Part 41

Nobody had ever said that Jane was handsome. She hadn't one straight feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. She wasn't pretty, either. There was something about her too large and dominating for that. She had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some ugliness subdued. It was part of her queerness that she had the square brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for the blood it took it had given her back fire.

Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had seen. She had felt herself cruelly despoiled, disinherited of the splendours and powers of her sex. And here she was, looking, as she modestly put it, like any other woman. Any one of the unknown multitude whom lately, in prophetic agony, she had seen surrounding Tanqueray; women dowered, not with the disastrous gift of genius, but with the secret charm and wonder of mere womanhood. One of these (she had always reckoned with the possibility), one of these conceivably might at any moment, and inevitably would when her moment came, secure and conquer Tanqueray. She had been afraid, even in vision, to measure her power with theirs.

But now, standing there in the long nightgown that made her so straight and tall, with arms raised, holding up the thick mass of her hair, her body bent a little backwards from the waist, showing it for the slender and supple thing it was, seeing herself so incredibly feminine and so alive, she defied any one to tell the difference. If any difference there were it was not in her body, neither was it in her face. That was the face which had looked at Tanqueray last night; the face which he had called up to meet that strange excitement and that tenderness of his. Her body was the body of a woman created in a day and a night by joy for its own wooing.

This glorious person was a marvel to itself. It was so incomprehensibly, so superlatively happy. Its eyes, its mouth, its hands and feet were happy. It was happy inside and out and all over. It had developed a perfectly preposterous capacity for enjoyment. It found pleasure in bathing itself, in dressing itself, in brushing its hair. And its very hair, when it had done with it, looked happy.

It was at its happiest at ten o'clock, when Jane sat down to write a letter to Tanqueray. The letter had to be written. For yesterday Nina Lempriere had asked her to supper in her rooms on Sunday, and she was to bring George Tanqueray. If, said Nina, she could get him.

Sunday was the seventeenth. This was Wednesday, the thirteenth. She would hear from Tanqueray to-night or to-morrow at the latest. And there would be only four days to get through till Sunday.

To-night and to-morrow went, and Tanqueray did not write. Jane's heart began to ache with an intolerable anxiety.

It was on Saturday night that the letter came.

"Dear Jinny," it said. "It was nice of Nina to ask me to supper. I'm sorry I can't come. I got married yesterday.

"Yrs., G. T.

"P.S.--Nicky saw me through."

Not a word about his wife.

At first the omission did not strike her as significant. It was so like Tanqueray, to fling you the bare body of a fact while he cherished the secret soul of it himself. He must have wondered how she would take it.

She took it as she would have taken a telegram from a stranger, telling her that Tanqueray was dead. She took it, as she would have taken the stranger's telegram, standing very stiff and very still. She faced, as it were, an invisible crowd of such strangers, ignorant of the intimacy of her loss, not recognizing her right to suffer, people whose presence constrained her to all the observances of decency.

She crushed the note in her hand vindictively, as she would have crushed that telegram; she pushed it from her, hating the thing that had made her suffer. Then she drew it to her again; she smoothed it; she examined it, as she might have examined the telegram, to verify the hour and the place of the decease, to establish the fact which seemed incredible.

Verification brought the first live pangs that stabbed her. She was aware of the existence of the woman. There had been a woman all the time. But she couldn't realize her. She only knew that she meant finality, separation.

An hour passed. She went to bed. Her footsteps and her movements in undressing were hushed and slow. She was still like some one who knows that there has been a death in the house and that the body lies in the next room. Stretched in her bed, turning her face to the wall to hide herself, she had that sense of awful contact and of separation, of there being only a wall between the living and the dead.

The best thing that could have happened to her would have been to lie awake all night, and let her heart and brain hammer as they would, till they hammered her to stupefaction. Unfortunately, towards morning she fell into a sound sleep.

She woke from it with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things which last night she had overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an unbearable illumination) Jane saw transparently what she had been to Tanqueray. She had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. But she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. So much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening, he, George Tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the other. He had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had made her suffer.

But never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any power or splendour of her own.

She wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. It had been just two days before he married her. Perhaps it had been only his shyness, or, more likely, his perversity.

But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each other and that he hoped they would be friends.

It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.

He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been, though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness. She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife. As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart than Tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it would end there.

It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.

Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let him go for a scruple finer than a hair.

And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was so pre-eminently her failure) came of feeling and of understanding at every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain, passion and insight in her running disastrously together.

It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of response.