Chapter 26

Not far from them Louis Levine, for John's benefit, calculated the possible proceeds of the new book. Louis smiled his mobile smile as he caught the last words of Henry's diagnosis. Henry might say what he liked. Neurosis, to that extent, was a valuable asset. He could do, Louis said, with some of it himself.

Brodrick, as he surveyed with Tanqueray the immensity of his wife's achievement, wondered whether, for all that, she had not paid too high a price. And Sophy Levine, who overheard him, whispered to Frances that it was he, poor dear, who paid.

Tanqueray got up and left the room. He had heard through it all the signal that he waited for, the sound of the opening of Jane's door.

Her eyes searched his at the very doorway. "Is it all right, George?" she whispered. Her hand, her thin hand, held his until he answered.

"It's tremendous."

"Do you remember two years ago--when you wouldn't drink?"

"I drank this time. I'm drunk, Jinny, drunk as a lord."

"I swore I'd make you drink, this time; if I died for it."

She leaned back in the corner of her couch, looking at him.

"Thank heaven you've never lied to me; because now I know."

"I wonder if you do. It's alive, Jinny; it's organic; it's been conceived and born." He brought his chair close to the table that stood beside her couch, a barrier between them. "It's got what we're all praying for--that divine unity----"

"I didn't think it could have it. _I_'m torn in pieces."

"You? I knew you would be."

"It wasn't the book."

"What was it?" he said fiercely.

"It was chiefly, I think, Mabel Brodrick's illness."

"_Whose_ illness?"

"John's wife's. You don't know what it means."

"I can see. You let that woman prey on you. She sucks your life. You're white; you're thin; you're ill, too."

She shook her head. "Only tired, George."

"Why do you do it? Why do you do it, Jinny?" he pleaded.

"Ah--I must."

He rose and walked up and down the room; and each time as he turned to face her he burst out into speech.

"What's Brodrick doing?"

She did not answer. He noticed that she never answered him when he spoke of Brodrick now. He paid no heed to the warning of her face.

"Why does he let his beastly relations worry you? You didn't undertake to marry the whole lot of them."

He turned from her with that, and she looked after him. The set of his shoulders was square with his defiance and his fury.

He faced her again.

"I suppose if _he_ was ill you'd have to look after him. I don't see that you're bound to look after his sisters-in-law. Why can't the Brodricks look after her?"

"They do. But it's me she wants."

He softened, looking down at her. But she did not see his look.

"You think," said she, "that it's odd of her--the last thing anybody could want?"

His face changed suddenly as the blood surged in it. He sat down, and stretched his arms across the table that was the barrier between them. His head leaned towards her with its salient thrust, its poise of impetus and forward flight.

"If you knew," he said, "the things you say----"

His hands made a sudden movement, as if they would have taken hers that lay nerveless and helpless, almost within their grasp.

She drew her hands back.

"It's nearly ten o'clock," she said.

"Do you want me to go?"

She smiled. "No. Only--they'll say, if I sit up, that that's what tires me."

"And does it? Do _I_ tire you?"

"You never tire me."

"At any rate I don't destroy you; I don't prey on you."

"We all prey on each other. _I_ prey on you."

"You? Oh--Jinny!"

Again there was a movement of his hands, checked, this time, by his own will.

"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 embarrassments 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 competition 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, "Damn 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 passed 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 passed 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 space 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, passionately, 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----"

"I can keep off kissing anything," said he.

Jane asked if he would ring for the nurse to take the baby.

Tanqueray was glad when he went. It had just dawned on him that he didn't like to see Jinny with a baby; he didn't like to see her preoccupied with Brodrick's son, adoring, positively adoring, and caressing Brodrick's son.

At the same time it struck him that it was a pity that Rose had never had a baby; but he didn't carry the thought far enough to reflect that Rose's baby would be his son. He wondered if he could persuade Jinny to send the baby home and stay for dinner.

He apologized for not having been there to receive her. Jane replied that Rose had entertained her.

"You mean that you were entertaining Rose?"

"We were entertaining each other."

"And now you've got to entertain me."

She was going to when Rose interrupted (her mind was still running on the baby).

"If I was you," said she, "I shouldn't leave 'im much to that Gertrude."

"What?" (It was Tanqueray who exclaimed.) "Not to the angel in the house?"

"I don't know about angels, but if it was me I wouldn't leave 'im, or she'll get a hold on 'im."

"Isn't he," said Tanqueray, "a little young?"

But Rose was very serious.

"It's when 'e's young she'll do the mischief."

"My dear Rose," said Jane, "whatever do you think she'll do?"

"She'll estrange 'im, if you don't take care."

"She couldn't."

"Couldn't? She'll get a 'old before you know where you are."

"But," said Jane quietly, "I do know where I am."

"Not," Rose insisted, "when you're away, writin'."

Tanqueray saw Jane's face flush and whiten. He looked at Rose.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said, with anger under his breath.

Jane seemed not to know that he was there. She addressed herself exclusively to Rose.

"What do you suppose happens when I'm--away?"

"You forget."

"Never!" said Jane. The passion of her inflection was lost on Rose who brooded.

"You forget," she repeated. "And she doesn't."

Involuntarily Tanqueray looked at Jane and Jane at Tanqueray. There were moments when his wife's penetration was terrible.

Rose was brooding so profoundly that she failed to see the passing of that look.

"If it was me," she murmured in a thick voice, a voice soft as her dream, "if it was my child----"

Tanqueray's nerves gave way. "But it isn't." He positively roared at her. "And it never will be."

Rose shrank back as if he had struck her. Jane's heart leaped to her help.

"If it was," she said, "it would have the dearest, sweetest little mother."

