XI

On the morning after Wendover Jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with

dreams. Last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept.

It passed into her dreams, and joy woke her.

She sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught,

agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe.

She went to it and stood there, looking at herself. For the last three

months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. Sometimes she

had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. Every day the

woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more

dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't

stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's

inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she

put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that

had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her

Genius.

And now she did not look like _that_ in the very least. She looked, to

her amazement, like any other woman.

Nobody had ever said that Jane was handsome. She hadn't one straight

feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. She wasn't pretty,

either. There was something about her too large and dominating for that.

She had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its

effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some

ugliness subdued. It was part of her queerness that she had the square

brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck

that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity

some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer

still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might

draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for

the blood it took it had given her back fire.

Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the

glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had

seen. She had felt herself cruelly despoiled, disinherited of the

splendours and powers of her sex. And here she was, looking, as she

modestly put it, like any other woman. Any one of the unknown multitude

whom lately, in prophetic agony, she had seen surrounding Tanqueray;

women dowered, not with the disastrous gift of genius, but with the

secret charm and wonder of mere womanhood. One of these (she had always

reckoned with the possibility), one of these conceivably might at any

moment, and inevitably would when her moment came, secure and conquer

Tanqueray. She had been afraid, even in vision, to measure her power

with theirs.

But now, standing there in the long nightgown that made her so straight

and tall, with arms raised, holding up the thick mass of her hair, her

body bent a little backwards from the waist, showing it for the slender

and supple thing it was, seeing herself so incredibly feminine and so

alive, she defied any one to tell the difference. If any difference

there were it was not in her body, neither was it in her face. That was

the face which had looked at Tanqueray last night; the face which he had

called up to meet that strange excitement and that tenderness of his.

Her body was the body of a woman created in a day and a night by joy for

its own wooing.

This glorious person was a marvel to itself. It was so incomprehensibly,

so superlatively happy. Its eyes, its mouth, its hands and feet were

happy. It was happy inside and out and all over. It had developed a

perfectly preposterous capacity for enjoyment. It found pleasure in

bathing itself, in dressing itself, in brushing its hair. And its very

hair, when it had done with it, looked happy.

It was at its happiest at ten o'clock, when Jane sat down to write a

letter to Tanqueray. The letter had to be written. For yesterday Nina

Lempriere had asked her to supper in her rooms on Sunday, and she was to

bring George Tanqueray. If, said Nina, she could get him.

Sunday was the seventeenth. This was Wednesday, the thirteenth. She

would hear from Tanqueray to-night or to-morrow at the latest. And there

would be only four days to get through till Sunday.

To-night and to-morrow went, and Tanqueray did not write. Jane's heart

began to ache with an intolerable anxiety.

It was on Saturday night that the letter came.

"Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper.

I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday.

"Yrs., G. T.

"P.S.--Nicky saw me through."

Not a word about his wife.

At first the omission did not strike her as significant. It was so like

Tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the

secret soul of it himself. He must have wondered how she would take it.

She took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling

her that Tanqueray was dead. She took it, as she would have taken the

stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. She faced, as

it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy

of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence

constrained her to all the observances of decency.

She crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed

that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made

her suffer. Then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined

it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the

place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible.

Verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. She was

aware of the existence of the woman. There had been a woman all the

time. But she couldn't realize her. She only knew that she meant

finality, separation.

An hour passed. She went to bed. Her footsteps and her movements in

undressing were hushed and slow. She was still like some one who knows

that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the

next room. Stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide

herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there

being only a wall between the living and the dead.

The best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie

awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till

they hammered her to stupefaction. Unfortunately, towards morning she

fell into a sound sleep.

She woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a

brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things

which last night she had overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined

her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she

portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an

unbearable illumination) Jane saw transparently what _she_ had been to

Tanqueray. She had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. But

she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. So

much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening,

he, George Tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the

other. He had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had

made her suffer.

But never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any

power or splendour of her own.

She wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. It had been

just two days before he married her. Perhaps it had been only his

shyness, or, more likely, his perversity.

But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so

fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each

other and that he hoped they would be friends.

It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was

the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if

there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent

honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.

He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for

one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that

Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer

exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been,

though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness.

She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her

wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must

make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the

smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the

wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not

theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of

excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife.

As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as

Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that

forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart

than Tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into

his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her

husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or

to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to

call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it

would end there.

It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this

friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that

resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.

Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She

was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had

dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had

been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let

him go for a scruple finer than a hair.

