"Ridiculous baby. With _those_ feet?"
"When those feet have done stamping there isn"t much left to squirm, I can tell you."
"Let"s look at them."
Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity of her feet.
"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."
"It wasn"t half as difficult as it looks."
"You"re a wonderful Kiddy, but you don"t know what pa.s.sion is, and you may thank your stars you don"t."
"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn"t for Papa. Papa"s a perfect safeguard against pa.s.sion. I know beforehand that as long as he"s there, pa.s.sion isn"t any good. You see," she explained, "it"s so simple. I wouldn"t marry anybody who wouldn"t live with Papa. And n.o.body would marry me if he had to."
"I see. Is it very bad?"
"Pretty bad. He dreams and dreams _and_ dreams."
"Won"t that ever be better?"
Laura shook her head.
"It may be worse. There are things--that I"m afraid of."
"What things, Kiddy, what things?"
"Oh! I don"t know----"
"How on earth do you go on?"
"I shut my eyes. And I sit tight. And I go."
"Poor Kiddy. You give me a pain."
"I"m quite happy. I"m working like ten horses to get things done while I can." She smiled indomitably. "I"m glad Tanks didn"t care for me. I couldn"t have let him in for all these--horrors. As for his marrying--I didn"t want you to have him because he wouldn"t have been good for you, but I _did_ want Jinny to."
"And you don"t mind--now?"
"There are so many things to mind. It"s one nail driving out another."
"It"s all the nails being hammered in at once, into your little coffin,"
said Nina. She drew closer to her, she put her arms round her and kissed her.
"Oh, don"t! _Don"t_ be sorry for me. I"m all right."
She broke from Nina"s hand that still caressed her.
"I am, really," she said. "I like Jinny better than anybody in the world except you and Tanks. And I like Nina better than all the Tankses that ever were."
("Nice Kiddy," Nina whispered into Laura"s hair.)
"And now Tanks is married, he can"t take you away from me."
"n.o.body else can," said Nina. "We"ve stuck together. And we"ll stick."
XV
The creation of Hambleby moved on in a procession of superb chapters.
Jane Holland was once more certain of herself, as certain as she had been in the days when she had shared the splendid obscurity of George Tanqueray. Her celebrity, by removing her from Tanqueray, had cut the ground from under her feet. So far from being uplifted by it, she had felt that there must be something wrong with her since she was celebrated and George Tanqueray was not. It was Tanqueray"s belief in her that had kept her up. It consoled her with the thought that her celebrity was, after all, only a disgusting accident. For, through it all, in spite of the silliness of it, he did believe. He swore by her.
He staked his own genius upon hers. As long as he believed in it she could not really doubt. But now for the first time since she was celebrated she believed in it herself.
She no longer thought of Tanqueray. Or, if she did think of him, her thinking no longer roused in her the old perverse, pa.s.sionate jealousy.
She no longer hated her genius because he had cared for it. She even foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.
She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray.
It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the blood and nerves and of the splendour of the pa.s.sions. And to those who did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme surrender.
Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable condition.
The quiet, ina.s.sailable knowledge of this truth had underlain Tanqueray"s most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he said, "The Lord our G.o.d is a consuming fire."
Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame.
She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life, and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of pa.s.sion, to recover the perfection of the pa.s.sionless hour. She had attained only the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth whole.
She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing amazing things.
There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing breathed but Hambleby. His presence destroyed those poignant, almost tangible memories of Tanqueray, those fragments of Tanqueray that adhered to the things that he had looked upon and touched. She was no longer afraid of these things or of the house that contained them. She no longer felt any terror of her solitude, any premonition of trouble as she entered the place. Away from it she found herself longing for its stillness, for the very sight of the walls that folded her in this incomparable peace.
She had never known what peace was until now. If she had she would have been aware that her state was too exquisite to last. She had not allowed for the flight of the days and for the inevitable return of people, of the dreadful, clever little people. By November they had all come back.
They had found her behind her barricades. They approached, some tentatively, some insistently, some with an ingenuity no foresight could defeat. One by one they came. First Caro Bickersteth, and Caro once let in, it was impossible to keep out the rest. For Caro believed in knowing the right people, and in the right people knowing each other. It was Caro, last year, who had opened the innumerable doors by which they had streamed in, converging upon Jane. And they were more terrible than they had been last year, braced as they were by their sense of communion, of an intimacy so established that it ignored reluctance and refusal. They had given introductions to each other, and behind them, on the horrific verge, Jane saw the heaving, hovering mult.i.tudes of the as yet unintroduced.
By December she realized again that she was celebrated; by January that she was hunted down, surrounded, captured, and alone.
For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray.
Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity, so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was.
And now, six months after George"s marriage, it was borne in upon her with appalling cert.i.tude that George was necessary to her, and that he was not there.
He had not even written to her since he married.
Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony, he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy.
Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after New Year"s day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not bring herself to write.
"My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven"t heard from you for centuries." (He must have expected, then, to hear.) "What"s the matter? Is it Book?"