At that, at the sudden tenderness of it coming after Tanqueray's blow, Rose gave a half-audible moan and got up quickly and left the room. They heard her faltering steps up-stairs in the room above them.

It was then that Tanqueray asked Jane if she would stay and dine with them. She could send a note to Brodrick by the nurse.

She stayed. She felt that if she did not Tanqueray would bully Rose.

Rose was glad she stayed. She was afraid to be left alone that evening with George. She was dumb before him, and her dumbness cut Jane to the heart. Jane tried to make her talk a little during dinner. They talked about the Protheros when Susan was in the room, and when she was out of it they talked about Susan.

This was not wise of Jane, for it exasperated Tanqueray. He wanted to talk to Jane, and he wanted to be alone with her to talk.

After dinner they went up to his study to look at some books he had bought. The best of selling your own books, he said, was that you could buy as many as you wanted of other people's. He had now got as many as he wanted. They were more than the room would hold. All that he could not get on to the shelves were stacked about the floor. He stood among them smiling.

Rose did not smile. The care of Tanqueray's study was her religion.

"How am I to get round them 'eaps to dust?" said she.

"You don't get round them, and you don't dust," said Tanqueray imperturbably.

"Then--them books'll breed a fever."

"They will. But _you_ won't catch it."

Rose lingered, and he suggested that it would be as well if she went down-stairs and made the coffee. She needn't send it up till nine, he said. It was now five minutes past eight.

She went obediently.

"She knows she isn't allowed into this room," said Tanqueray to Jane.

"You speak of her as if she was a dog," said she. She added that she would have to go at half-past eight. There was a train at nine that she positively must catch.

He had to go down and ask Rose to come back with the coffee soon. Jane was glad that she had forced on him that act of humility.

For the moments that she remained alone with him she wandered among his books. There were some that she would like to borrow. She talked about them deliberately while Tanqueray maddened.

He walked with her to the station.

She turned on him as they dipped down the lane out of sight and hearing.

"George," she said, "I'll never come and see you again if you bully that dear little wife of yours."

"I?--Bully her?"

"Yes. You bully her, you torture her, you terrify her till she doesn't know what she's doing."

"I'm sorry, Jinny."

"Sorry? Of course you're sorry. She slaves for you from morning till night."

"That's not my fault. I stopped her slaving and she got ill. Why, it was you--_you_--who made me turn her on to it again."

"Of course I did. She loves slaving for you. She'd cut herself in little pieces. She'd cook herself--deliciously--and serve herself up for your dinner if she thought you'd fancy her."

"You're right, Jinny. I never ought to have married her."

"I didn't say you never ought to have married her. I say you ought to be on your knees now you have married her. She's ten thousand times too good for you."

"You're right, Jinny. You always were right, you always will be damnably right."

"And you always will be--oh dear me--so rude."

He looked in her face like a whipped dog trying to reinstate himself in favour, as far as Tanqueray could look like a whipped dog.

"Let me carry those books for you," he said.

"You may carry the books, but I don't like you, Tanks."

His devil, the old devil that used to be in him, looked at her then.

"You used to like me," he said.

But Jinny was beyond its torment. "Of course I liked you. I liked you awfully. You were another person then."

He said nothing to that.

"Forgive me, George," she said presently. "You see, I love your little wife."

"I love you for loving her," he said.

"You may go on loving me for that. But you needn't come any further with me. I know my way."

"But I want to come with you."

"And I, unfortunately, want to be alone."

"You shall. I'll walk behind you--as many yards as you like behind you. I've got to carry the books."

"Bother the books. I'll carry them."

"You'll do nothing of the sort."

They walked together in silence till the station doors were in sight. He meant to go with her all the way to Putney, carrying the books.

"I wish," he said, "I knew what would really please you."

"You do know," she said.

A moment passed. Tanqueray stopped his stride.

"I'll go back and beg her pardon--_now_."

She gave him her hand. He went back; and between them they forgot the books.

Though it was not yet ten the light was low in Rose's bedroom. Rose had gone to bed. He went up to her room. He raised the light a little, quietly, and stood by her bedside. She lay there, all huddled, her body rounded, her knees drawn up as if she had curled into herself in her misery. One arm was flung out on the bed-clothes, the hand hung cramped over a fold of blanket; sleep only had slackened its convulsive grip. Her lips were parted, her soft face was relaxed, blurred, stained in scarlet patches. She had cried herself to sleep.

And as he looked at her he remembered how happy she had been playing with Jinny's baby; and how his brutal words had struck her in the hurt place where she was always tender.

His heart smote him. He undressed quietly and lay down beside her.

She stirred; and, finding him there, gave a little cry and put her arms about him.

And then he asked her to forgive him, and she said there was nothing to forgive.

She added with her seeming irrelevance, "You didn't go all the way to Putney then?"

She knew he had meant to go. She knew, too, that he had been sent back.

XLIX

On her return Jane went at once to Brodrick in his study. The editor was gloomy and perturbed. He made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her excuse that Tanqueray had kept her. Presently, after some moments of heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his gloom. He was worried about the magazine. Levine was pestering him. When she reminded him that Louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal Jews behind him, and they were running the concern. You could buy him out, you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if you hadn't, where were you? It had been stipulated that the editor was to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its way, his hand had been pretty free. But it wasn't paying; and Levine was insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit.

He did not tell her that Levine's point was that they had not bargained for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. If they were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends; which, Levine said, was about what it amounted to.

That was what was bothering Brodrick; for it was Jane's hand, in its freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. It had helped him to realize his expensive dream. The trouble, this time, he told her, was a tale of Nina Lempriere's.

Jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her friend's name.

"What, Nina? Has she----?"