On her return Jane went at once to Brodrick in his study. The editor was
gloomy and perturbed. He made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her
excuse that Tanqueray had kept her. Presently, after some moments of
heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his
gloom. He was worried about the magazine. Levine was pestering him. When
she reminded him that Louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought
he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in
theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal Jews
behind him, and they were running the concern. You could buy him out,
you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if
you hadn't, where were you? It had been stipulated that the editor was
to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its
way, his hand had been pretty free. But it wasn't paying; and Levine was
insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit.
He did not tell her that Levine's point was that they had not bargained
for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. If they
were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not
prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends;
which, Levine said, was about what it amounted to.
That was what was bothering Brodrick; for it was Jane's hand, in its
freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. It had
helped him to realize his expensive dream. The trouble, this time, he
told her, was a tale of Nina Lempriere's.
Jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her
friend's name.
"What, Nina? Has she----?"
Brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. And Levine had put
his silly foot down. He had complained that the tale was gruesome (they
had set it up; it was quite a short thing); Nina's tales usually were
gruesome; and Nina's price was stiff. He didn't know about the price;
perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the
tale----! Brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with
him of profound excitement--the tale was a corker. He didn't care if it
_was_ gruesome. It was magnificent.
"More so than her last?" Jane murmured.
"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He'd be
eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd
look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.
She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had
said. Nina had more than found herself.
"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."
"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his
beastly Jews--with a chance like that. I don't care if the price _is_
stiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once
in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he
funks it."
He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets
away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing
like this."
Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.
They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard
that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was
very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.
She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front
room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.
Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not
told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going
to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was
yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane.
She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done
with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it.
Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only
save herself by keeping clear of her.
"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough--after that
last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments
of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."
"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always
just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if
I never could keep up."
"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."
"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."
"My handicap?"
"Well--a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got
to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart
out of me."
"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you
thought it?"
Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if
Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.
"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any
handicap. That's why I want to win."
Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions.
She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to
Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself
afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to
Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she
found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying
nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said)
that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into
the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time,
every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the
sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.
But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own.
She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to
talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art _was_ a
handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of
creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you
allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.
The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.
"Does it seem to you, then, that _I_'ve defeated my end?" Nina pressed
her point home implacably.
Jane strung herself to the pain of it.
"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."
She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible
to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.
Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.
It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that
she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had
done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so
uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without
encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose
that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own.
And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the
righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the
results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she,
Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the
perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have
been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration
betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far
in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the
perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had
been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of
Jinny. That was how she measured her.
It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any
more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think
of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully
removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had
swept on, reckless, regardless.
It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not
letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should
seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the
idea of rivalry was absurd.
Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no
vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great
thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you
acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand
and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the
splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and
certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid
course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself
there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had
instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for
danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her
swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.
She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing
else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it
with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely
now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of
disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane's book, because
Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as
tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision
of her own.
If the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her
friends were bent on frustrating them. Within five minutes after Jane
Brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, Nina received a telegram
from Owen Prothero. He was coming to see her at five o'clock. It was now
half-past four.
This was what she had dreaded more than anything. Her fear of it had
kept her out of London for two years.
Owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. It suggested
that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while
it warned her not to miss him if she did. She debated the point for the
half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him.
Prothero arrived punctually to his hour. She found no change in his
aspect or his manner. If he looked happy, he looked it in his own
supersensual way. Marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness,
nor touched his incorruptible refinement.
He considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs
of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. Her mountains, he
said, evidently agreed with her.
She inquired after Laura, and was told that she would not know her. The
Kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. She was almost plump; she had
almost a colour.
"She wants to see you," he said. "She told me I was to bring you back
with me."
Ages passed before she answered. "I don't think, really, Owen, that I
can come."
"Why not?" he said.
She would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge
that with Owen lying was no good. She resented his asking her why not,
when he knew perfectly well why.
"Why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?"