The Creators Part 108

"But I don't. It's the public that pays for them. And your wife has a savage joy in making it pay. If it wasn't for that I should loathe my celebrity more than Jinny ever loathed hers. It makes me feel sillier."

"Poor little thing," said Prothero.

"Well--it's hard that _I_ should have to entertain imbeciles who wouldn't read _you_ if they were paid."

He knew that that was the sting of it for her.

"They're all right," he said. "It's your funny little humour that they like. I like it, too."

But Laura snapped her teeth and said, "d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n my humour! Well--when they use it as a brickbat to hurl at your head."

She quoted furiously, "'While her husband still sings to deaf ears, Mrs.

Prothero has found the secret of capturing her public. She has made her way straight to its heart. And the heart of Mrs. Prothero's public is unmistakably in the right place.' Oh--if Mrs. Prothero's public knew what Mrs. Prothero thinks of it. I give them what they want, do I? As if I gave it them because they want it. If they only knew why I give it, and how I'm fooling them all the time! How I make them pay--for _you_!

Just think, Owen, of the splendid, the diabolical irony of it!"

"So very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce."

"Just think," she went on, "how I'm enjoying myself."

"Just think," said Prothero, "how I am not."

"Then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment, which is what you want."

The clock struck six. She went out of the room, and returned, bringing an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. She warmed it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat.

All the way to Fleet Street, Prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat, meditated tenderly on his wife's humour.

LVI

Nothing, Tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the Kiddy spreading her diminutive skirts before Prothero, to shelter that colossal figure.

But the Kiddy, ever since Tanqueray had known her, had refused to be pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating touch of sympathy. She was always breaking loose from the hands that tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror, always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. And she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in front. The wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. She had turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph; she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it were, a gay and pretty gown.

And now, again, Tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her pathos. The spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement; though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. The Kiddy was minute, but her achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime.

She sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them,"

was her reiterated comment on her own performances.

Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his account."

"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.

She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs, hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.

She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her courage on the dreadful eve.

It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together.

Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they cared what was said about them.

Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.

"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my popularity!"

"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."

She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not care.

"I think your popularity, _and_ you, my child, the most beautiful sight I've ever seen for many a long year."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You may laugh at me," she said.

"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.

"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy; and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never will know."

"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."

"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms into a splendid poem."

It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of divine trans.m.u.tation, by which her work pa.s.sed into Owen's and became perfect. It pa.s.sed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was trans.m.u.ted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.

"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he would see.

"Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision; smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and trans.m.u.ted Tanqueray.

"What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?"

"I expect what always has happened, and worse."

"So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the brokers. It's a generation of brokers."

"Beasts!"

"Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture--real--and pictures is _'is_ line."

"Aunt's lodger, I a.s.sure you, will be thoroughly well d.a.m.ned if he takes any stock in Owen."

"'E 'asn't seen Mr. Prothero," said Rose, "and you'll frighten Minny if you use such language."

Tanqueray ignored the interruption. "Owen, you see, is dangerous. He regards the entire Stock Exchange as a bankrupt concern. The Stock Exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for Owen. If a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his own. You can't have it both ways."

"I know. He knows it. We'd rather have it this way. I oughtn't to talk as if he minded, as if it could touch him where he is. It's me it hurts, not him."