August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square
had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the
corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the
top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.
Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a
certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the
terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little
people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue
celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves.
They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and
Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it,
vanished when they went.
She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her
secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.
Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do
anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature
that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking,
this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got
up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But
when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to
write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the
blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way."
When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite.
And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from
her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me,
a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington
Gardens."
He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that
walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it
could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish
of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the
solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.
So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and
round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.
She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of
sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So
she hardened it.
She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never
touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August
had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look.
This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen
in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it
had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody
she knew.
At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the
dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living
grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was
beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things
pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in
the Gardens, where she walked.
One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The
little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a
steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently
at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where
you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.
Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes
that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her
so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran
to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a
steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.
And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding
her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came
in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's
wail.
"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if
it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to
them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute--I was a steam-engine
and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could
do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again--I wonder if
he knew I was like that."
The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way
through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in
growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world
again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that
feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt
her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings,
to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees
as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.
There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that
insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of
September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She
could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but
of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial
and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the
world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the
world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew
that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of
sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.
Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and
Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And
the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that
he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see
him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.
He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She
could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of
seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme
distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow
with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban,
adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a
blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would
have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark
flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby;
the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of
Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency
of Hambleby.
Heavens, what a book he would be.
Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so
divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to
deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate
excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were
falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this
virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of
creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.
And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she
hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so
possessed by the furious impulse to be born.
Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think
about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a
year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.
But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby
was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely
as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray.
Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and
Laura Gunning.
That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the
fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.
"Do you like him?" said Jane.
"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along
the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary
taint.
"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"
"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with
him?"
"Not a thing."
If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to
Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a
discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura
spoke again.
"How George would have loved him."
Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were
dead.
Nina broke their silence.
"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"
They did not answer.
"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"
"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Sussex," said Jane.
"And where's she?"
"Wherever he is, I imagine."
"I gave her six months, if you remember."
"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."
"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."
"He might write. It isn't like him not to."
"No," said Jane, "it isn't like him." She rose. "Good-bye, I'm going."
She went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that
blurred the splendour of Hambleby.
"Perhaps," Laura continued, "he thinks _we_ want to drop him. You know,
if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think."
"If," said Nina, "he thought about it at all."
"He'd think about Jinny."
"If he'd thought about Jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl."
It was then that Laura had her beautiful idea. She was always having
them.
"It _was_ Jinny he thought about. He thought about nothing else. He gave
Jinny up for her own sake--for her career. You know what he thought
about marrying."
She was in love with her idea. It made George sublime, and preserved
Jinny's dignity. But Nina did not think much of it, and said so. She sat
contemplating Laura a long time. "Queer Kiddy," she said, "very queer
Kiddy."
It was her tribute to Laura's moral beauty.
"I say, Infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?"
"Why shouldn't I be? I'm human," said the Infant.
"I doubt it. You're such a calm Kiddy. I'd like to know how it takes
you."
"It doesn't take me at all. I don't give it a chance."
"It doesn't give _you_ a chance, when it comes, my child."
"Yes, it does. There's always," said the Infant, speaking slowly,
"just--one--chance. When you feel it coming."
"You don't feel it coming."
"I do. You asked me how it takes _me_. It takes me by stages. Gradual,
insidious stages. In the first stage I'm happy, because it feels nice.
In the second I'm terrified. In the third I'm angry and I turn round and
stamp. Hard."
"Ridiculous baby. With _those_ feet?"
"When those feet have done stamping there isn't much left to squirm, I
can tell you."
"Let's look at them."
Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity
of her feet.
"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."
"It wasn't half as difficult as it looks."
"You're a wonderful Kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you
may thank your stars you don't."
"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn't for Papa. Papa's a
perfect safeguard against passion. I know beforehand that as long as
he's there, passion isn't any good. You see," she explained, "it's so
simple. I wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with Papa. And nobody
would marry me if he had to."
"I see. Is it very bad?"
"Pretty bad. He dreams and dreams _and_ dreams."
"Won't that ever be better?"
Laura shook her head.
"It may be worse. There are things--that I'm afraid of."
"What things, Kiddy, what things?"
"Oh! I don't know----"
"How on earth do you go on?"
"I shut my eyes. And I sit tight. And I go."
"Poor Kiddy. You give me a pain."
"I'm quite happy. I'm working like ten horses to get things done while I
can." She smiled indomitably. "I'm glad Tanks didn't care for me. I
couldn't have let him in for all these--horrors. As for his marrying--I
didn't want you to have him because he wouldn't have been good for you,
but I _did_ want Jinny to."
"And you don't mind--now?"
"There are so many things to mind. It's one nail driving out another."
"It's all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin,"
said Nina. She drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed
her.
"Oh, don't! _Don't_ be sorry for me. I'm all right."
She broke from Nina's hand that still caressed her.
"I am, really," she said. "I like Jinny better than anybody in the world
except you and Tanks. And I like Nina better than all the Tankses that
ever were."
("Nice Kiddy," Nina whispered into Laura's hair.)
"And now Tanks is married, he can't take you away from me."
"Nobody else can," said Nina. "We've stuck together. And we'll stick."