The Creators Part 78

Inside, to be sure, there wasn't any drawing-room; for what did Rose want with a drawing-room, she would like to know? But there was a beautiful study for Tanqueray up-stairs, and a little dining-room and a kitchen for Rose below.

Rose had sought counsel in her furnishing; with the result that Tanqueray's study bore a remarkable resemblance to Laura Gunning's room in Camden Town, while Rose's dining-room recalled vividly Mrs.

Henderson's dining-room at Fleet.

Though it was such a little house, there had been no difficulty about getting the furniture all in. The awful thing was moving Tanqueray and his books. It was a struggle, a hostile invasion, and it happened on his birthday. And in the middle of it all, when the last packing-case was hardly emptied, and there wasn't a carpet laid down anywhere, Tanqueray announced that he had asked some people to dine that night.

"Wot, a dinner-party?" said Rose (she was trying not to cry).

"No, not a party. Only six."

"Six," said Rose, "_is_ a dinner-party."

"Twenty-six might be."

Rose sat down and looked at him and said, "Oh dear, oh dear." But she had begun to smooth her hair in a kind of antic.i.p.ation.

Then Tanqueray stooped and put his arm around her and kissed her and said it was his birthday. He always did ask people to dine on his birthday. There would only be the Brodricks and Nicky and Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning--No, Laura Gunning couldn't come. That, with themselves, made six.

"Well----" said Rose placidly.

"I can take them to a restaurant if you'd rather. But I thought it would be so nice to have them in our own house. When it's my birthday."

She smiled. She was taking it all in. In her eyes, for once, he was like a child, with his birthday and his party. How could she refuse him anything on his birthday? And all through the removal he had been so good.

Already she was measuring s.p.a.ces with her eye.

"It'll 'old six," she said--"squeezin'."

She sat silent, contemplating in a vision the right sequence of the dinner.

"There must be soup," she said, "an' fish, an' a hongtry an' a joint, an' a puddin' an' a sav'ry, an' dessert to follow."

"Oh Lord, no. Give 'em bread and cheese. They're none of 'em greedy."

"I'll give you something better than that," said Rose; "on your birthday--the idea!"

Dinner was to be at eight o'clock. The lateness of the hour enabled Mr.

and Mrs. Eldred to come up and give a hand with the waiting and the dishing-up. They had softened towards Tanqueray since he had taken that little house. That he should give a dinner-party in it during the middle of the removal was no more than they expected of his eccentricity.

The dinner went off very well. Rose was charming in a pink silk blouse with lace at her throat and wrists. Her face too was pink with a flush of anxiety and excitement. As for George, she had never seen him look so handsome. She could hardly take her eyes off him, as he sat there in his beautiful evening suit and white shirt-front. He was enjoying his birthday like a child, and laughing--she had never heard him laugh like that in her life before. He laughed most at the very things she thought would vex him, the little accidents, such as the sliding of all the dinner-plates from Mr. Nicholson's hands on to the floor at Uncle's feet in the doorway, and Uncle's slamming of the door upon the fragments. The dinner, too; she had been afraid that George wouldn't like all his friends to know she'd cooked it. But he told them all straight out, laughing, and asking them if she wasn't very clever? And they all said that she was, and that her dinner was delicious; even the dishes that she had worried and trembled over. And though she had cooked the dinner, she hadn't got to wait. Not one of the gentlemen would let her. Rose became quite gay with her small triumph, and by the time the sweets came she felt that she could talk a little.

For Nicky was the perfection of admirable behaviour. His right ear, patient and attentive, leaned toward Tanqueray's wife, while his left strained in agony to catch what Tanqueray was saying. Tanqueray was talking to Jane. He had said he supposed she had seen the way "they had been going for him," and she had asked him was it possible he minded?

"Minded? After your letter? When a big full-fledged arch-angel gets up on the tips of its toes, and spreads its gorgeous wings in front of me, and sings a hymn of praise out loud in my face, do you think I hear the little beasts snarling at my feet and snapping at the calves of my legs?"

Rose at Nicky's right was saying, "It's over small for a dinin'-room.

But you should see 'is study."

He bowed an ear that did not hear her.

"Nicky did me well," said Tanqueray.

"I told you all the time," said Jane, "that Nicky knew."

"'E couldn't do anything without 'is study."

"Ah?" Nicky returned to the little woman, all attention.

"Aren't you proud of him? Isn't it splendid how he's brought them round?

How they're all praising him?"

"So they'd ought to," Rose said. "'E's worked 'ard enough for it. The way 'e works! He'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if 'e could get fair hold of a word----"

They had all stopped talking to Tanqueray and were listening to Tanqueray's wife.

"Then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. And the study and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think."

Nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her; and Rose became aware that George's forehead was lowering upon her from the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence.

After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much had suddenly become dreadful to her.

Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over, when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a married woman.

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul, a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause.

It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.

Her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the bedroom that she had been called on to admire. Rose's bedroom was a wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the smoothest and the whitest thing in it was Tanqueray's pillow where Tanqueray's head had never lain. There was a tiny dressing-room beyond, and through the open door Jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where, night after night, Tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off the orgy of the day's work. The dressing-room was a place where he could hide from Rose by night as he hid from her by day.

And Rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the dressing-room.

Jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove the fear and jealousy. She must let Rose see that she was not dangerous; and she knew how.

She began by asking Rose when she was coming out to Putney? And Rose answered that she was busy and couldn't say for sure.

"You won't be busy in August, will you? If you'll come then I'll show you a room you haven't seen, the prettiest room in the house."

Rose drew in her breath. Her face had the soft flush in it that came when she was deeply moved.

"I've got some of its dear little things all ready for it now," said Jane. "You must see them."

"I should dearly love to."

"I never thought, Rose, that I should have it."

Rose meditated. "They come," said she, "mostly to them that doesn't think."

"There's only one thing, Rose. I'm afraid. Oh, I'm so dreadfully afraid."