“Oh, Auntie, didn’t you hear?” (She had heard, you know. I had seen her
shrinking back when Anita screamed at her, with that dreadful shrinking
that you see in an animal threatened by a head-blow. She had been
leaning forward, and eager. She must have heard.)
“Hear? They all talk,” she quavered. “‘Be quiet,’ says Anita. Ah, I’ve
spoilt her. Now Madala——What’s the time, my dear? Why don’t she come?”
“Auntie—Auntie——”
“Eh?” she said. “Why don’t Madala come?”
“Auntie—you’ve forgotten. She’s been ill.”
“Ah—and she’ll be worse before she’s better,” said Great-aunt briskly.
“’Sh! Listen to my daughter.”
We listened: at least, I listened. Great-aunt cocked her head on one
side, still as a bird, for a minute; then, like a bird, she was
re-assured and fell to her knitting again.
Anita and Mr. Flood were quarrelling.
“Why shouldn’t I? Tell me that! Is anyone better fitted? Who knows as
much about her as I do? Didn’t I discover her, hacking on two pounds a
week? Didn’t I recognize what she was? Who sent her to Mitchell and
Bent? Who introduced her everywhere? Who bullied her into writing
_Ploughed Fields_? Who was the best friend she ever had—even if I didn’t
make the parade of being fond of her that——Oh, I’ve no patience! What
would the world know of Madala Grey if it weren’t for me?”
“But—oh, of course we all know how good you were to her, Miss Serle,
indeed I can guess by what you’ve done for me——” began the Baxter girl.
Mr. Flood’s tongue tip showed between his red lips. I think he would
have made some comment but for the hand pressing on his shoulder.
“But——?” said the woman behind the hand.
“I only mean—‘genius will out,’ won’t it?”
“Genius? Big word!” said Miss Howe.
“Not too big.” The Baxter girl reddened enthusiastically.
“‘Genius will out?’ Not Madala Grey’s. She didn’t know she had any. I
don’t believe she ever fully realized——Why, it was the merest chance
that _Eden Walls_ didn’t go into the fire. If it hadn’t been for me—if
it hadn’t been for me——”
“Ah—_you_!” Miss Howe squared up to her. “Now just what (among friends)
have you stood to gain? Fond of her? Oh yes, you were, Anita! Don’t tell
me! But in spite of yourself, eh? But that wasn’t what you were after.
You didn’t get the pleasure out of her that—I did, for instance. You
used to exhaust Madala. I’ve seen you do it. You—you drained her.”
“Yes, I did. I meant to,” said Anita with her laugh. “Pleasure!”
“And she thought you were fond of her. She used to flare if anyone
attacked you. Poor Madala!”
“Poor? Why? I shall give it all back.” Anita gave her a long cool look.
“I—I hate debts,” said Anita.
Miss Howe flushed brightly.
“If you were cursed with the artistic temperament——” She broke off and
began again. “If I were a poor devil of a Bohemian in a hole, it’s not
to you I’d go——”
“—twice!” said Anita.
Again they eyed each other. Miss Howe, still flushing, chose her words.
“Madala never lent. That wasn’t in her. She gave. Time, money, love—she
gave. You took, it was understood, rather than hurt her feelings by
refusing. But it was always free gift.”
“Not to me.” Anita held her head high. “I shall pay. And interest too.”
“Oh, the _Life_! Are you really going to attempt a _Life_?” Miss Howe
recovered herself with a laugh, while Mr. Flood repeated curiously—
“Yes, but then what were you after, Anita? What do you stand to gain?”
“Reflected glory,” came from behind him.
She turned as if she had been stung.
“Reflected? Let her keep it! Reflected? Am I never to have anything of
my own? Oh, wait!”
“You can’t get much of yourself into a life of Madala Grey though.
You’ve too much sense of style for that,” Mr. Flood insisted. “We both
hate a biographer who ‘I says, says I.’”
“Oh, it shall be all Madala Grey. I promise you that,” she said with her
thin smile.
“Humph! It’s a notion.” Miss Howe was really interested, I could see—yet
with a flush on her cheek still. “It’s your sort of work too, Anita!
You’re—happier—in critical work.”
