"Five minutes past ten, George. They"ll come and carry me out if I don"t go."
"Who will?"
"All of them, probably. They"re all in there."
"It"s preposterous. They don"t care what they do to you themselves; they bore you brutally; they tire you till you"re sick; they hand you on to each other, to be worried and torn to pieces; and they drag you from anybody who does you good. They don"t let you have five minutes"
pleasure, Jinny, or five minutes" peace. Good Lord, what a family!"
"Anyhow, it"s _my_ family."
"It isn"t. You haven"t got a family; you never had and you never will have. They don"t belong to you, and you don"t belong to any of them, and you know it----"
She rose. "All the same, I"m going to them," she said. "And that reminds me, how"s Rose?"
"Perfectly well, I believe."
"It"s ages since I saw Rose. Tell her--tell her that I"m coming to see her."
"When?" he said.
"Some day next week."
"Sunday?"
He knew, and she knew that he knew, that Sunday was Brodrick"s day.
"No, Monday. Monday, about four."
XLVIII
Tanqueray was realizing more and more that he was married, and that his marriage had been made in that heaven where the spirit of creative comedy abides. In spite of the superb sincerity of his indifference, he found it increasingly difficult to ignore his wife. It had, in fact, become impossible now that people no longer ignored _him_. Rose, as the wife of an obscurity, could very easily be kept obscure. But, by a peculiar irony, as Tanqueray"s genius became recognized, Rose, though not exactly recognized in any social sense, undoubtedly tended to appear. Tanqueray might dine "out" without her (he frequently did), but when it came to asking people back again she was bound to be in evidence. Not that he allowed himself to tread the ruinous round. He still kept people at arm"s length. Only people were more agreeably disposed towards George Tanqueray recognized than they had been towards George Tanqueray obscure, and he in consequence was more agreeably disposed towards them. Having made it clearly understood that he would not receive people, that he barred himself against all intrusions and approaches, occasionally, at the length of his arm, he did receive them.
And they immediately became aware of Rose.
That did not matter, considering how little _they_ mattered. The nuisance of it was that he thus became aware of her himself. Rose at the head of his table, so conspicuously and yet so fortuitously his wife, emphasizing her position by her struggles to sustain it, Rose with her embarra.s.sments and solecisms, with her lost innocence in the matter of her aspirates, agonized now by their terrified flight and by her own fluttering efforts at recapture, Rose was not a person that anybody could ignore, least of all her husband.
As long as she had remained a servant in his house he had been unaware of her, or aware of her only as a presence beneficent, invisible, inaudible. Here again his celebrity, such as it was, had cursed him. The increase in Tanqueray"s income, by enabling them to keep a servant, had the effect of throwing Rose adrift about the house. As the mistress of it, with a maid under her, she was not quite so invisible, nor yet so inaudible as she had been.
It seemed to Tanqueray that his acuter consciousness dated from the arrival of that maid. Rose, too, had developed nerves. The maid irritated Rose. She put her back up and rubbed her the wrong way in all the places where she was sorest. For Rose"s weakness was that she couldn"t tolerate any compet.i.tion in her own line. She couldn"t, as she said, abide sitting still and seeing the work taken out of her hands, seeing another woman clean _her_ house, and cook _her_ husband"s dinner, and she knowing that she could do both ten times as well herself. She appealed to Tanqueray to know how he"d like it if she was to get a man in to write his books for him. She was always appealing to Tanqueray.
When George wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with Susan, and declared that Susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, Rose said that was the worst of it. Susan was much too superior for her. She could see well enough, she said, that Susan knew that she was not a lady, and she could see that George knew that she knew. Else why did he say that Susan was superior? And sometimes George would be beside himself with fury and would roar, "d.a.m.n Susan!" And sometimes, but not often, he would be a torment and a tease. He would tell Rose that he loved Susan, that he adored Susan, that he couldn"t live without her. He might part with Rose, but he couldn"t possibly part with Susan. Susan was the symbol of his prosperity. Without Susan he would not feel celebrated any more.
And sometimes Rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled her with Susan. And Tanqueray cursed Susan in his heart, as the cause of Rose"s increasing tendency to conversation.
