Читать книгу The Creators - Sinclair May - Страница 3

Three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he there for? And at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the first time that evening, as if they said that he would see.

She had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him, George Tanqueray, to meet.

Everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with Jane Holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than he. It was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by Gisborne, R.A. He had given most of his attention to the portrait.

Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face, broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight enough when her will was dominant. He had got her hair, the darkness and the mass of it. Tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that Gisborne had put his best work into that, and when Gisborne resented it he had told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted Jane Holland's hair. (This was in the days when Gisborne was celebrated and Tanqueray was not.)

If Jane had had the face that Gisborne gave her she would never have had any charm for Tanqueray. For what Gisborne had tried to get was that oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. Not a hint had he caught of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine, deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight.

When Tanqueray wanted to annoy Jane he told her that she looked like her portrait by Gisborne, R.A.

They were all going to the play together. But at the last moment, she, to Tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. She was too tired, she said, to go.

The celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course, if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration. And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get rid of them.

She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for. Her tired eyes helped her.

Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.

"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"

"I am certainly not going with them——" He paused, hesitating.

"Then—you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she hesitated too.

"But you're tired?" he said.

"Not now."

She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her appeal.

That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.

That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the first time in many weeks.

She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified her.

Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him. There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping him.

"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.

"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."

"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"

"It won't work."

"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."

She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.

There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her writing-table. His "Works"—five novels—were on a shelf by themselves at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.

For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the Master, told her was "the unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on his tremendous height.

But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.

"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"

"What hasn't?"

"Your pop—your celebrity."

"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they——"

"They needn't. I must. Celebrity—you observe that I call it by no harsher name—celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to end that way."

"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I hate it sometimes."

"You hate it, yet you're drawn."

"By what? By my vanity?"

"Not by your vanity, though there is that."

"By what, then?"

"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."

"Mayn't I be?"

"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."

For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.

"Because you've genius."

"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"

He laughed. "Why not I?"

"Because it was you who told me not to keep back. You told me not to live alone. Don't you remember?"

He remembered. It was in the days when he first knew her.

"I did. Because you ran to the other extreme then. You were terrified of life."

"Because I was a woman. You told me to be a woman!"

"Because I was the only man you knew. How you remember things."

"That comes of living alone. I've never really forgotten anything you ever said to me. It's where I score."

"You had nobody but me to talk to then, if you remember."

"No. Nobody but you."

"And it wasn't enough for you."

"Oh, wasn't it? When you were never the same person for a week together. It was like knowing fifteen or twenty men."

He smiled. "I've always been the same man to you, Jinny. Haven't I?"

"I'm not so sure," said she.

"Anyhow, you were safe with me."

"From what?"

"From being 'had.' But now you've begun knowing all sorts of people——"

"Is that why you've kept away from me?"

He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable, pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the persecutors, the pursuers. Did I ever pursue you?"

"No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any one."

"They will. And they'll have you at every turn."

"No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them."

"They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'"

"Do I?" She said it defiantly.

"No. You never lend—you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you."

"Oh—you——"

"And yet," he said, "I wonder——"

He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes.

"Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your books?"

"Where you get yours," she said.

Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people."

She smiled, recognizing them.

"Look at me," he said.

"Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation.

"Yes, me. I was born out of it."

"And I—wasn't I born? Look at me?" She turned to him, holding her head high.

"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening—and I see a difference already."

"What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in me."

It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever and the brilliance fever brought.

She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind, suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet somehow more obscure.

Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven.

He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the hills, questing the visionary maid.

It was not she. His trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. She saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was not she. She saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason, that it was not she. That showed that he was approaching headlong the point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him back. He was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. Any woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand.

And between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey, dumb, and holding them dumb. She searched for words to dispel it, but no words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. That was not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart.

He tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking about the room and examining the things in it. There were some that it had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in material prosperity. Yes. He had liked her better when she had worked harder and was as poor as he. They had come to look on poverty as their protection from the ruinous world. He now realized that it had also been their protection from each other. He was too poor to marry.

He reflected with some bitterness that Jane was not, now.

She in her corner called him from his wanderings. She had made the coffee. He drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old place on the sofa by her side.

She brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. She had man[oe]uvred to keep him. And now she wished that she had let him go.

"Aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said.

"No. I shan't sleep if I do."

