The Creators Part 75

She smiled. "Oh no, not that."

"It doesn't make you unhappy?"

"No, not if--if it wasn't for that you cared."

"You know it wasn't."

She knew. She had always known it.

They sat silent a long time. Round and about them Brodrick's garden slept, enchanted in darkness. Phantasmal, blanched by the dark, his flowers dreamed on the lawn. An immense tenderness filled her for Brodrick and all things that were his.

At last they rose and went hand in hand, slowly, through the garden towards the house.

Her state was bliss; and yet, through it all she had a sense of estrangement from herself, and of things closing round her.

x.x.xV

This sense came sharply to her one late afternoon in July. She was sitting out in the garden, watching Brodrick as he went his slow and happy rounds. Now and then he paused and straightened a border, or propped some untended plant, top-heavy with bloom, or pinned back some wild arm of a climbing rose flung out to pluck at him as he went by. He could not but be aware that since Gertrude Collett left there had been confusion and disorder in the place she had made perfect.

In these hours of innocent absorption he was oblivious of Jane who watched him.

The garden was still, with that stillness that earth takes at sunsets following hot days; stillness of gra.s.s-plots flooded by flat light; stillness of trees and flowers that stand fixed, held by the light, divinely vivid. Jane's vision of her surroundings had never been so radiant and intense. Yet in a moment, by some impenetrable way, her thoughts had wandered back to her solitude in Kensington Square. She saw herself sitting in her room. She was dressed in an old gown that she had worn two years ago, she saw distinctly the fas.h.i.+on and the colour of it, and the little ink-mark on the sleeve. She was writing, this solitary woman, with an extraordinary concentration and rapidity. Jane found herself looking on, fascinated as by the performance of a stranger, admiring as she would have admired a stranger. The solitary woman knew nothing of Hugh Brodrick or of his house at Putney, and cared less; she had a desire and a memory in which he had no part. That seemed to Jane most curious.

Then suddenly she was aware that she, Jane Brodrick, and this woman, Jane Holland, were inseparably and indestructibly one. For a moment her memory and her desire merged with this woman's desire and memory, so that the house and the garden and the figure of her husband became strange to her and empty of all significance. As for her own presence in the extraordinary scene, she had no longer her vague, delicious wonder at its reality. What she felt was a shock of surprise, of spiritual dislocation. She was positively asking herself, "What am I doing here?"

The wonder pa.s.sed with a sense of s.h.i.+fting in her brain.

But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked about the genius of Jane Holland.

For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed to own.

She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal strength.

It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches,"

showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection; further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place; there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.

And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever made. It was possible, it was more than possible, it was hideously probable that this time she would achieve popularity. It was just the sort of terrible, ironic thing that happened. If it did happen she would not be able to look George Tanqueray in the face.

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. n.o.body 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 gla.s.ses. Jane's terrified eyes met theirs.

"To the Book!" they said. "To the Book!" Tanqueray found himself gazing in agony at his gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s; 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 gla.s.s 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.