Nina"s face drew back as if Laura had struck her. Its haggard, smitten look spoke as if Nina had spoken. "What do you want to know him for?" it said.
"He hasn"t got to be seen," said Nina herself savagely. She was overwrought. "He"s got to be heard. You"ve heard him."
"It"s because I"ve heard him that I want to see him."
Nina paused in her ferocious stride and glanced at the little thing. The small face of her friend had sunk from its ecstasy to its sullen suffering, its despondency, its doubt.
Nina was stung by compa.s.sion.
"Do you want to see him very much?" she said.
"I wouldn"t ask you if I didn"t."
"All right. You shall. I"ll make him come."
XXIII
Within a fortnight of that reading Prothero received a letter from George Tanqueray. It briefly told him that the lady whom he had refused to meet had prevailed upon her publishers to bring out his poems in the autumn, at their own and not Prothero"s expense.
How the miracle had been worked he couldn"t conceive, and Tanqueray was careful to leave him unenlightened. It had been simply a stock instance of Jinny"s way. Jinny, whose affairs were in Tanqueray"s hands, had been meditating an infidelity to Messrs. Molyneux, by whom Tanqueray vehemently a.s.sured her she had been, and always would be, "had." They had "had" her this time by the sacrificial ardour with which they soared to her suggestion that Mr. Prothero should be published. Miss Holland must, they urged, be aware that Mr. Prothero had been rejected by every other firm in London. They were sure that she realized the high danger of their enterprise and that she appreciated the purity of their enthusiasm. The poems were, as she knew, so extraordinary that Mr.
Prothero had not one chance in a thousand even with the small public that read poetry. Still, they were giving Mr. Prothero his fractional opportunity, because of their enthusiasm and their desire to serve Miss Holland. They understood that Miss Holland was thinking of leaving them.
They would not urge her to remain, but they hoped that, for her own sake, she would reconsider it.
Jane had reconsidered it and had remained.
"You understand clearly, Jinny," Tanqueray had said, "that you"re paying for Prothero"s poems?"
To that Jinny had replied, "It"s what I wanted to do, and there wasn"t any other way."
Owen Prothero could no longer say that n.o.body knew his name. His innocence was unaware of the secret processes by which names are made and unmade; but he had gathered from Nina that her friends had created for him a rumour and reputation which he persistently refused to incarnate by his presence among them. He said he wanted to preserve his innocence. Tanqueray"s retirement was not more superb or more indignant; Tanqueray had been fortuitously and infrequently "met"; but n.o.body met Prothero anywhere. Even Jane Holland, the authentic fount of rumour, had not met him.
It was hard on Jane that she who was, as she piteously pleaded, the prey of all the destroyers, should not be allowed a sight of this incomparable creator. But she respected the divine terror that kept Nina"s unlicked Celt outside women"s drawing-rooms.
She understood, however, that he was to be seen and seen more often than not, at Tanqueray"s rooms in Torrington Square. Tanqueray"s wife did not count. She was not the sort of woman Prothero could be afraid of, and she was guiltless of having any drawing-room. Jane remembered that it was a long time since she had seen Tanqueray"s wife.
One afternoon, about five o"clock, she called in Torrington Square. She approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy little face of Tanqueray"s wife looking out of the ground-floor window.
But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across, obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before the door.
Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs.
Tanqueray.
She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the doctor was.
"Don"t go, Jinny," he said.
She searched his face.
"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"
He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from him.
"Oh, dear me, no," he said.
"May I see her--afterwards?"
"Of course you may see her. But"--he smiled--"if you"ll come up-stairs you"ll see Prothero."
She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high above Rose and her movements and her troubles.
He paused at the door.
"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of you."
"You think I"d better keep clear of him?"
"No. I think he"d better keep clear of you."
"George, is he really there?"
"Yes, he"s there all right. He"s caught. He"s trapped. He can"t get away from you."
"I won"t," she said. "It"s dishonourable."
He laughed and they went in.
The poet was sitting in Tanqueray"s low chair, facing them. He rose at some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by the guile she judged dishonourable.
Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.
They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that had no awkwardness and no embarra.s.sment. It was intimate, rather, and vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.
It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was obliquely attentive to his face, rugged and battered by travel, sallow now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had pa.s.sed through strange climates.
It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself secretly defining it. Tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion.
When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made swift by hunger.
Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also suggested the thing she at last said.
"I"m distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it"s nothing serious."
Prothero"s face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray"s had been.
"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn"t cut out for a contemplative, though she"s in a fair way of becoming a saint and----"