Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from
George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused
to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the
autumn, at their own and not Prothero's expense.
How the miracle had been worked he couldn't conceive, and Tanqueray was
careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance
of Jinny's way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray's hands, had been
meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray
vehemently assured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They
had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared
to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland
must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every
other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger
of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their
enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr.
Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public
that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional
opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss
Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them.
They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own
sake, she would reconsider it.
Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.
"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you're paying
for Prothero's poems?"
To that Jinny had replied, "It's what I wanted to do, and there wasn't
any other way."
Owen Prothero could no longer say that nobody knew his name. His
innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made
and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created
for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to
incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his
innocence. Tanqueray's retirement was not more superb or more indignant;
Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but nobody met
Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had
not met him.
It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey
of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this
incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept
Nina's unlicked Celt outside women's drawing-rooms.
She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than
not, at Tanqueray's rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray's wife did not
count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and
she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it
was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray's wife.
One afternoon, about five o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She
approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy
little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.
But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across,
obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before
the door.
Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the
house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the
little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs.
Tanqueray.
She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the
doctor was.
"Don't go, Jinny," he said.
She searched his face.
"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"
He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She
recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from
him.
"Oh, dear me, no," he said.
"May I see her--afterwards?"
"Of course you may see her. But"--he smiled--"if you'll come up-stairs
you'll see Prothero."
She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high
above Rose and her movements and her troubles.
He paused at the door.
"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of
you."
"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"
"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."
"George, is he really there?"
"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away
from you."
"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."
He laughed and they went in.
The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at
some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct
of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the
singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of
the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by
the guile she judged dishonourable.
Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the
doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.
They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that
had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and
vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that
they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.
It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was
obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow
now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed
through strange climates.
It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she
knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that
must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself
secretly defining it. Tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain
and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she
had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of
his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his
singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion.
When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently
nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an
incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable
distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made
swift by hunger.
Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also
suggested the thing she at last said.
"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."
Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had
been.
"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out
for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint
and----"