Jane answered at once. If Nina would bring Prothero to Kensington on
Friday at four o'clock he would meet Hugh Brodrick.
But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about
women's drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you
harm. He wanted to hold on to what he'd got. It was tricky; it came and
went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up
with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.
Nina assured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was,
she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian
jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden
him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the manuscript,
should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or
three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly,
were all about God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. Owen
Prothero didn't seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she
said, to handicap him.
Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she
proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson.
Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were
very far from appreciating him. He knew a multitude of little men on
papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about
singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it,
might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote
for the papers.
The reading was fixed for Friday at four o'clock. Tanqueray, who
detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero's sake. His
letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the
others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally.
She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things
were going badly at the moment.
Laura, however, was the first to arrive.
"Who is this man of Nina's?" said she.
"I don't know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."
She showed her Nina's letter.
Laura's face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly
indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.
"But why God?" was her profane comment.
"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."
Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to
believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her
arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George
Tanqueray.
Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro
Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.
He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to
banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt,
impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here
to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow
Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for
Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray,
too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was
always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him.
There was Brodrick's magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland
had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott
Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small
thing and an easy thing for her to do.
It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank,
in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his
little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the
unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does
not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women.
He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.
And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected
in the sorrow of this thought.
Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had
been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could
also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with
the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be
pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And
from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he
could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he
could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on
concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had
threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial
co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to
do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he
hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.
As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, anticipating with
resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.
And Jane, who knew what passed in Brodrick's mind, was downcast in her
turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him,
that she was always trying to get at him.
Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the
manuscript. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of
the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at
Tanqueray over Nina's shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her;
Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they
could look at Jane.
It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero's poems
of the Vision of God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane,
absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; to
Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to
Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the
mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.
They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul's mortal
terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul,
of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine
consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of God.
Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was
dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude of extreme depression.
His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a
sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to
himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by
Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his
desire, sublimely renouncing.
Brodrick's head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his
lowering brows, looked up at Jane's, gathering from them her judgment of
Owen Prothero. Prothero's case defied all rule and precedent, and
Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a
gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and
troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a
creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp
flame of the spirit.
It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers
for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader's
voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.
Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul
surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away
into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.
And Laura, who did not believe in God, Laura sat motionless, her small
insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over
her face there passed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange
softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face
of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes
were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared
at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.
She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came
forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his
own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had
sunk into. Everybody's nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating
passage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic
and curt.
Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "He
_is_ great," said poor Nicky.
"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."
Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and
Jane remarked that it hadn't done badly since it had begun with him.
Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she
turned eastwards with Nina.
"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.
"It depends," said Nina. "He's seen George."
"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know
him."
Nina's face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten
look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it
said.
"He hasn't got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was
overwrought. "He's got to be heard. You've heard him."
"It's because I've heard him that I want to see him."
Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The
small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen
suffering, its despondency, its doubt.
Nina was stung by compassion.
"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.
"I wouldn't ask you if I didn't."
"All right. You shall. I'll make him come."