Nina turned her head and looked up at the poet. His eyes were still
following his vision. Her voice recalled him.
"Owen," she said, "will you bring the rest? Bring down all you've got."
Tanqueray saw as she spoke to him that there came again that betraying
tenderness about her mouth; as she looked at him, her eyes lifted their
hoods, revealing the sudden softness and surrender.
And as Tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man
were turned on him, rather than on Nina. They looked through him, as if
they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was going
on in Tanqueray's soul.
He said something inaudible to Nina and went out of the room with a
light, energetic stride.
"How can you stand his eyes?" said Tanqueray; "it's like being exposed
to the everlasting stare of God."
"It is, rather."
"What's his name again?"
"Owen Prothero."
"What do you know about him."
She told him what she knew. Prothero was, as Tanqueray saw, an unlicked
Celt. He had been, if Tanqueray would believe it, in the Indian Medical
Service, and had flung it up before he got his pension. He had been to
British Central Africa on a commission for investigating sleeping
sickness; he spoke of it casually as if it were the sort of thing you
naturally were on. He had volunteered as a surgeon in the Boer War. And
with it all he was what Tanqueray saw.
"And his address?" Tanqueray inquired.
"He lives here."
"Why shouldn't he?" He answered her challenging eyes. They shot light at
him.
"He is a great poet? I _was_ right?"
"Absolutely. He's great enough for anybody. How on earth did you get
hold of him?"
She was silent. She seemed to be listening for the sound of Prothero's
feet on the stair.
He was soon with them, bringing his sheaf of manuscript. He had brought
all he had got. The chanting began again and continued till the light
failed.
And as Tanqueray listened the restless, irritable devilry passed from
his face. Salient, thrust forward toward Prothero, it was the face of a
winged creature in adoration, caught suddenly into heaven, breasting the
flood of the supernal light. For Tanqueray could be cruel in his
contempt for all clevernesses and littlenesses, for all achievements
that had the literary taint; but he was on his knees in a moment before
the incorruptible divinities. He had the immortal's scent for
immortality.
When the chanting ceased they talked.
Tanqueray warned Prothero of the horrors of premature renown. Prothero
declared that he had none. Nobody knew his name.
"Good," said Tanqueray. "Celebrity's all very well at the end, when
you've done the things you want to do. It's a bad beginning. It doesn't
matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to
know you're celebrated till you're dead. But if you _will_ live in
London, your only chance is to remain obscure."
"There are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand
celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles
where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each
other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other.
Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat----"
"_Don't_, George!" cried Nina.
"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of
each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at
each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do
anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere?
Horrid used-up air that authors--beasts!--have breathed over and over
and over again."
"As if," said Nina, "_we_ weren't authors."
"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it
of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."
"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."
"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."
At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he
wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his
poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.
Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were.
He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There
were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of
immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on
immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things
most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance
for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired.
They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He
stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides
and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he
could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There
was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The
form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous
and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord.
It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still
more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that
Tanqueray could get it for him.
He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote
things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them
into letter-boxes. As to what became of them, Tanqueray had never seen
anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event.
He went away with Prothero's poems in his pocket.
Nina followed him and held him on the doorstep.
"You do believe in him?" she said.
"What's the good of _my_ believing in him? I can't help him. I can't
help myself. He's got to wait, Nina, like the rest of us. It won't hurt
him."
"It will. He can't wait, George. He's desperately poor. You must do
something."
"What can I do?"
"There are things," she said, "that people always do."
"I could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it."
"No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him
to meet that man of yours."
"What man?"
"That magazine man, Brodrick."
He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine!
Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane
about Prothero?"
"No."
A faint flame leaped in her face and died.
"You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could
even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?"
"I haven't seen her for six months."
"Is that your fault or hers?"
"Neither."
"He's had to wait, then, six months?"
There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.
"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to
the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and
then she has a way with her."
Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.
"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take
him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.
"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."
Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves,
was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He
lingered.
"I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of
me, and I can't blame him, poor devil."
"It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland."
"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."
He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She
would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her.
She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had
seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it
again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness,
was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So
amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good
deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.
Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of
his own youth.
He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew
more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a
family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a
hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after
year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left
her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.
It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London,
lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina
Lempriere.
The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner
room, preparing their supper.
There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the
medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long
intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains.
They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own
dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen
him.
He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his
perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild
places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid
of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the
fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let
him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would
sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that
up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.
He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed
state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He
was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could
live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got
work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently
open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the
problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style
and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.
It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver
than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.
She would have suggested his meeting Brodrick, but that the way to
Brodrick lay through Jane Holland. She remembered that the gods had
thrust Jane Holland between her and George Tanqueray; and she was
determined that they should put no woman between her and Owen Prothero.
She had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself.
The supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. It
dominated her desire to serve his interests. But she had not refused him
when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see George Tanqueray, the
only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any
sweep, any clearness of vision.
It was Tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that
vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. She
had no right to keep Owen to herself. He was too valuable.
His innocence had given a sting to her remorse. He had remained so
completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware
of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. Things came, he
seemed to say, or they didn't come. If you were wise you waited.
With his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs,
standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood
absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was
manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly
indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated
to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some
inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina as she entered.
She called him to the supper she had made ready for him. He swung round,
returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her.
He was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. It
was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the
outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred.