

In three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort.

There was about Rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to

everything she laid her hands on. (Her hands were light in their touch

and exquisitely gentle.) His writing-table was like a shrine that she

tended. Every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay

ready to his hand. Not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its

place. The charm was that he never caught her at it. In all her

ministrations Rose was secret and silent and unseen.

Only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and

Rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the

magic and rhythm of a song, "Puss--Puss--Puss," she called;

"Minny--Min--Min--Minny--Puss--Puss--Puss." That was the hymn with which

Rose saluted the night. It ought to have irritated him, but it didn't.

It was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her

admirable silence. She had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from

under the book he was reading.

"It isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir."

"I know it isn't. But what are you to do if you've nobody to talk to?"

A long silence. It seemed as if Rose was positively thinking.

"You should go out more, sir."

"I don't like going out."

Silence again. Rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its

drawer. Yet she lingered.

"Would you like to see the little dogs, sir?"

"Little dogs? I didn't know there were any."

"We keep them very quiet; but we've seven. We've a fox and a dandy"

(Rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an Aberdeen, and two

Aberdeen pups, and two Poms, a mole and a white. May they come up, sir?"

"By all means let them come up."

She ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her

heels. Tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (He was fond of animals.)

The fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. The old Aberdeen ran

away from him backwards, showing her teeth. Her two pups sat down in the

doorway and yapped at him.

Rose tried not to laugh, while the Poms ran round and round her skirts,

panting with their ridiculous exertions.

"That's Prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. He doesn't belong to us.

And this," said Rose, darting under the table and picking up the white

Pom, "this is Joey."

The white Pom leaped in her arms. He licked her face in a rapture of

affection.

"Is Joey a pedigree dog, too?" said Tanqueray.

"Yes," said Rose. She met his eyes without flinching.

"So young a dog----"

"No, sir, Joey's not so very young."

She was caressing the little thing tenderly, and Tanqueray saw that

there was something wrong with Joey.

Joey was deplorably lean and puny, and his hair, which should have stood

out till Joey appeared three times the size he was, his hair, what hair

he had, lay straight and limp along his little back. Rose passed her

hand over him the wrong way.

"You should always brush a Pom the wrong way, sir. It brings the hair

on."

"I'm afraid, Rose, you've worn his hair away with stroking it."

"Oh no, sir. That's the peculiarity of Joey's breed. Joey's my dog,

sir."

"So I see."

He saw it all. Joey was an indubitable mongrel, but he was Rose's dog,

and she loved him, therefore Joey's fault, his hairlessness, had become

the peculiarity, not to say the superiority, of Joey's breed.

She read his thoughts.

"We're taking great pains to bring it on before the tenth."

"The tenth?"

"The Dog Show, sir."

(Heavens above! She was going to show him!)

"And do you think you'll bring it on before the tenth?"

"Oh yes, sir. You've only got to brush a Pom's hair backwards and it

comes."

The little dogs clamoured to be gone. She stooped, stroking them,

smoothing their ears back and gazing into their eyes, lost in her own

tenderness, and unaware that she was watched. If Rose had been skilled

in the art of allurement she could not have done better than let him see

how she loved all things that had life.

"How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose, musing.

[Illustration: "How any one can be unkind to dumb animals," said Rose,

musing]

She moved slowly to the door, gathering up the puppies in her arms, and

calling to the rest to follow her. "Come along," she said, "and see what

Pussy's doing."

He heard her voice going down-stairs saying,

"Puss--Puss--Pussy--Min--Min--Min."

When she appeared to him the next day, Minny, the cat, was hanging by

his claws on to her shoulder.

"Are you fond of cats, sir?"

"I adore them." (He did.)

"Would you like to have Minny, sir? He'll be nice company for you."

"Ought I to deprive you of his society?"

"I don't mind, sir. I've got the little dogs." She looked at him softly.

"And you've got nothing."

"True, Rose. I've got nothing."

That evening, as he sat in his chair, with Rose's cat curled up on his

knee, he found himself thinking, preposterously thinking, about Rose.

He supposed she was Mrs. Eldred's daughter. He did not like to think of

her as Mrs. Eldred's daughter. She was charming now; but he had a vision

of her as she might be in twenty years' time, grown shapeless and

immense, and wheezing as Mrs. Eldred wheezed. Yet no; that was too

horrible. You could not think of Rose as--wheezing. People did not

always take after their mothers. Rose must have had a father. Of course,

Eldred was her father; and Eldred was a small man, lean and brown as a

beetle; and he had never heard him wheeze.

At dinner-time Rose solved his doubt.

"Aunt says, sir, do you mind my waitin' on you?"

"I do not mind it in the very least."

"It's beginning to be a trouble to Aunt now to get up-stairs."

"I wouldn't dream of troubling your aunt."

Her aunt? Mrs. Eldred was not her mother. Ah, but you could take after

your aunt.

He found that this question absorbed him more than was becoming. He

determined to settle it.

"Are you going to stay here, then?" he asked, with guile.

"Yes, sir. I've come back to live with Uncle."

"Have you always lived here?"

"Yes, sir. Father left me to Uncle when he died."

"Then, Rose, Mrs. Eldred is not your aunt?"

"Oh no, sir," said Rose eagerly.

Tanqueray felt a relief out of all proportion to its cause.

He continued the innocent conversation.

"And so you're going to look after me, are you?"

"Yes," said Rose. He noticed that when she dropped the "sir," it was

because her voice drew itself back with a little gasping breath.

"And your aunt, you think, really won't be equal to it?"

"Well, sir, you see, she gets all of a flutter like, and then she

w'eezes, and she knows that's irritating for you to hear." She paused.

"And Aunt was afraid that if you was irritated, sir, you'd go. Nothin'

could keep you."

(How thoroughly they understood him!)

"Well, I'm not irritated any more. But it is unfortunate, isn't it, that

she--er--wheezes?"

He had tried before now to make Rose laugh. He wanted to see how she did

it. It would be a test. And he perceived that, somewhere behind her

propriety, Rose cherished a secret, iniquitous enjoyment of her aunt.

An imp of merriment danced in Rose's eyes, but the rest of her face was

graver than ever. ("Good," he thought; "she doesn't giggle.")

"Oh, Mr. Tanqueray, talk of w'eezin', you should hear Aunt snore."

"I have heard her. In my dreams."

Rose, abashed at her own outburst, remained silent for several minutes.

Then she spoke again.

"Do you think, sir, you could do without me on the tenth?"

"No. I don't think I could possibly do without you."