Nothing, Tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the Kiddy spreading
her diminutive skirts before Prothero, to shelter that colossal figure.
But the Kiddy, ever since Tanqueray had known her, had refused to be
pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating
touch of sympathy. She was always breaking loose from the hands that
tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror,
always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. And
she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in
front. The wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in
their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. She had
turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph;
she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it
were, a gay and pretty gown.
And now, again, Tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her
pathos. The spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement;
though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely
an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. The Kiddy was minute, but her
achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime.
She sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming
book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every
appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public
with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them,"
was her reiterated comment on her own performances.
Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his
peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in
her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable
levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly
soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The
irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his
account."
"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.
She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs,
hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the
pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.
She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she
came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a
premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray
knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her
courage on the dreadful eve.
It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly
escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his
recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It
looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together.
Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this
indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for
Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the
risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves
thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they
cared what was said about them.
Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by
congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.
"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my
popularity!"
"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."
She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held
itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not
care.
"I think your popularity, _and_ you, my child, the most beautiful sight
I've ever seen for many a long year."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"You may laugh at me," she said.
"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted
to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her
knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.
"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy;
and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn
anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never
will know."
"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."
"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms
into a splendid poem."
It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the
miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of
divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became
perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds
and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was
transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She
touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.
"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he
would see.
"Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision;
smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted Tanqueray.
"What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?"
"I expect what always has happened, and worse."
"So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a
place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go
on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the
brokers. It's a generation of brokers."
"Beasts!"
"Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture--real--and
pictures is _'is_ line."
"Aunt's lodger, I assure you, will be thoroughly well damned if he takes
any stock in Owen."
"'E 'asn't seen Mr. Prothero," said Rose, "and you'll frighten Minny if
you use such language."
Tanqueray ignored the interruption. "Owen, you see, is dangerous. He
regards the entire Stock Exchange as a bankrupt concern. The Stock
Exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for Owen. If
a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and
all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his
own. You can't have it both ways."
"I know. He knows it. We'd rather have it this way. I oughtn't to talk
as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. It's me it hurts,
not him."
"It hurts me, too, Kiddy. I can't stand it when I see the filthy curs
rushing at him. They've got to be kicked into a corner. I'm prepared for
them, this time."
He rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which
he gave to her.
"Just look through that and see if it's any good."
It was his vindication of Owen Prothero.
"Oh----"