XV

The creation of Hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters.

Jane Holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had

been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of George

Tanqueray. Her celebrity, by removing her from Tanqueray, had cut the

ground from under her feet. So far from being uplifted by it, she had

felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was

celebrated and George Tanqueray was not. It was Tanqueray's belief in

her that had kept her up. It consoled her with the thought that her

celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. For, through it

all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. He swore by her.

He staked his own genius upon hers. As long as he believed in it she

could not really doubt. But now for the first time since she was

celebrated she believed in it herself.

She no longer thought of Tanqueray. Or, if she did think of him, her

thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, passionate jealousy.

She no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. She even

foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at

the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.

She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to

create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was

subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this

thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked

of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it

abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It

could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray.

It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed

on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the

blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. And to those who

did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back

immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme

surrender.

Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable

condition.

The quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain

Tanqueray's most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he

said, "The Lord our God is a consuming fire."

Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all

that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could

put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame.

She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life,

and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious

impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion,

to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. She had attained only

the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in

fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken

dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the

thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth

whole.

She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet

bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing

amazing things.

There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of

Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator

possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four

walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing

breathed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost

tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that

adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no

longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She

no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as

she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its

stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this

incomparable peace.

She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have

been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed

for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of

the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back.

They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some

tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could

defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let

in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing

the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was

Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had

streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they

had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of

an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They

had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific

verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering multitudes of the as yet

unintroduced.

By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that

she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.

For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray.

Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His

greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their

littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity,

so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.

And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her

with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he

was not there.

He had not even written to her since he married.

Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony,

he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy.

Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after

New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she

would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not

bring herself to write.

"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He

must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?"

And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please

me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane

sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after.

In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four.

Tanqueray."

Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in

her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of

his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his

old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug,

of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart

were still.

"What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out."

"I am worn out."

"With Book, Jinny?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting

people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a

spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there.

And there."

His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were

stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts.

Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every

available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on

celebrity.

Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene.

"Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny--"one little

line--I've got to send answers to all that."

"You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of

answering?"

"If it could only end in dreaming."

He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is

it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you

go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by

yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like."

"George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"

"My dear Jinny, I've tried my level best to save you. But you wouldn't

_be_ saved."

"Ah," said she, "you don't know how I've hated it."

"Haven't you liked any of it."

"No," she said slowly. "Not any of it."

"The praise, Jinny, didn't you like the praise? Weren't you just a

little bit intoxicated?"

"Did I look intoxicated?"

"No-no. You carried it fairly well."

"Just at first, perhaps, just at first it goes to your head a bit. Then

you get sick of it, and you don't want ever to have any more of it

again. And all the time it makes you feel such a silly ass."

"You were certainly not cut out for a celebrity."

"But the awful thing is that when you've swallowed all the praise you

can't get rid of the people. They come swarming and tearing and

clutching at you, and bizzing in your ear when you want to be quiet. I

feel as if I were being buried alive under awful avalanches of people."

"I told you you would be."

"If," she cried, "they'd only kill you outright. But they throttle you.

You fight for breath. They let go and then they're at you again. They

come telling you how wonderful you are and how they adore your work; and

not one of them cares a rap about it. If they did they'd leave you alone

to do it."

"Poor Jinny," he murmured.

"Why am I marked out for this? Why is it, George? Why should they take

me and leave you alone?"

"It's your emotional quality that fetches them. But it's inconceivable

how _you_'ve been fetched."

"I wanted to see what the creatures were like. Oh, George, that I

should be so punished when I only wanted to see what they were like."

"Poor Jinny. Poor gregarious Jinny."

She shook her head.

"It was so insidious. I can't think, I really can't think how it began."

"It began with those two spluttering imbecilities you asked me to dine

with."

"Oh no, poor things, they haven't hurt me. They've gone on to dine at

other tables. They're in it, too. They're torn and devoured. They dine

and are dined on."

"But, my dear child, you must stop it."

"If I could. If I could only break loose and get away."

"Get away. What keeps you?"

"Everything keeps me."

"By everything you mean----?"

