Every year, about the middle of August, Brodrick's family dispersed for
the summer holidays. Every year, about the middle of September, its
return was celebrated at a garden-party given by the Levines.
Brodrick's brother-in-law lived with an extreme simplicity in one of
those square white houses in St. John's Wood, houses secluded behind
high, mysterious walls, where you entered, as by secret, through a
narrow door.
The party had streamed through this door, over the flagged path and
through the house, into the small, dark, green garden at the back, a
garden that seemed to guard, like the house, its secret and its mystery.
There, on this yearly festival, you were certain to find all the
Brodricks, packed rather tight among a crowd of Levines and their
collaterals from Fitzjohn's Avenue, a crowd of very dark, very
large-eyed, very curly-haired persons, persons attired with sobriety,
almost with austerity, by way of protest against the notorious excesses
of their race.
And with them there was always, on this occasion, a troop of little boys
and girls, dark, solemn-eyed little boys and girls, with incredibly
curly hair, and strange, unchildlike noses.
Moving restlessly among them, or grouped apart, you came upon friends of
the Brodricks and Levines, and here and there a few journalists,
conspicuously tired young men who toiled nocturnally on the "Morning
Telegraph."
This year it was understood that the party would be brilliant. The young
men turned up in large numbers and endeavoured to look for the occasion
a little less tired than they were. All the great writers on the
"Monthly Review" had been invited and many of them came.
Caro Bickersteth was there; she came early, and Sophy Levine, in a
discreet aside, implored her to give her a hand with the authors.
Authors, Sophy intimated, were too much for her, and there would be a
lot of them. There was Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning, and Jane
Holland, of course----
"Of course," said Caro, twinkling.
"And Mr. Tanqueray."
At that name Caro raised her eyebrows and remarked that Sophy was a
lucky lady to get Him, for He never went anywhere. Then Caro became
abstracted, wondering why George Tanqueray was coming, and to this
particular show.
"Will his wife be here?" she inquired.
"Dear me," said Sophy, "I never asked her. You don't somehow think of
him as married."
"I doubt," said Caro; "if he thinks so of himself. There never was a man
who looked it less."
Most singularly unattached he looked, as he stood there, beside Nina
Lempriere and Laura Gunning, drawn to them, but taking hardly more
notice of them than of any Brodrick or Levine. He was watching Jinny as
she moved about in the party. She had arrived somewhat conspicuously,
attended by Brodrick, by Winny Heron and by Eddy, with the two elder
little Levines clinging to her gown.
Jane was aware that Nina and Laura were observing her; she was aware of
a shade of anxiety in their concentration. Then she knew that Tanqueray
was there, too, that he was watching her, that his eyes never left her.
He did not seek her out after their first greeting. He preferred to
stand aside and watch her. He had arrived later and he was staying late.
Jane felt that it would become her not to stay. But Brodrick would not
let her go. He took possession of her. He paraded her as his possession
under Tanqueray's eyes; eyes that were fixed always upon Jane,
vigilantly, anxiously, as if he saw her caught in the toils.
An hour passed. The party dwindled and dissolved around them. The
strangers were gone. The hordes of Levines had scattered to their houses
in Fitzjohn's Avenue. The little Levines had been gathered away by their
nurses from the scene. Only Brodrick and his family remained, and Jane
with them, and Tanqueray who kept on looking at the two while he talked
vaguely to Levine.
Brodrick's family was not less interested or less observant. It had
accepted without surprise what it now recognized as inevitable. It could
no longer hope that Hugh would cease from his insane pursuit of Jane
Holland, after making the thing thus public, flourishing his intentions
in the face of his family. With a dexterity in man[oe]uvre, an audacity,
an obstinacy that was all his own, Hugh had resisted every attempt to
separate him from Miss Holland. He only let go his hold when Sophy
Levine, approaching with an admirable air of innocence in guile,
announced that Baby was being put to bed. She suggested that Jane might
like to see him in his--well, in his perfection. It was impossible,
Sophy maintained, for anybody not to desire above all things to see him.
Up-stairs in the nursery, Winny and Mrs. Heron were worshipping Baby as
he lay on the nurse's lap, in his perfection, naked from his bath. Sophy
could not wait till he was given up to her. She seized him, in the
impatience of maternal passion. She bent over him, hiding her face with
his soft body.
