Chapter 13

"No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him to meet that man of yours."

"What man?"

"That magazine man, Brodrick."

He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine! Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane about Prothero?"

"No."

A faint flame leaped in her face and died.

"You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?"

"I haven't seen her for six months."

"Is that your fault or hers?"

"Neither."

"He's had to wait, then, six months?"

There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.

"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her."

Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.

"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.

"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."

Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. He was sorry for her torture. He lingered.

"I'd go and speak to Brodrick to-morrow, only he loathes the sight of me, and I can't blame him, poor devil."

"It's no matter," she said. "I'll write to Jane Holland."

"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."

He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her. She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.

Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of his own youth.

He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.

It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina Lempriere.

The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper.

There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen him.

He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.

He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.

It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.

She would have suggested his meeting Brodrick, but that the way to Brodrick lay through Jane Holland. She remembered that the gods had thrust Jane Holland between her and George Tanqueray; and she was determined that they should put no woman between her and Owen Prothero. She had taken possession of him and she meant to keep him to herself. The supreme, irresistible temptation was to keep him to herself. It dominated her desire to serve his interests. But she had not refused him when he owned, shyly, that he would like to see George Tanqueray, the only living writer, he maintained, who had any passion for truth, any sweep, any clearness of vision.

It was Tanqueray, with that passion, that diabolical lucidity, that vision of his, who had made her realize the baseness of her secrecy. She had no right to keep Owen to herself. He was too valuable.

His innocence had given a sting to her remorse. He had remained so completely satisfied with what she had done for him, so wholly unaware of having been kept obscure when celebrity was possible. Things came, he seemed to say, or they didn't come. If you were wise you waited.

With his invincible patience he was waiting now, in her room up-stairs, standing before the bookcase with his back to the door. He stood absolutely still, his head and shoulders bowed over the book he was manifestly not reading. In this attitude he had an air of masterly indifference to time, of not caring how long he waited, being habituated to extravagant expenditure of moments and of days. Absorbed in some inward and invisible act, he was unaware of Nina as she entered.

She called him to the supper she had made ready for him. He swung round, returning as it were from an immense distance, and followed her.

He was hungry, and she had a fierce maternal joy in seeing him eat. It was after supper that they talked, as they sat by the window in the outer room, looking at the river, a river of night, lamp-starred.

Nina began it. "Owen," she said, "how did George Tanqueray strike you?"

He paused before he spoke. "I think," he said, "I never in my life saw anybody more on the look-out. It's terrible, that prowling genius, always ready to spring."

"I know," she said, "he sees everything."

"No, Nina, he doesn't. He's a man whose genius has made away with one half of his capacity for seeing. That's his curse! If your eyes are incessantly looking out they lose the power of looking in."

"And yet, he's the only really great psychologist we've got. He and Jane Holland."

"Yes, as they go, your psychologists. Tanqueray sees so much inside other people that he can't see inside himself. What's worse, I shouldn't think he'd see far inside the people who really touch him. It comes of perpetually looking away."

"You don't know him. How can you tell?"

"Because I never look away."

"Can you see what's going on inside _me_?"

"Sometimes. I don't always look."

"Can you help looking?"

"Of course you can."

"You _may_ look. I don't think I mind your looking. Why," she asked abruptly, "don't I mind?"

Her voice had an accent that betrayed her.

"Because there's nothing inside you that you're ashamed of."

She reddened with shame; shame of the fierce, base instinct that had made her keep him to herself. She knew that nothing escaped him. He had the keen, comprehending eyes of the physician who knows the sad secrets of the body; and he had other eyes that saw inward, that held and drew to confession the terrified, reluctant soul. She had an insane longing to throw herself at his feet in confession.

"Yes," she said, "but there are _things_----And yet----"

He stopped her. "Nothing, Nina, if you really knew yourself."

"Owen--it's not that. It's not because I don't know myself. It's because I know you. I know that, whatever there might be in me, whatever I did, however low I sank--if I could sink--your charity would be there to hold me up. And it wouldn't be your charity, either. I couldn't stand your charity. It wouldn't even be understanding. You don't understand me. It would be some knowledge of me that I couldn't have myself, that nobody but you could have. As if whatever you saw you'd say, 'That isn't really Nina.'"

"I should say, 'That's really Nina, so it's all right.'"

She paused, brooding on the possibilities he saw, that he was bound to see, if he saw anything. Did he, she wondered, really see what was in her, her hidden shames and insanities, the course of the wild blood that he knew must flow from all the Lemprieres to her? She lived, to be sure, the life of an ascetic and took it out in dreams. Yet he must see how her savage, solitary passion clung to him, and would not let go. Did he see, and yet did he not condemn her?

"Owen," she said suddenly, "do you mind seeing?"

"Sometimes I hate it. These aren't the things, you know, I want to see."

She lowered her eyes. Her nervous hand moved slowly to and fro along the window-sill, measuring her next words.

"What--do you want--to see?"

He rose to his feet and looked at her. At her, not through her, and she wondered, had he seen enough? It was as if he withdrew himself before some thought that stirred in her, menacing to peace.

"I can't tell you," he said. "I can't talk about it."

Then she knew what he meant. He was thinking of his vision, his vision of God.

He could not speak of it to her. She had never known him. This soul, with which her own claimed kindred, was hidden from her by all the veils of heaven.

"I know," she said. "Only tell me one thing. Was that what you went out to India and Central Africa to see?"

That drew him.

"No. I went out not to see it. To get away from it. I meant to give things their chance. That's why I went in for medicine. I wasn't going to shirk. I wanted to be a man. Not a long-haired, weedy thing in a soft hat."

"Was it any good?"

"Yes. I proved the unreality of things. I proved it up to the hilt. And I _did_n't shirk."

"But you wanted to escape, all the time?"

"I didn't escape. I couldn't. I couldn't catch cholera, or plague, _or_ sleeping sickness. I couldn't catch anything."

"You tried?"

"Oh, yes, I gave _myself_ a chance. That was only fair. But it was no use. I couldn't even get frightened."

"Owen--some people would say you were morbid."

"No, they wouldn't. They'd say I was mad. They _will_ say it when I've published those poems."

"Did you mind my showing them to George Tanqueray?"

"No. But it's no use. Nobody knows my name."

"May I show them to Jane Holland?"

"Show them to any one you like. It'll be no use either."

"Owen--does it never occur to you that any human being can be of use?"

"No." He considered the point. "No, I can't say it ever does."

He stood before her, wrapped in his dream, removed from her, utterly forgetful.

She had her moment of pain in contemplating him. He saw it in her face, and as it were came back to her.

"Don't imagine," he said, "that I don't know what _you_'ve done. Now that I do know you."

She turned, almost in anger. "I've done nothing. You don't know me." She added, "I am going to write to Jane Holland."

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 sex. 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 assured 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 manuscript, 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 God; and nowadays people didn't care about God. 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 multitude 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 God?" 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, anticipating with resentment the assault about to be made upon her soul.

And Jane, who knew what passed 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 manuscript. 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 God; to Laura, who didn't believe in God; to Jane, absorbed in her embarrassments; to Nina, tortured by many passions; 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 God.

Nicky's admirable judgment told him that as a competitive poet he was dished by Prothero. He maintained his attitude 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 God, Laura sat motionless, her small insurgent being stilled to the imperceptible rhythm of her breath. Over her face there passed 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 passage 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."

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 compassion.

"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.