When he had left her she sat a long while by the window, brooding on the thing that had happened to her a second time.
She had fallen in love; fallen with the fatality of the Lemprieres, and with the fine precipitate sweep of her own genius. And she had let herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces.
Owen"s nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences of her s.e.x. They were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and disembodied.
She knew that in his way, his remote and disembodied way, he cared for her. She knew that in whatever place he held her she was alone there.
She was the only woman for whom as yet he had cared. His way was not Tanqueray"s way. It was a way that kept her safe. She had sworn that there were to be no more George Tanquerays; and there were none. She had done with that.
Not but that she was afraid of Owen. She had taken possession of him in fear, a secret, unallowed possession, a holding with hands invisible, intangible. For she had wisdom, the sad wisdom of the frustrate; it, and the insight of her genius, told her that Owen would not endure a tie less spiritual than friendship. She knew George Tanqueray"s opinion of her. He was justified.
But though she sacrificed so far to spirit, it was her flesh and blood that shrank from the possible communion of Owen Prothero and Jane Holland. For Jinny, as Tanqueray said, had a way with her; and she knew Jinny"s way. Jinny would take Owen Prothero from her as she had taken George, not deliberately, not because she wanted to, but because she was Jinny and had a way. Besides, Jane could do for him what she with her bare genius could not do, and that thought was insupportable to Nina.
Yesterday she had been everything to him. Tomorrow Jane would be as much, or more.
And there were other women. They would be as ready as she to take possession. They would claim his friendship, and more than she had claimed, as the reward of having recognized him. There was no reason why she should give Owen up, and hand him over to them. And this was what she would do if she wrote that letter to Jane Holland.
She rose, and went to her desk and wrote it.
XXII
Jane answered at once. If Nina would bring Prothero to Kensington on Friday at four o"clock he would meet Hugh Brodrick.
But Prothero refused to be taken anywhere. He would not go hanging about women"s drawing-rooms. It was the sort of thing, he said, that did you harm. He wanted to hold on to what he"d got. It was tricky; it came and went; it was all he could do to hold on to it; and if he got mixed up with women he was done for. Of course he was profoundly grateful.
Nina a.s.sured Jane that Mr. Prothero was profoundly grateful. But he was, she said, a youth of an untamable shyness. He was happy in an Indian jungle or an African swamp, but civilized interiors seemed to sadden him. She therefore proposed that Tanqueray, who had the ma.n.u.script, should read it to an audience, chosen with absolute discretion. Two or three people, not a horrid crowd. For the poems, she warned her fairly, were all about G.o.d; and nowadays people didn"t care about G.o.d. Owen Prothero didn"t seem to care much about anything else. It was bound, she said, to handicap him.
Jane consented. After all, the poems were the thing. For audience she proposed Hugh Brodrick, Caro Bickersteth, Laura, and Arnott Nicholson.
Dear Nicky, who really was an angel, could appreciate people who were very far from appreciating him. He knew a mult.i.tude of little men on papers, men who write you up if they take a fancy to you and go about singing your praises everywhere. Nicky himself, if strongly moved to it, might sing. Nicky was a good idea, and there was Laura who also wrote for the papers.
The reading was fixed for Friday at four o"clock. Tanqueray, who detested readings, had overcome his repugnance for Prothero"s sake. His letter to Jane was one fiery eulogy of the poet. Brodrick and the others had accepted the unique invitation, Laura Gunning provisionally.
She would come like a shot, if she could get off, she said, but things were going badly at the moment.
Laura, however, was the first to arrive.
"Who is this man of Nina"s?" said she.
"I don"t know, my dear. I never heard of him till the other day."
She showed her Nina"s letter.
Laura"s face was sullen. It indicated that things were going very badly indeed; that Laura was at the end of her tether.
"But why G.o.d?" was her profane comment.
"Because, I imagine, he believes in him."
Laura declared that it was more than she did. She preferred not to believe in him, after the things that had been done to Papa. Her arraignment of the cosmic order was cut short by the arrival of George Tanqueray.
Nina appeared next. She was followed by Hugh Brodrick and by Caro Bickersteth. Nicky came last of all.
He greeted Jane a little mournfully. It was impossible for Nicky to banish altogether from his manner the delicate reproach he felt, impossible not to be alive to the atrocious irony that brought him here to be, as Jane said, an angel, to sit and listen to this fellow Prothero. He understood that they were all there to do something for Prothero. Brodrick had been brought solely for that purpose. Tanqueray, too, and Miss Bickersteth and Miss Gunning, and he. Jane Holland was always asking him to do things, and she had never done anything for him.
There was Brodrick"s magazine that he had never got into. Jane Holland had only got to speak to Brodrick, only got to say to him that Arnott Nicholson was a rather fine poet and the thing was done. It was a small thing and an easy thing for her to do.