Presently her eyes, Sophy's beautiful, loving eyes, looked up at Jane
over the child's shoulder, and their gaze had guile as well as love in
it. Jane stood before it motionless, impassive, impenetrable.
Winny fell on her knees in a rapture.
"Oh, Miss Holland!" she cried. "Don't you love him?"
Jane admitted that she rather liked him.
"She's a wretch," said Sophy. "Baby duckums, she says she rather likes
you."
Baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of Jane's moderation.
"Oh, don't you want," said Winny, "don't you want to kiss his little
feet? Wouldn't you love to have him for your very own?"
"No, Winny, I shouldn't know what to do with him."
"Wouldn't you?" said Mrs. Heron.
"Feel," said Winny, "how soft he is. He's got teeny, teeny hairs, like
down, golden down, just there, on his little back."
Jane stooped and stroked the golden down. And at the touch of the
child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she
drew back, as one who feels, for the first time, the touch of life,
terrible and tender.
"Oh, Jane," said Sophy, "what are you made of?"
"I wonder----" said Mrs. Heron.
Jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and
that Sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. She continued in her
impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile.
"She looks," said Sophy, "as if she knew a great deal. And she doesn't
know, Baby dear, she doesn't know anything at all."
"Wait," said Mrs. Heron, "till she's got babies of her own. Then she'll
know."
"I know now," said Jane calmly.
"Not you," said Sophy almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing
away to his bed beside her own. Winny and the nurse followed her. Jane
was alone with Frances Heron.
"No woman," said Frances, "knows anything till she's had a child."
"Oh, you married women!"
"Even a married woman. She doesn't know what her love for her husband is
until she's held his child at her breast. And she may be as stupid as
you please; but she knows more than you."
"I know what she knows--I was born knowing. But if I were married, if I
had children, I should know nothing, nothing any more."
Frances was silent.
"They--they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing--not
even them."
"Don't you want them to press?"
"It doesn't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they wouldn't let
me see."
"They'd make you feel," said Frances.
"Feel? I should think they would. I should feel _them_, I should feel
for them, I should feel nothing else besides."
"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."
"Do you think I don't?" said Jane.
"Well, there are some things--I don't see how you can--without
experience."
"Experience? Experience is no good--the experience you mean--if you're
an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you,
twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know
women--artists--who have never got over their experience, women who'll
never do anything again because of it."
"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do
very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a
light of sword-play in her eyes.
"I do say it--if they're thinking of their genius."
"Would you say it to Hugh?"
The thrust flashed sharp and straight.
"Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.
Sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. They held her at
parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable.
Their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved.
Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home,
he said. He wanted to talk to her. They could walk through Regent's Park
towards Baker Street.
They had left the Levines' some way behind them when he turned to her.
"Jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?"
"What are you doing in it yourself, George?"
"I? I came to see you. I was told you would be there. You know, you _do_
let yourself in for people."
"Do I?"
"You do. And these Brodricks aren't your sort. No good can come of your
being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.
"They're kind to me," she pleaded.
"Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for
that fellow and his magazine."
"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he'd rather his magazine
smashed than I did."
"And you believed him?"
"I believed him."
"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."
His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil.
"Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.
"Do I like him? Yes."
"Why do you like him?"
"I think, perhaps, because he's good."
"That's how he has you, is it?"
He paused.
"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."
"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."
"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."
He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the
gravel measured the moments of his thought.
"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he
paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."
"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs.
Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments
when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth
living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because
you're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend
to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need,
the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know
that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary,
passing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's
temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do.
Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly
falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."
He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.
"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."
"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."
"That's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself."
It was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her.
"Think--think, before you're drawn in."
"I am thinking," she said.
Tanqueray's voice insisted. "It's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly
easy to get out."
"And if I don't want," she murmured, "to get out----?"
He looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw
in her.
"It's your confounded Jinniness!"
At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it, as
a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.
"It'll always tug you one way and your genius another. I'm only asking
you which is likely to be stronger?"
"Do I know, George? Do _you_ know?"
"I've told you," he said. "I think I do."