It was there that she encroached. She invaded more and more the guarded territory of silence. She annexed outlying pieces of Tanqueray"s sacred time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to.
He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the habit.
And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in.
Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray"s superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have pa.s.sed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful.
Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury on Tanqueray"s part and on Rose"s a long period of dumbness.
He was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing Jane Brodrick. From every meeting with Jane he came to her gloomy and depressed and irritable. And the meetings were growing more frequent. He saw Jane now at less and less intervals. He couldn"t go on without seeing her. A fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. He had a sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that pa.s.sed between the night (it was a Thursday) when he had dined at Putney and Monday afternoon when Jane had promised that she would come to Hampstead.
On Monday a telegram arrived for Tanqueray. The brisk director of a great publishing firm in New York desired (at the last moment before his departure) an appointment with the novelist for that afternoon. The affair was of extreme importance. The American meant business. It would be madness not to see him, even though he should miss Jinny.
All morning Tanqueray sulked because of that American.
Rose was cowed by his mood. At luncheon she prepared herself to sit dumb lest she should irritate him. She had soft movements that would have conciliated a worse ruffian than Tanqueray in his mood. She rebuked the importunities of Joey in asides so tender that they couldn"t have irritated anybody. But Tanqueray remained irritated. He couldn"t eat his luncheon, and said so.
And then Rose said something, out loud. That wasn"t her fault, she said.
And Tanqueray told her that he hadn"t said it was. Then, maddened by her thought, she (as she put it to herself afterwards) fair burst with it.
"I wish I"d never set eyes on that Susan!" said she.
Tanqueray at the moment was trying to make notes in his memorandum-book.
He might be able to cut short that interview if he started with all his points clear.
"Oh--_hold_ your tongue," said Tanqueray.
"I _am_ "oldin" it," said Rose.
He smiled at that in spite of himself. He was softened by its reminder of her submissive dumbness, by its implication that there were, after all, so many things she might have said and hadn"t.
Having impressed upon her that she was on no account to let Mrs.
Brodrick go till he came back, he rushed for his appointment.
By rushing away from it, cutting it very short indeed, he contrived to be back again at half-past four. Susan informed him that Mrs. Brodrick had come. She had arrived at four with the baby and the nurse. She was in there with the baby.
"The baby?"
Sounds of laughter came from the dining-room, rendering it unnecessary for Susan to repeat her statement. She smiled sidelong at the door, as much as to say she had put her master on to a good thing. He would appreciate what he found in there.
In there he found Jinny crouching on a footstool; facing her, Rose knelt upon the floor. In the s.p.a.ce between them, running incessantly to and fro on his unsteady feet, was Brodrick"s little son. When he got to Jinny he flung his arms around her neck and kissed her twice, and then Rose said, "Oh, kiss poor Rose"; and when he got to Rose he flung his arms around her neck, too, and kissed her, once only. That was the distinction that he made. And as he ran he laughed, he laughed as if love were the biggest joke in all the world.
Tanqueray stood still in the doorway and watched, as he had stood once in the doorway of the house in Bloomsbury, watching Rose. Now he was watching Jinny. He thought he had never seen her look so divinely happy.
He watched Brodrick"s son and thought distastefully that when Brodrick was a baby he must have looked just like that.
And the little Brodrick ran to and fro, from Jinny to Rose and from Rose to Jinny, pa.s.sionately, monotonously busy, with always the same rapturous embrace from Brodrick"s wife and always the same cry from Tanqueray"s, "Kiss poor Rose!"
When Jane turned to greet Tanqueray, the baby clung to her gown. His mouth drooped as he realized that it was no longer possible to reach her face. Identifying Tanqueray as the cause of her remoteness, he stamped a baby foot at him; he distorted his features and set up a riotous howl.
Rose reiterated her sad cry as a charm to distract him. She pretended to cry too, because the baby wouldn"t look at her. He wouldn"t look at anybody till his mother took him in her arms and kissed him. Then, with his round face still flushing under his tears, he smiled at Tanqueray, a smile of superhuman forgiveness and reconciliation.
Rose gazed at them in a rapture.
"Well," said she, "how you can keep orf kissin" "im----"