"What, Nina? Has she----?"
Brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. And Levine had put his silly foot down. He had complained that the tale was gruesome (they had set it up; it was quite a short thing); Nina"s tales usually were gruesome; and Nina"s price was stiff. He didn"t know about the price; perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the tale----! Brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with him of profound excitement--the tale was a corker. He didn"t care if it _was_ gruesome. It was magnificent.
"More so than her last?" Jane murmured.
"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He"d be eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn"t publish it. He wished she"d look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn"t be.
She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had said. Nina had more than found herself.
"Of course," she said, "you"ll publish it."
"Of course I shall. I"m not going to knuckle under to Louis and his beastly Jews--with a chance like that. I don"t care if the price _is_ stiff. It"s a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don"t get once in a hundred years. It"ll send up the standard. That"s of course why he funks it."
He pondered. "There"s something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing like this."
Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.
They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.
She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.
Nina met her friend"s reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not told her she was coming, because she didn"t know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane.
She hadn"t read her book, and wasn"t going to until she had fairly done with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it.
Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only save herself by keeping clear of her.
"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough--after that last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."
"You"re the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always just ahead of me. I"m exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if I never could keep up."
"But why? There"s no comparison between your pace and mine."
"It"s not your pace, Jinny, it"s your handicap that frightens me."
"My handicap?"
"Well--a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I"ve got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me."
"If I did win, wouldn"t it prove that the handicap wasn"t what you thought it?"
Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.
"That"s what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn"t any handicap. That"s why I want to win."
Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions.
She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.
But the conditions, she said aloud, were n.o.body"s business but your own.
She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art _was_ a handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.
The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.
"Does it seem to you, then, that _I_"ve defeated my end?" Nina pressed her point home implacably.
Jane strung herself to the pain of it.
"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."
She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina"s eyes.
Nina was left meditating on her friend"s beautiful hypocrisy.
It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without encountering the vengeance of the jealous G.o.d. Nina could not suppose that Jinny"s G.o.d was less jealous than George Tanqueray"s or her own.
And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the righteousness of the artist in Jinny"s plea to be judged only by the results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she, Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of Jinny. That was how she measured her.
It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn"t stop Jinny, any more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had swept on, reckless, regardless.
It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the idea of rivalry was absurd.
Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.
She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane"s book, because Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision of her own.
If the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her friends were bent on frustrating them. Within five minutes after Jane Brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, Nina received a telegram from Owen Prothero. He was coming to see her at five o"clock. It was now half-past four.
This was what she had dreaded more than anything. Her fear of it had kept her out of London for two years.
Owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. It suggested that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while it warned her not to miss him if she did. She debated the point for the half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him.
Prothero arrived punctually to his hour. She found no change in his aspect or his manner. If he looked happy, he looked it in his own supersensual way. Marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness, nor touched his incorruptible refinement.
He considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. Her mountains, he said, evidently agreed with her.
She inquired after Laura, and was told that she would not know her. The Kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. She was almost plump; she had almost a colour.
"She wants to see you," he said. "She told me I was to bring you back with me."
Ages pa.s.sed before she answered. "I don"t think, really, Owen, that I can come."
"Why not?" he said.
She would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge that with Owen lying was no good. She resented his asking her why not, when he knew perfectly well why.
"Why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?"
She smiled. "You seem determined to get everything you want."
She had a good mind to tell him straight out, there and then, that he couldn"t have everything he wanted, not with her, at any rate. He couldn"t have it both ways. But you do not say these things; and if she could judge by the expression of his face what she had said had hit him hard enough.