Nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the Strand, overlooking
the river. You approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you
wonder.
In a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat
over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between
them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial
presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final,
consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to
talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them.
They left him behind them in the other room, a room where there was no
evidence of Tanqueray's ever having been. The place was incontestably
and inalterably Nina's. There were things in it cared for by Nina with a
superstitious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it
were, in shrines. And in their company were things that Nina had worn
out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury
of rejection; things on which Nina had inflicted personal violence,
provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate association with her;
signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. It was as
if Nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left
them there. You inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the
open air. There were antlers about and the skins of animals. A
hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. Foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs
staggered together in a corner. Nina herself, long-limbed, tawny,
aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within
walls.
Beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to London,
to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the
river.
It was Nina who began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her
legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its
ease, she talked.
"Jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?"
Jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly
inarticulate.
Nina pondered. "I believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." She
paused on that a moment. "It needn't have happened," she said. "It
wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared."
Jane looked at her then. "I did show him," she said. "That's how it
happened."
"It couldn't. Not that way."
"It did. I waked him up. I made him restless, I made him want things.
But there was nothing--nothing----"
"You forget. I've seen him with you. What's more, I've seen him without
you."
"Ah, but it wasn't _that_. Not for a moment. It could never have been
_that_."
"You could have made it that. You could have made it anything you liked.
Jinny! If I'd been as sure of him as you were, I'd never have let him
go. I'd have held on----"
Her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would
have held on.
"You see," said Jinny, "I was never sure of him."
A silence fell between them.
"You were in it," said Nina, troubling the silence. "It must--it must
have been something you did to him."
"Or something I didn't do."
"Yes. Something you didn't do. You didn't know how."
Jane could have jumped at this sudden echo of her thought.
"And _she_ did," said Nina.
She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece, looking down on Jane.
"Poor Jinny," she said. "How I hated you three years ago."
Jane remembered. It was just three years since Nina had gone away
without saying a word and hidden herself among the mountains where she
was born. In her isolation she had conceived and brought forth her
"Tales of the Marches." And a year ago she had come back to them, the
Nina whom they knew.
"You can't hate me now," Jane said.
"I believe I would if you had been sure of him. But I don't hate you. I
don't even hate her."
"Why should you?"
"Why should I? When I don't believe she's sure of him, either. She's
called out the little temporary animal or the devil in him. That's what
she's married. It won't last."
"No, Nina. Nicky said she was good."
"It's wonderful how good women manage these things."
"Not when they're absolutely simple."
"How do you know she's simple?"
"Oh--because I'm not."
"Simplicity," said Nina, "would only give her more rope."
"Nina--there's one thing Nicky didn't tell us. He never let on that she
was pretty. I suppose he thought that was more than we could bear."
"How do you know she's pretty?"
"That's how I see her. Very pretty, very soft and tender. Shy at first,
and then very gently, very innocently letting herself go. And always
rather sensuous and clinging."
"Poor idiot--she's done for if she clings. I'm not sorry for George,
Jinny; I'm sorry for the woman. He'll lay her flat on the floor and wipe
his boots on her."
Jane shrank back. "Nina," she said, "you loved him. And yet--you can
tear him to pieces."
"You think I'm a beast, do you?"
"Yes. When you tear him--and before people, too."
She shrank a little further. Nina was now sitting on the floor with her
back against Jane's knees.
"It's all very well for you," she said. "He wanted to care for you. He
only wanted me--to care. That's what he is. He makes you care, he makes
you show it, he drives you on and on. He gives nothing; he takes
nothing. But he lets you strip yourself bare; he lets you bring him the
soul out of your body, and then he turns round and treats you as if you
were his cast-off mistress."
She laid her head back on Jane's knee, so that Jane saw her face
foreshortened and, as it were, distorted.
"If I had been--if I'd been like any other woman, good or bad, he'd have
been different."
Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.
[Illustration: Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought]
It was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark
and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not
incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed.
It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture,
violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its
utterance. But she was sorry for it. She hated to see it suffer.
It raised its head.
"Doesn't it look, Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can
be saddled with? It's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger
one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman
and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. We go after it like a
man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights
when he isn't a coward or a fool. And because we fight we're done for.
And then, when we're down, the woman in us turns and rends us. But if we
got what we wanted we'd be just like any other woman. As long," she
added, "as we wanted it."
She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather
like a man, on Jane.
"It's borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn't meant to
matter. She's simply the victim of the Will-to-do-things. It puts the
bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. It's like a whip
laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside."
She paused in her vehemence.
"Jinny--have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?"
Jane stirred in her corner. "I suppose," she said, "if it's any good
I'll have to pay for it."
"You'll have to pay for it with everything you've got and with
everything you haven't got and might have had. With a genius like yours,
Jinny, there'll be no end to your paying. You may make up your mind to
that."
"I wonder," said Jane, "how much George will have to pay?"
"Nothing. He'll make his wife pay. _You_'d have paid if he'd married
you."
"I wonder. Nina--he was worth it. I'd have paid ten times over. So would
you."
"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."
She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina's feet,
and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.
"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There
must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife
into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find
out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I
haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me.
You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"
Her murky face cleared suddenly.
"Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything
stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and
me."