Chapter 21

The date of the Event was fixed now, the fifteenth of July. It was like death. She had never thought of it as a personal experience so long as its hour remained far-off in time. But the terror of it was on her, now that the thing was imminent, that she could count the hours.

The day came, the Birthday, as Brodrick called it, of the Great Book. He had told Tanqueray long ago that it was the biggest thing she had done yet. He bore himself, this husband of Jane's, with an air of triumphant paternity, as if (Tanqueray reflected) he had had a hand in it. He had even sent Tanqueray an early copy. Tanqueray owned that the fellow was justified. He thought he could see very plainly Brodrick's hand, his power over the infatuated Jinny.

By way of celebrating the fifteenth he had asked Tanqueray to dinner.

The Levines were there and the John Brodricks, Dr. Henry Brodrick and Mrs. Heron. But for the presence of the novelist, the birthday dinner was indistinguishable, from any family festival of Brodricks. Solemn it was and ceremonial, yet intimate, relieved by the minute absurdities, the tender follies of people who were, as Tanqueray owned, incomparably untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness in the man.

And only the supreme levity of innocence could have devised and accomplished this amazing celebration. It took, Tanqueray said to himself, a mind like Brodrick's to be unaware of Jinny's tragedy, to be unaware of Jinny.

He himself was insupportably aware of her, as she sat, doomed and agonizing, in her chair at the head of Brodrick's table.

They had stuck him, of course, at her left, in the place of honour. Unprofitable as he was, they acknowledged him as a great man. He was there on the ground and on the sanction of his greatness. Nobody else, their manner had suggested, was great enough to be set beside Jinny in her splendid hour. His stature was prized because it gave the measure of hers. He was there also to officiate. He was the high priest of the unspeakable ritual. He would be expected presently to say something, to perform the supreme and final act of consecration.

And for the life of him he could not think of anything to say. The things he thought could not be said while he sat there, at Brodrick's table. Afterwards, perhaps, when he and she were alone, if she insisted.

But she would not insist. Far from it. She would not expect him to say anything. What touched him was her utter absence of any expectation, the candour with which she received his silence as her doom.

The ceremony was growing more and more awful. Champagne had been brought. They were going--he might have foreseen it--they were going to drink to the long life of the Book.

John Brodrick rose first, then Henry, then Levine. They raised their glasses. Jane's terrified eyes met theirs.

"To the Book!" they said. "To the Book!" Tanqueray found himself gazing in agony at his glass where the bubbles danced and glittered, calling him to the toast. For the life of him he could not rise.

Brodrick was drinking now, his eyes fixed upon his wife. And Tanqueray, for the life of him, could not help looking at Jane, to see how she would take it.

She took it well. She faced the torture smiling, with a courage that was proof, if he had wanted proof, of her loyalty to Brodrick. Her smile trembled as it met Brodrick's eyes across the table, and the tenderness of it went to Tanqueray's heart. She held out her glass; and as she raised it she turned and looked full in Tanqueray's face, and smiled again, steadily.

"To the Book!" she said. "To Nina Lempriere's book! You can drink now, George."

He met her look.

"Here's to you. You immortal Jinny."

Lucid and comprehending, over the tilted glass his eyes approved her, adored her. She flushed under the unveiled, deliberate gaze.

"Didn't I get you out of that nicely?" she said, an hour later, outside in the darkening garden, as she paced the terrace with him alone. The others, at Brodrick's suggestion, had left them to their communion. Brodrick's idea evidently was that the novelist would break silence only under cover of the night.

"Yes," he said. "It was like your sweetness."

"You can't say," she continued, "that I'm not appreciated in my family."

Through the dark, as her face flashed towards him, he saw the little devil that sat laughing in her eyes.

"You needn't be afraid to talk about it," she said. "And you needn't lie to me. I know it's a tragedy."

He had never lied to her. It was not in him to fashion for her any tender lie.