"London. London does something to your brain. It jogs it and shakes it;

and all the little ideas that had gone to sleep in their little cells

get up and begin to dance as if they heard music. Everything wakes them

up, the streams of people, the eyes and the faces. It's you and Nina and

Laura. It's ten thousand things. Can't you understand, George?"

"It's playing the devil with your nerves, Jinny."

"Not when I go about in it alone. That's the secret."

"It looks as if you were alone a lot, doesn't it?" He glanced

significantly around him.

"Oh--that!"

"Yes," he said, "that. Will you really let me save you?"

"Can you?"

"I can, if I do it my own way."

"I don't care how you do it."

"Good." He rose. "Is there anything in those letters you mind my

seeing?"

"Not a word."

He sat down at her writing-table and stirred the litter with rapid,

irritable hands. In two minutes he had gathered into a heap all the

little notes of invitation. He then went round the room collecting the

tickets and the cards and the telegrams. These he added to his heap.

"What are you going to do?" she asked.

"I am going," he said, "to destroy this hornets' nest you've raised

about you."

He took it up, carrying it gingerly, as if it stung, and dropped it on

the fire.

"George----" she cried, and sat looking at him as he stirred the pile to

flame and beat down its ashes into the grate. She was paralyzed,

fascinated by the bold splendour of his deed.

"There," he said. "Is there anything else I can do for you."

"Yes." She smiled. "You can tell me what I'm to say to my stepmother."

"Your stepmother?"

"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."

"Effy?"

"My half-sister."

"Well?"

"I think, George, I may have to have her."

"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being

had?"

He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd

pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always

been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.

"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even

the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."

She said nothing.

"Can you afford to have him done for?"

"If it would help them, George."

"You want to help them?"

"Of course I do."

"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and

rakes in the shekels, not you."

"Ye-es. I know he does."

"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."

Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this

truth.

"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be

a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."

He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of

intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto

expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of

Jinny's style.

"I am going to post this myself," he said, "because I can't trust you

for a minute."

He ran out bareheaded and came back again.

"You can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a

minute."

He sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had

happened. "And now about Hambleby. Another day, Jinny, and I should have

been too late to save him."

"But, George, it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize

the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour."

"Tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything."

"The scenes I do move in! I was so happy once, when I hadn't any money,

when nobody but you knew anything about me."

"Were you really, Jinny?"

"Yes. And before that, when I was quite alone. Think of the hours, the

days, the months I had to myself."

"Then the curse fell, and you became celeb----Even then, with a little

strength of mind, you might have saved yourself. Do you think, if I

became celebrated, I should give myself up to be devoured?"

"If I could only not be celebrated," she said. "Do you think I can ever

creep back into my hole again and be obscure?"

"Yes, if you'll write a book that nobody but I can read."

"Why, isn't Hambleby----?"

"Not he. He'll only make things worse for you. Ten times worse."

"How do you mean?"

"He may make you popular."

"Is _that_ what you think of him?"

"Oh, I think a lot of him. So do you."

He smiled his old teasing and tormenting smile.

"Are you sure you're not just a little bit in love with that little

banker's clerk?"

"I was never in love with a banker's clerk in my life. I've never even

seen one except _in_ banks and tubes and places."

"I don't care. It's the way you'll be had. It's the way you'll be had by

Hambleby if you don't look out. It's the way," he said, "that's

absolutely forbidden to any artist. You've got to know Hambleby outside

and inside, as God Almighty knows him."

"Well?" Jinny's mind was working dangerously near certain personal

matters. George himself seemed to be approaching the same borders. He

plunged in an abyss of meditation and emerged.

"You can't know people, you can't possibly hope to know them, if you

once allow yourself to fall in love with them."

"Can't you?" she said quietly.

"No, you can't. If God Almighty had allowed himself to fall in love with

you and me, Jinny, he couldn't have made us all alive and kicking. You

must be God Almighty to Hambleby or he won't kick."

"Doesn't he kick?"

"Oh, Lord, yes. You haven't gone in deep enough to stop him. I'm only

warning you against a possible danger. It's always a possible danger

when I'm not there to look after you."