It was not so much that he wanted her to do things. He even now shrank, in his delicacy, from the bare idea of her doing them. For all his little palpitating ambition, Nicky shrank. What hurt him was the unavoidable inference he drew. When a woman cares for a man she does not doom him to obscurity by her silence, and Jane least of all women.
He knew her. He knew what she had done for Tanqueray because she cared.
And now she was going to do things for Owen Prothero. Nicky sat dejected in the sorrow of this thought.
Brodrick also was oppressed. He was thinking of his magazine. It had been saved by Jane Holland, but he was aware that at this rate it could also be ruined by her. He knew what he was there for. He could see, with the terrible foreknowledge of the editor, that Prothero was to be pressed on him. He was to take him up as he had taken up Tanqueray. And from all that he had heard of Prothero he very much doubted whether he could afford to take him up. It was becoming a serious problem what he could afford. Levine was worrying him. Levine was insisting on concessions to the public, on popular articles, on politics. He had threatened, if his views were disregarded, to withdraw his financial co-operation, and Brodrick realized that he could not as yet afford to do without Levine. He might have to refuse to take Prothero up, and he hated to refuse Jane Holland anything.
As for Laura, she continued in her sullenness, antic.i.p.ating with resentment the a.s.sault about to be made upon her soul.
And Jane, who knew what pa.s.sed in Brodrick"s mind, was downcast in her turn. She did not want Brodrick to think that she was making use of him, that she was always trying to get at him.
Tanqueray, a transformed, oblivious Tanqueray, had unrolled the ma.n.u.script. They grouped themselves for the reading, Nina on a corner of the sofa; Jane lying back in the other corner; Laura looking at Tanqueray over Nina"s shoulder, with her chair drawn close beside her; Nicholson and Brodrick on other chairs, opposite the sofa, where they could look at Jane.
It was to this audience that Tanqueray first read young Prothero"s poems of the Vision of G.o.d; to Laura, who didn"t believe in G.o.d; to Jane, absorbed in her embarra.s.sments; to Nina, tortured by many pa.s.sions; to Hugh Brodrick, bearing visibly the financial burden of his magazine; to Caro Bickersteth, dubious and critical; to Nicky, struggling with the mean hope that Prothero might not prove so very good.
They heard of the haunting of the divine Lover; of the soul"s mortal terror; of the divine pursuit, of the flight and the hiding of the soul, of its crying out in its terror; of its finding; of the divine consummation; of its eternal vision and possession of G.o.d.
Nicky"s admirable judgment told him that as a compet.i.tive poet he was dished by Prothero. He maintained his att.i.tude of extreme depression.
His eyes, fixed on Jane, were now startled out of their agony into a sudden wonder at Prothero, now clouded again as Nicky manifestly said to himself, "Dished, dished, dished." He was dished by Prothero, dished by Tanqueray, reduced to sitting there, like an angel, conquering his desire, sublimely renouncing.
Brodrick"s head was bowed forward on his chest. His eyes, under his lowering brows, looked up at Jane"s, gathering from them her judgment of Owen Prothero. Prothero"s case defied all rule and precedent, and Brodrick was not prepared with a judgment of his own. Now and then a gleam of comprehension, caught from Jane, illuminated his face and troubled it. He showed, not as a happy creature of the flesh, but as a creature of the flesh made uncontent, divinely pierced by the sharp flame of the spirit.
It was so that Jane saw him, once, when his persistent gaze drew hers for an inconsiderable moment. Now and then, at a pause in the reader"s voice, Brodrick sighed heavily and shifted his position.
Nina leaned back as she listened, propping her exhausted body, her soul surrendered as ever to the violent rapture; caught now and carried away into a place beyond pain, beyond dreams, beyond desire.
And Laura, who did not believe in G.o.d, Laura sat motionless, her small insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over her face there pa.s.sed strange lights, strange tremors, a strange softening of the small indomitable mouth. It was more than ever the face of a child, of a flower, of all things innocent and open. But her eyes were the eyes of a soul whom vision makes suddenly mature. They stared at Tanqueray without seeing him, held by the divine thing they saw.
She still sat so, while Brodrick and Nicholson, like men released, came forward and congratulated the novelist as on some achievement of his own. They did it briefly, restrained by the silence that his voice had sunk into. Everybody"s nerves were tense, troubled by the vibrating pa.s.sage of the supersensual. The discussion that followed was spasmodic and curt.
Nicky charged into the silence with a voice of violent affirmation. "He _is_ great," said poor Nicky.
"Too great," said Brodrick, "for the twentieth century."
Nina reminded him that the twentieth century had only just begun, and Jane remarked that it hadn"t done badly since it had begun with him.
Laura said nothing; but, as they parted outside in the square, she turned eastwards with Nina.
"Does he really mind seeing people?" she said.
"It depends," said Nina. "He"s seen George."
"Would he mind your bringing him to see me some day? I want to know him."