"It's worse than a tragedy. It's a sin, Jinny. And that's what I would have saved you from. Other people can sin and not suffer. You can't. There's your tragedy."

She raised her head.

"There shall be no more tragedies."

He went on as if he had not heard her. "It wouldn't have mattered if it had been bad all through. But neither you nor I, Jinny, have ever written, probably we never shall write, anything to compare with the beginning of that book. My God! To think that there were only six months--six months--between that beginning and that end."

She smiled, saying to herself, "Only six months. Yes. But what months!"

"You've killed a masterpiece," he said, "between you."

"Do you mean Hugh?" she said. "What had he to do with it?"

"He married you."

"My crime was committed before he married me."

"Exactly." She was aware of the queer, nervous, upward jerk of his moustache, precluding the impermissible--"When you were in love with him."

Her face darkened as she turned to him.

"Let's talk about Nina's book. George--there isn't anybody like her. And I knew, I knew she'd do it."

"Did you know that she did it before she saw Prothero."

"I know."

"And that she's never written a line since?"

"When she does it will be immense. Because of him."

"Possibly. She hasn't married him."

"After all, George, if it comes to that, you're married too."

"Yes. But I married a woman who can't do me any harm."

"Could anybody."

She stood still there, on the terrace, fronting him with the scorn of her question.

He did not answer her at first. His face changed and was silent as his thought. As they paced up and down again he spoke.

"I don't mind, Jinny; if you're happy; if you're really content."

"You see that I am."

Her voice throbbed. He caught the pure, the virginal tremor, and knew it for the vibration of her soul. It stirred in him a subtle, unaccountable pang.

She paused, brooding.

"I shall be," she said, "even if I never do anything again."

"Nothing," he assured her, "can take from you the things you have done. Look at Hambleby. He's enough. After all, Jinny, you might have died young and just left us that. We ought to be glad that, as it is, we've got so much of you."

"So much----"

Almost he could have said she sighed.

"Nothing can touch Hambleby or the genius that made him."

"George--do you think it'll ever come back to me?"

She stood still again. He was aware now, through her voice, of something tense, something perturbed and tormented in her soul. He rejoiced, for it was he who had stirred her; it was he who had made her feel.

"Of course," he said, "it'll come back. If you choose--if you let it. But you'll have to pay your price."

She was silent. They talked of other things. Presently the John Brodricks, the Levines and Mrs. Heron came out into the garden and said good-night, and Tanqueray followed them and went.

She found Hugh closeted with Henry in the library where invariably the doctor lingered. Brodrick made a sign to his brother-in-law as she entered.

"Well," he said, "you've had your talk."

"Oh yes, we've had it."

She lay back in her seat as if exhausted by hard physical exercise, supporting the limp length of her arms on the sides of the chair.

The doctor, after a somewhat prolonged observation of her posture, remarked that she should make a point of going to bed at ten.

Brodrick pleaded the Birthday of the Book. And at the memory of the intolerable scene, and of Tanqueray's presence in it, her agony broke out.

"Don't talk about it. I don't want ever to hear of it again."

"What's he been saying to you?" said Brodrick.

"He'd no need to say anything. Do you suppose I don't know? Can't you see how awful it is for me?"

Brodrick raised the eyebrows of innocence amazed.

"It's as if I'd brought something deformed and horrible into the world----"

The doctor leaned forward, more than ever attentive.

"And you _would_ go and drag it out, all of you, when I was sitting there in shame and misery. And before George Tanqueray--How could you?"

"My dear Jinny----"

Brodrick was leaning forward too now, looking at her with affectionate concern.

Her brother-in-law rose and held out his hand. He detained hers for an appreciable moment, thoughtfully, professionally.

"I think," he said, "really, you'd better go to bed."

Outside in the hall she could hear him talking to Hugh.

"It's physical, it's physical," he said. "It won't do to upset her. You must take great care."

