The Creators Part 4

So he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her, while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day.

He went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond Hampstead.

He lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think about Jane. For all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible for him to think of anything else. And when he got back into his room its solitude was intolerable. For ten days he had not spoken to any woman but his landlady. Every morning, before he sat down to write, he had to struggle with his terror of Mrs. Eldred. It was growing on him like a nervous malady.

An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed, rolling through s.p.a.ce to inconceivable confines which it burst. For though this ma.s.s moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed.

He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he forgot himself so far as to implore her for G.o.d's sake not to talk to him.

The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to her, it would not be necessary for her to talk.

He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him at a figure which surprised him by its moderation.

Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill, frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the obsession of this thought he pa.s.sed whole hours sitting at his desk, bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands.

He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because, being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could not have proceeded from Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge.

It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the sideboard. It had the air of cultivating a.s.siduously the art of self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of inimitable remoteness.

He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably feminine. He smiled, simply to rea.s.sure it.

"How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?"

"I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak."

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty, yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, pa.s.sed for perfect. It was her face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft, so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners, and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness, when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she tried so hard to restrain it, coiling it tight at the back, and smoothing it sleek as a bird's wing above her brows. Mouse-colored hair it was on the top, and shining gold at the temples and at the roots that curled away under the coil.

She wore a brown skirt, and a green bodice with a linen collar, and a knot of brown ribbon at her throat.

Thus attired, for three days Rose waited on him. For three days she never spoke a word except to tell him that a meal was ready.

In three days he noticed a remarkable increase in his material comfort.

There was about Rose a shining cleanliness that imparted itself to everything she laid her hands on. (Her hands were light in their touch and exquisitely gentle.) His writing-table was like a shrine that she tended. Every polished surface of it shone, and every useful thing lay ready to his hand. Not a paper out of its order, or a pen out of its place. The charm was that he never caught her at it. In all her ministrations Rose was secret and silent and unseen.

Only every evening at nightfall he heard the street door open, and Rose's voice calling into the darkness, sending out a cry that had the magic and rhythm of a song, "Puss--Puss--Puss," she called; "Minny--Min--Min--Minny--Puss--Puss--Puss." That was the hymn with which Rose saluted the night. It ought to have irritated him, but it didn't.

It was all he heard of her, till on the fourth evening she broke her admirable silence. She had just removed the tablecloth, shyly, from under the book he was reading.

"It isn't good for you to read at meal-times, sir."

"I know it isn't. But what are you to do if you've n.o.body to talk to?"

A long silence. It seemed as if Rose was positively thinking.

"You should go out more, sir."

"I don't like going out."

Silence again. Rose had folded up the cloth and put it away in its drawer. Yet she lingered.

"Would you like to see the little dogs, sir?"

"Little dogs? I didn't know there were any."

"We keep them very quiet; but we've seven. We've a fox and a dandy"

(Rose grew breathless with excitement), "and an Aberdeen, and two Aberdeen pups, and two Poms, a mole and a white. May they come up, sir?"

"By all means let them come up."

She ran down-stairs, and returned with the seven little dogs at her heels. Tanqueray held out his hand invitingly. (He was fond of animals.) The fox and the dandy sniffed him suspiciously. The old Aberdeen ran away from him backwards, showing her teeth. Her two pups sat down in the doorway and yapped at him.

Rose tried not to laugh, while the Poms ran round and round her skirts, panting with their ridiculous exertions.

"That's Prince--the mole--he's a pedigree dog. He doesn't belong to us.

And this," said Rose, darting under the table and picking up the white Pom, "this is Joey."

The white Pom leaped in her arms. He licked her face in a rapture of affection.

"Is Joey a pedigree dog, too?" said Tanqueray.

"Yes," said Rose. She met his eyes without flinching.

"So young a dog----"

"No, sir, Joey's not so very young."

She was caressing the little thing tenderly, and Tanqueray saw that there was something wrong with Joey.

Joey was deplorably lean and puny, and his hair, which should have stood out till Joey appeared three times the size he was, his hair, what hair he had, lay straight and limp along his little back. Rose pa.s.sed her hand over him the wrong way.

"You should always brush a Pom the wrong way, sir. It brings the hair on."

"I'm afraid, Rose, you've worn his hair away with stroking it."

"Oh no, sir. That's the peculiarity of Joey's breed. Joey's my dog, sir."

"So I see."