"Haven't you been sleeping?"

"Not very well."

"That's why you're looking like your portrait. That man isn't such a silly ass as I thought he was."

"I wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and everything."

"Everything?"

"You know what I mean. The horrid thing that's happened to me. My—my celebrity." She brought it out with a little shiver of revolt.

He laughed. "But when you remind me of it every minute? When it's everlastingly, if I may say so, on the carpet?"

Her eyes followed his. It was evident that she had bought a new one.

"It doesn't mean what you think it does. It isn't, it really isn't as bad as that——"

"I was afraid."

"You needn't be. I'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger mouthfuls."

"Why apologize?"

"I can't help it. You make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu."

"I make you feel——?"

"Yes. You—you. You don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded.

"You know what I think you."

"I don't. I only know what you used to think me."

"I think the same."

"Tell me—tell me."

"I think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years, you'll write a superb book, Jinny. But it all depends on what you do with yourself in the next five years."

He paused.

"At the present moment there's hardly any one—of our generation, mind you—who counts except you and I."

He paused again.

"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our families have cast us off."

"Mine hasn't yet."

"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.

He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake. He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the "consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.

Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.

"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet that's our temptation, yours and mine."

Again he paused.

"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws them by one divine sense. Ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the very soul, into the thick of it. The unpardonable sin is separating literature from life. You know that as well as I do."

She did. She worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls of men. There was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the serene, inspired audacity of Jane Holland. Her genius seemed to have kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation.

Tanqueray continued in his theme. Talking like this allayed his excitement.

"We're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. They're the stuff we work in. It's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. We're being tempted all the time. People—people—people—we can't have enough of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. The thing is—to keep 'em off us. And Jane, I know—they're getting at you."

She did not deny it. They were.

"And you haven't the—the nerve to stand up against it."

"I have stood up against it."

"You have. So have I. When we were both poor."

"You want me to be poor?"

"I don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just pleasantly short of cash. There's nothing like that for keeping you out of it."

"You want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? Deprived of everything that makes life amusing?"

"Thoroughly uncomfortable. Deprived of everything that stands in the way of your genius."

She felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing that had been tacked on to her. He cared for it and could be tender to it, but not to her.

"You're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain.

"My cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be prepared to be burnt."

"It's all very well for you, George. I don't like being burnt."

That roused him; it stirred the devil in him.

"Do you suppose I like it? Why, you—you don't know what burning is. It means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink themselves drunk."

"You don't want to be drunk, George. Any more than I do."

"I do not, thank God. But it would be all the same if I did. I can't get a single thing I do want."

"Can't you? I should have thought you could have got most things you really wanted."

"I could if I were a grocer or a draper. Why, a hair-dresser has more mastery of the means of life."

He was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit.

He began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from his mood. Now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them, only that dark, unhappy fire.

He was quiet now. He had caught sight of some sheets of manuscript lying on her desk.

"What's this?" he said.

"Only the last thing I've written."

"May I look?"

"You may."

He took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the leaves over with a nervous hand. He was not reading. There was no thought in his eyes.

He looked at her again. She saw that he was at the mercy of his moment, and of hers.

For it was her moment. There was a power that every woman had, if she cared to use it and knew how. There was a charm that had nothing to do with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. These things had their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other power. His senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her. She knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. She had only to kindle her flame, send out her signal.

And she said to herself, "I can't. I can't take him like this. He isn't himself. It would be hateful of me."

In that moment she had no fear. Love held her back and burning honour that hardly knew itself from shame. It accused her of having man[oe]uvred for that moment. It said, "You can't let him come in like this and trap him."

Another voice in her whispered, "You fool. If you don't marry him some other woman will—in this mood of his." And honour cried, answering it, "Let her. So long as it isn't I."

She had a torturing sense of his presence. And with it her fear came back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from him.

He flung the manuscript into the place she had left, and bowed forward, hiding his face in his hands. He rose too, and she knew that his moment had gone. She had let it go.

Then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart.

"Do you know what I should like to do?" she said. "I should like to sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for nobody to come near me but you, nobody to read me but you, nobody to talk about me but you. Do you remember?"

He did, but he was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held immorality.

"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"

"I've told you why."

"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you——"

He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the physician who knew her malady.

"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be worst of all."

And so he left her.