Part 164

"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He'd be eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.

She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had said. Nina had more than found herself.

"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."

"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his beastly Jews--with a chance like that. I don't care if the price is stiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he funks it."

He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing like this."

Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.

They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.

She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.

Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane. She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it. Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only save herself by keeping clear of her.

"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough--after that last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."

"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if I never could keep up."

"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."

"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."

"My handicap?"

"Well--a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me."

"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you thought it?"

Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.

"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any handicap. That's why I want to win."

Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions. She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.

But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own. She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art was a handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.

The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.

"Does it seem to you, then, that I've defeated my end?" Nina pressed her point home implacably.

Jane strung herself to the pain of it.

"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."

She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.

Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.

It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own. And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she, Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of Jinny. That was how she measured her.

It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had swept on, reckless, regardless.