And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It

might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it

as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was

so pre-eminently _her_ failure) came of feeling and of understanding at

every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your

head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your

body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain,

passion and insight in her running disastrously together.

It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest

and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like

other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her

scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of

response.

Her heart, of course, he must have heard. It had positively screamed at

him. But her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. She

remembered how she had said to him that night, "Mayn't I be a woman?"

and he had answered her brutally. What _had_ concerned him was her

genius. If there had been twenty women in her he would have made her

sacrifice them all to that. He had cared for it to the point of

tenderness, of passion. She had scores of his letters in a drawer,

there; love-letters written to her genius. She knew one of them, the

last, by heart. It was written at Hampstead.

"Jinny," it had said, "I'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet.

I'm in the dust, Jinny, kissing your feet. Shivers of exquisite

adoration are going up and down my spine. Do you know what you've done

to me, you unspeakably divine person? I've worn out the knees, the knees

of my trousers; I've got dust in my hair, Jinny, kissing your feet."

That letter (there was a great deal more of it) had tided her over

Tanqueray's worst absence; it had carried her on, so to speak, to

Wendover. As she thought of it her heart was filled with hatred and

jealousy of her genius.

It was odd, but she had no jealousy and no hatred for Tanqueray's wife.

She hated and was jealous of her genius, not only because it had forced

Tanqueray to care for it, but because, being the thing that had made her

different from other women, it had kept Tanqueray from caring about her.

And she had got to live alone with it.

Her solitude had become unbearable. The room was unbearable; it was so

pervaded, so dominated by her genius and by Tanqueray. Most of all by

Tanqueray. There were things in it which he had given to her, things

which she had given to him, as it were; a cup he drank out of, a tray he

used for his cigar-ash; things which would remain vivid for ever with

the illusion of his presence. She could not bear to see them about. She

suffered in all ways, secretly, as if Tanqueray were dead.

A bell rang. It was four o'clock. Somebody was calling.

As to one preoccupied with a bereavement, it seemed to her incredible

that anybody _could_ call so soon. She was then reminded that she had a

large acquaintance who would be interested in seeing how she took it.

She had got to meet all these people as if nothing had happened. She

remembered now that she had promised Caroline Bickersteth to go to tea

with her to-day. If she wanted to present an appearance of nothing

having happened, she couldn't do better than go to Caro's for tea. Caro

expected her and would draw conclusions from her absence.

So might her caller if she declared herself not at home.

It was Nicky, come, he said, to know if she were going to Miss

Bickersteth's, and if he might have the pleasure of taking her there.

That was all he cared to go for, the pleasure of taking her.

Jane had never thought of Nicky being there. He was a barrister and he

had chambers, charming chambers, in the Temple, where he gave little

tea-parties and (less frequently) looked up little cases. But on Sundays

he was always a little poet down at Wendover.

They needn't start at once, he said, almost as if he knew that Jane was

dreading it. He sat and talked; he talked straight on end; talked, not

literature, but humble, innocent banalities, so unlike Nicky who cared

for nothing that had not the literary taint.

It was a sign of supreme embarrassment, the only one he gave. He did not

mention Tanqueray, and for a moment she wondered if he had heard. Then

she remembered. Of course, it was Nicky who had seen Tanqueray through.

Nicky was crowning his unlikelihood by refraining from the slightest

allusion to the event. He was, she saw with dreadful lucidity, afraid of

hurting her. And yet, he was (in his exquisite delicacy) behaving as if

nothing had happened. They were going together to Miss Bickersteth's as

if nothing had happened. His manner suggested that they were moving

together in a world where nothing could happen; a world of delightful

and amicable superficialities. She was not to be afraid of him; he was,

as it were, looking another way; he wasn't even aware of any depths. The

sheer beauty and gentleness of him showed her that he had seen and

understood thoroughly what depths there were.

It was her certainty of Nicky's vision that drove her to the supreme act

of courage.

"Why aren't we talking," she said, "about George Tanqueray?"

Nicky blushed in a violent distress. Even so, in the house of mourning,

he would have blushed at some sudden, unsoftened reference to the

deceased.

"I didn't know," he said, "whether he had told you."

"Why shouldn't he?"

Poor Nicky, she had made him blunder, so upset was he by the spectacle

of her desperate pluck. He really _was_ like a person calling after a

bereavement. He had called on account of it, and yet it was the last

thing he was going to talk about. He had come, not to condole, but to

see if there was any way in which he could be of use.

"Well," said Nicky, "he seemed to have kept it so carefully from all his

friends----"

"He told _you_----Why, you were there, weren't you?"