The Creators Part 16

"Oh," he said abruptly. "I looked after myself."

Jane stared intently at a notice of the departure and arrival of trains.

Laura, aware of embarra.s.sment somewhere, began to talk to him light-heartedly, in her fashion, and the moment pa.s.sed.

In the train, going down to Wendover, Laura talked to Jane. Nina did not talk. Her queer eyes, when they looked at him, had a light in them of ironic devilry and suspicion. They left him speculating on the extent to which he was cutting himself off. This journey down to Wendover was a stage in the process. He was going down to tell Nicholson, to ask Nicholson to see him through.

How would Jane take it? How would Nina? How would Laura? He had said to himself, light-heartedly, that his marriage would make no difference, that he should retain them, all three, as an intellectual seraglio.

Would this, after all, be possible? When they heard that he, George Tanqueray, was marrying a servant in a lodging-house?

Aware now, vividly aware, of the thing he was doing, he asked himself why, if he was not in love with Jane, he had not been in love with Nina?

Nina had shown signs. Yes, very unmistakably she had shown signs. He could recall a time when there had lurked a betraying tenderness about her ironic mouth; when her queer eyes, as they looked at him, took on a certain softness and surrender. It had not touched him. To his mind there had always been something a little murky about Nina. It was the fault, no doubt, of her complexion. Not but what Nina had a certain beauty, a tempestuous, haggard, Roman eagle kind of beauty. She looked the thing she was, a creature of high courage and prodigious energy.

Besides, she had a devil. Without it, he doubted whether even her genius (he acknowledged, a little grudgingly, her genius) could have done all it did.

It had entered into Tanqueray's head (though not his heart) to be in love with Jane. But never, even by way of fantasy, had it entered it to be in love with Nina; though it was to Nina that he looked when he wanted the highest excitement in his intellectual seraglio. He could not conceive any man being in love with her, to the extent, that is to say, of trying to marry her. Nina had the thing called temperament, more temperament and murkier than he altogether cared for; but, as for marrying, you might as well try to marry some bird of storm on the wing, or a flash of lightning on its career through heaven. Nina--career and all--was pre-eminently unfit.

She had shown, more than once, this ironic antagonism, as if she knew what he thought of her, and owed him a grudge.

If not Nina, why not Laura? She was small and she was pretty and she was pathetic, and he liked women to be so. Why was it that with all her feminine smallness and prettiness and pathos he had never cared for her?

They were talking.

"Tired, Laura?" Jane asked.

"Only sleepy. Papa had another dream last night."

They laughed. So did Laura, though her tragedy was there, the tragedy which had given her that indomitable face.

Laura lived under conditions which would have driven Tanqueray mad. She had a father; she who, as Jane said, could least of all of them afford a father. Her father had had a sunstroke, and it had made him dream dreams. He would get up a dozen times in the night and wander in and out of Laura's bedroom, and sit heavily on her bed and tell her his dreams, which terrified Laura.

"It wasn't funny, this time," said she. "It was one of his horrid ones."

n.o.body laughed then. They were dumb with the pity and horror of it.

Laura's father, when he was awake, was the most innocent, most uninspired, most uncreative of old gentlemen; but in his dreams he had a perfect genius for the macabre. The dreams had been going on for about a year, and they were making Laura ill. Tanqueray knew it, and it made him sad.

That was why he had not cared to care for Laura.

Yet little Laura, very prettily, very innocently, with an entire unconsciousness, had let him see where her heart was. And as prettily and innocently and unconsciously as he could, he had let her see that her heart was no concern of his, any more than Nina's.

And she had not cherished any resentment, she had not owed him any grudge. She had withdrawn herself, still prettily, still innocently, so that she seemed, with an absurd prettiness, to be making room for Jane.

He had even a vague recollection of himself as acquiescing in her withdrawal, on those grounds. It was almost as if there had been an understanding between him and Laura, between Jane and Laura, between him and Jane. They had behaved perfectly, all three. What made their perfection was that in all these withdrawals, acquiescences and understandings not one of them had given any outward sign. They had kept their spoken compact. They had left each other free.

As for his mere marriage, he was certain with all of them to be understood. It was their business, as they had so often told each other, to understand. But he was not sure that he wanted to be understood with the lucidity, the depth, the prodigious thoroughness of which they were capable.

He said to himself, "The blood of these women is in their brains." That was precisely what he had against them.

VIII

It was a perfect day, Jane's birthday, like a young June day, a day of the sun, of white distances and vivid foregrounds.

Wendover Hill looked over Arnott Nicholson's white house and over his green garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly quiet, a perfect peace. It was strange and sad, said Tanqueray, that a quiet and peace like that should be given to Nicky--to write poems in.

Jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from anything so charming, so perfect in its way as Nicky.

"Do you think," said she, as they crowded on his doorstep, "do you think he'll be at home?"

"Rather. We shall find him in his library, among his books and his busts, seething in a froth of abominable ma.n.u.scripts, and feeling himself immortal."

Arnott Nicholson was at home, and he was in his library, with his books and his busts, and with Gisborne's great portrait of Jane Holland (the original) above his chimney-piece. He was, as Tanqueray had predicted, seething in his froth. Their names came to him there--Miss Holland and Mr. Tanqueray. In a moment Nicky was out of his library and into his drawing-room.

He was a singularly attractive person, slender, distinguished, highly finished in black and white. He was dressed, not like a candidate for immortality, but in the pink of contemporary perfection.

He was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. And delighted, of course, he said, to see Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. He insisted on their all staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come, a day. He ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. He brought peaches and chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things mortal and savouring of mortality.

He went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one aware that he entertained immortal guests. He couldn't get over it, he said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance, out of their blue. Heavens! Supposing he had been out! He stood there glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room.

It was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great bowls of roses everywhere. The whole house had a strange feminine atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had pa.s.sed over it. Yet it was Nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts feminine.

Nicky was looking at Jane as she stooped over the roses. "Do you know,"

he said, "that you've come home? Come and see yourself."

He led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its high place.

"You bought it?" said she.

"Rather. Gisborne painted it for me."

"Oh, Nicky!"

"It's your genius brooding over mine--I mean over me."

He looked at her again. When he looked at you Nicky's perfect clothes, his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black moustache, Nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his enormous, prominent black eyes.

"I put you there," he said, "to inspire me."

Nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked about his inspiration.

"Do I?"

She did. They had caught him in the high act of creation. He'd been at it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have destroyed himself. His head was burning now.

"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.

His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had so strongly the literary taint.