The doctor's voice grew mysterious, then inaudible, and she heard Hugh saying he supposed that it was so; and Henry murmured and mumbled himself away. Outside their voices still retreated with their footsteps, down the garden path, and out at the terrace gate. Hugh was seeing Henry home.

When he came back he found Jane in the library, sitting up for him. She was excited and a little flushed.

"So you've had _your_ talk, have you?" she said.

"Yes."

He came to her and put his hands on her forehead.

"Look here. You ought to have gone to bed."

She took his hand and drew him to her.

"Henry doesn't think I'm any good," she said.

"Henry's very fond of you."

She shook her head.

"To Henry I'm nothing but a highly interesting neurotic. He watches me as if he were on the look-out for some abnormal manifestation, with that delightful air he has of never being surprised at anything, as if he could calculate the very moment."

"My dear----"

"I'm used to it. My people took me that way, too. Only they hadn't a scientific turn of mind, like Henry. They didn't think it interesting; and they haven't Henry's angelic patience and forbearance. I was the only one of the family, don't you know, who wasn't quite sane; and yet--so unlike Henry--they considered me rather more responsible than any of them. I couldn't get off anything on the grounds of my insanity."

All the time, while thus tormenting him, she seemed profoundly occupied with the hand she held, caressing it with swift, nervous, tender touches.

"After all," she said, "I haven't turned out so badly; even from Henry's point of view, have I?"

He laughed. "What is Henry's point of view?"

She looked up at him quickly. "You know, and I know that Henry didn't want you to marry me."

The uncaptured hand closed over hers, holding it tighter than she herself could hold.

"No," she said. "I'm not the sort of woman Henry _would_ want you to marry. To please Henry----"

"I didn't marry to please Henry."

"To please Henry you should have married placable flesh and blood, very large and handsome, without a nerve in her body. The sort of woman who has any amount of large and handsome flesh-and-blood children, and lives to have them, thrives on them. That's Henry's idea of the right woman."

He admitted that it had once been his. He had seen his wife that was to be, placable, as Jinny said, sane flesh and blood, the mother of perfect children.

"And so, of course," said Jinny, "you go and marry me."

"Of course," said Brodrick. He said it in the voice she loved.

"Why didn't you marry her? _She_ wouldn't have bothered your life out." She paused. "On the other hand, she wouldn't have cared for you as I do. That sort of woman only cares for her children."

"Won't you care for them, Jinny?"

"Not as I care for you," said Jinny.

And to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and cried.

XXXVI

Tanqueray's book was out. Times and seasons mattered little in a case so hopeless. There was no rivalry between George Tanqueray and his contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce him in the same month as Jane Holland. They handled any work of his with the apathy of despair.

He himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. The perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would not be recognized. He did not suppose for a moment that it would be. _His_ tide would never turn.

His first intimation that it was turning came from Jane, in a pencil note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review. "Poor George," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. But it's coming--it's come. You needn't think you're going to be so very posthumous, after all." He marvelled that Jinny should attach so much importance to the printed word.

But Jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the tides. It looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected it, as if (as dear Jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being posthumous. Not only was he aware that this book of his was a masterpiece, but other people were aware. There was one man, even Tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would be placed. And lesser men followed, praising him; some with the constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered unwillingly under judicial pressure. And there were others, lesser still, men who had hated Tanqueray. They postured now in attitudes of prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of English letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. They would, if they could, have passed him by.

It was Caro Bickersteth who said of Tanqueray that he played upon the imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts.

And so it went on. One took off a conventional hat to Mr. Tanqueray's sincerity; and one complained of "Mr. Tanqueray's own somewhat undraped attitude toward the naked truth," observing that truth was not nearly so naked as "Mr. Tanqueray would have us think." Another praised "his large undecorated splendour." They split him up into all his attributes and antitheses. They found wonder in his union of tenderness and brutality. They spoke of "the steady beat of his style," and his touch, "the delicate, velvet stroke of the hammer, driven by the purring dynamo." Articles appeared ("The Novels of George Tanqueray;" "George Tanqueray: an Appreciation;" "George Tanqueray: an Apology and a Protest"); with the result that his publishers reported a slight, a very slight improvement in his sales.