“Oh, don’t hedge. Don’t be delicate with me. I can’t create, that’s what
you mean. Do you think that’s news to me? Is there a critic who has
failed to make it clear to me? I can record—but I can’t create. Good! I
can’t create. I can’t do what she did—what you do, Jasper—what even
Beryl here does. But——” she paused an instant, “you should be afraid of
me for all that. I can pry. Little, nasty, mean word, isn’t it? It’s
me!”
The Baxter girl laughed uncertainly and then stopped because Anita’s
eyes were on her.
“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve
claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen.
You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the
uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala
Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me!
Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come
to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re
afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do
you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said
to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a
glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged
me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and
the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why
I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were
so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them.
Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I
reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my _will_.
That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means,
you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I
haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied,
that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in
London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t
contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the
ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That”
—she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind
her—“and my column in the _Matins_, and some comforting hundreds a year,
and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that.
I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with
myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they
are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more
knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who
arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People
don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known
critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch
hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty
years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career.
There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And
then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without
training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one
leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose,
would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I
_will_ have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve
exploited her, if you like to call it that. When I think of the day I
discovered her——” She paused an instant, dragging her hand wearily over
her eyes—“I was at my zero that day. The _Famous Women_ had been out a
week. The reviews—oh, the reviews! Respectful, courteous, lukewarm. If
they’d attacked me, if they’d slated, I’d have rejoiced. But they
respect me and they’re bored. They know it’s sound work and they’re
bored. I bore people. I bore you—all of you. Do you think I’m blind?
That night I read the manuscript of _Eden Walls_. (Wasn’t it kind of
me—it wasn’t even typed!) And then I saw my chance. I saw how far she’d
got at twenty, and I thought—‘I’ll take my chance. I’ll take this
genius. I’ll make her fond of me. I’ll help her. I’ll worm myself into
her. I’ll abase myself. I’ll toady. I’ll do anything. But I will find
out how she does it. I will find out the secret. I’ll find it and I’ll
make it my own. I’ll serve for her as Jacob served for Rachel; but she
shall serve me in the end.’ I have watched. I have studied. I have
puzzled. I believe I’ve grasped it at last. I know myself and I know
her. If genius is life—the power to give life—is it that?—then I’m
barren. I can’t make life as Madala can. But—listen to me! Listen to me,
all of you! I can take a living thing—I can cut it open alive. That’s
what I shall do with this life-maker—this easy genius. I’ve taken her to
pieces, flesh and blood, bone and ligament and muscle, every secret of
her mind and her heart and her soul. The life, the _real_ life of Madala
Grey, the rise and fall of a genius, that’s what I’m going to make
plain. She’s been a puzzle to you all, with her gifts and her ways and
her crazy marriage—she’s not a mystery to me. I tell you I’ve got her,
naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn’t it fair? She
ought to thank me. ‘Dead,’ he says. Who’s to blame? She chose to kill
herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I’ve refrained. She
couldn’t. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again.
Finding’s keeping. It’s mine.”
Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked,
panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.
“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as
she challenged them.
The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention
was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a
fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in
answer, a laugh rippled out.
I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice.
Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective
soul.
“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a
blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her
by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she,
too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.
“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”
Miss Howe made a wry face.
“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”
“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But
her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told
her that.
“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.
She looked at him from under her lashes.
“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would
make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.
“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.
“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.
“I didn’t. I wasn’t.”
“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”
“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she
hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let
you laugh at me.”
Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of
expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale.
It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest,
concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad
woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t
like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair,
overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.
“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize.
You know we don’t mean it.”
Anita endured her right-and-left kisses.
“You do mean it,” was all she said.
She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to
myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’
Miss Howe was eagerly remorseful.
“We don’t. I don’t know what’s got into us tonight. It’s the fog.
There’s something evil about a fog. Distorting. It yellows over one’s
soul.”
“It isn’t only tonight,” said the Baxter girl, with her sidelong,
‘can-I-risk-it?’ look at them. “The fog’s been coming on for months.”
“And you mean——?” The blonde lady never snubbed the Baxter girl. It
struck me suddenly, as their eyes met, that there was the beginning of a
likeness between them. The Baxter girl at fifty—with dyed hair——? But it
was only an idea of mine. I’m always seeing imaginary likenesses. I
remember that those Academy pictures of Kent Rehan’s always set me to
work wondering—‘That woman with the face turned away—I’ve seen her
somewhere—of whom does she remind me?—where have I seen her?’ And yet,
of course, in those days I knew nothing of Madala Grey.