"Oh--because I"m not."
"Simplicity," said Nina, "would only give her more rope."
"Nina--there"s one thing Nicky didn"t tell us. He never let on that she was pretty. I suppose he thought that was more than we could bear."
"How do you know she"s pretty?"
"That"s how I see her. Very pretty, very soft and tender. Shy at first, and then very gently, very innocently letting herself go. And always rather sensuous and clinging."
"Poor idiot--she"s done for if she clings. I"m not sorry for George, Jinny; I"m sorry for the woman. He"ll lay her flat on the floor and wipe his boots on her."
Jane shrank back. "Nina," she said, "you loved him. And yet--you can tear him to pieces."
"You think I"m a beast, do you?"
"Yes. When you tear him--and before people, too."
She shrank a little further. Nina was now sitting on the floor with her back against Jane"s knees.
"It"s all very well for you," she said. "He wanted to care for you. He only wanted me--to care. That"s what he is. He makes you care, he makes you show it, he drives you on and on. He gives nothing; he takes nothing. But he lets you strip yourself bare; he lets you bring him the soul out of your body, and then he turns round and treats you as if you were his cast-off mistress."
She laid her head back on Jane"s knee, so that Jane saw her face foreshortened and, as it were, distorted.
"If I had been--if I"d been like any other woman, good or bad, he"d have been different."
Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Jane started at this sudden voice of her own thought]
It was as if some inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed.
It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture, violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its utterance. But she was sorry for it. She hated to see it suffer.
It raised its head.
"Doesn"t it look, Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can be saddled with? It"s giving you another s.e.x inside you, and a stronger one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can"t sit still like a woman and wait till it comes to us, or doesn"t come. We go after it like a man; and if we can"t get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights when he isn"t a coward or a fool. And because we fight we"re done for.
And then, when we"re down, the woman in us turns and rends us. But if we got what we wanted we"d be just like any other woman. As long," she added, "as we wanted it."
She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece looking down, rather like a man, on Jane.
"It"s borne in on me," she said, "that the woman in us isn"t meant to matter. She"s simply the victim of the Will-to-do-things. It puts the bit into our mouths and drives us the way we must go. It"s like a whip laid across our shoulders whenever we turn aside."
She paused in her vehemence.
"Jinny--have you ever reckoned with your beastly genius?"
Jane stirred in her corner. "I suppose," she said, "if it"s any good I"ll have to pay for it."
"You"ll have to pay for it with everything you"ve got and with everything you haven"t got and might have had. With a genius like yours, Jinny, there"ll be no end to your paying. You may make up your mind to that."
"I wonder," said Jane, "how much George will have to pay?"
"Nothing. He"ll make his wife pay. _You_"d have paid if he"d married you."
"I wonder. Nina--he was worth it. I"d have paid ten times over. So would you."
"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."
She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina"s feet, and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.
"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I"ll put a knife into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I"ll find out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn"t forget. If I haven"t the pluck to stick it in myself, I"ll get you to do it for me.
You"ll only have to say "George Tanqueray.""
Her murky face cleared suddenly.
"Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and me."
XIV
August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.
Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the terrible, converging, threatening mult.i.tudes of the clever little people, the mult.i.tudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves.
They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and Jane"s celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it, vanished when they went.
She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.
Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking, this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You"ll never get rid of me that way."
When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appet.i.te.
And whenever she dressed before the looking-gla.s.s he made her turn from her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn"t care for me, a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington Gardens."
He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little s.p.a.ce where it could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.
So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.
She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So she hardened it.
She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura"s face in August had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look.
This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody she knew.
At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living gra.s.s and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in the Gardens, where she walked.
One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don"t you look where you"re going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.
Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a steam-engine, and he couldn"t stop.