Besides this alien tribute there was Caro Bickersteth's large column in the "Morning Telegraph," and Nicky's inspired eulogy in the "Monthly Review." For, somehow, by the eternal irony that pursued him, Nicky's reviews of other people could get in all right, while his own poems never did and never would. And there was the letter that had preceded Jinny's note, the letter that she wrote to him, as she said, "out of the abyss." It brought him to her feet, where he declared he would be glad to remain, whether Jinny's feet were in or out of the abyss.

Rose revived a little under this praise of Tanqueray. Not that she said very much about it to him. She was too hurt by the way he thrust all his reviews into the waste-paper basket, without showing them to her. But she went and picked them out of the waste-paper basket when he wasn't looking, and pasted all the good ones into a book, and burnt all the bad ones in the kitchen fire. And she brought the reviews, and made her boast of him to Aunt and Uncle, and told them of the nice sum of money that his book had "fetched," this time. This was all he had been waiting for, she said, before he took a little house at Hampstead.

For he had taken it at last, that little house. It was one of a terrace of three that stood high above the suburb, close to the elm-tree walk overlooking the West Heath. A diminutive brown-brick house, with jasmine climbing all over it, and a little square of glass laid like a mat in front of it, and a little garden of grass and flower-borders behind. Inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did Rose want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? But there was a beautiful study for Tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a kitchen for Rose below.

Rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that Tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to Laura Gunning's room in Camden Town, while Rose's dining-room recalled vividly Mrs. Henderson's dining-room at Fleet.

Though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about getting the furniture all in. The awful thing was moving Tanqueray and his books. It was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his birthday. And in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, Tanqueray announced that he had asked some people to dine that night.

"Wot, a dinner-party?" said Rose (she was trying not to cry).

"No, not a party. Only six."

"Six," said Rose, "_is_ a dinner-party."

"Twenty-six might be."

Rose sat down and looked at him and said, "Oh dear, oh dear." But she had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of anticipation.

Then Tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and said it was his birthday. He always did ask people to dine on his birthday. There would only be the Brodricks and Nicky and Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning--No, Laura Gunning couldn't come. That, with themselves, made six.

"Well----" said Rose placidly.

"I can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. But I thought it would be so nice to have them in our own house. When it's my birthday."

She smiled. She was taking it all in. In her eyes, for once, he was like a child, with his birthday and his party. How could she refuse him anything on his birthday? And all through the removal he had been so good.

Already she was measuring spaces with her eye.

"It'll 'old six," she said--"squeezin'."

She sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the dinner.

"There must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint, an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow."

"Oh Lord, no. Give 'em bread and cheese. They're none of 'em greedy."

"I'll give you something better than that," said Rose; "on your birthday--the idea!"

Dinner was to be at eight o'clock. The lateness of the hour enabled Mr. and Mrs. Eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the dishing-up. They had softened towards Tanqueray since he had taken that little house. That he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.

The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out, laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner, she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came she felt that she could talk a little.

For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear, patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?

"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me, and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my legs?"

Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room. But you should see 'is study."

He bowed an ear that did not hear her.

"Nicky did me well," said Tanqueray.

"I told you all the time," said Jane, "that Nicky knew."

"'E couldn't do anything without 'is study."

"Ah?" Nicky returned to the little woman, all attention.

"Aren't you proud of him? Isn't it splendid how he's brought them round? How they're all praising him?"

"So they'd ought to," Rose said. "'E's worked 'ard enough for it. The way 'e works! He'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if 'e could get fair hold of a word----"

They had all stopped talking to Tanqueray and were listening to Tanqueray's wife.

"Then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. And the study and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think."

Nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her; and Rose became aware that George's forehead was lowering upon her from the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence.

After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much had suddenly become dreadful to her.

Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over, when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a married woman.

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul, a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause. It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.