Part 47

"You think so? You haven't got a hundred horse-power genius pulling you along. When he's off, fifty women hanging on to him couldn't hold him back."

She smiled. "You don't know him. The first time that wife of his gets in his way he'll shove her out of it. If she does it again he'll knock her down and trample her under his feet."

Her smile, more than ever ironic, lashed Nicky's shocked recoil.

"Creators are a brutal crew, Mr. Nicholson. We're all the same. You needn't be sorry for us."

She looked, over Nicky's head as it were, at Jane and Laura. It was as if with a sweep of her stormy wing she gathered them, George Tanqueray and Jane and Laura, into the spaces where they ran the superb course of the creators.

The movement struck Arnott Nicholson aside into his place among the multitudes of the uncreative. Who was he to judge George Tanqueray? If she arraigned him she had a right to. She was of his race, his kind. She could see through Nicky as if he had been an innocent pane of glass. And at the moment Nicky's soul with its chivalry and delicacy enraged her. Caroline Bickersteth enraged her, everybody enraged her except Jane and little Laura.

She stood beside Jane, who had risen and was about to say good-bye.

Caro would have kept them with her distressed, emphatic "Must you go?" She was expecting, she said, Mr. Brodrick.

Jane was not interested in Mr. Brodrick. She could not stay and did not, and, going, she took Nina with her.

Laura would have followed, but Miss Bickersteth held her with a hand upon her arm. Nicholson left them, though Laura's eyes almost implored him not to go.

"My dear," said Miss Bickersteth. "Tell me. Have you any idea how much she cares for him?"

"She?"

"Jane."

"You've no reason to suppose she cares."

"Do you think he cared in the very least for her?"

"I think he may have--without knowing it."

"My dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. He knows, for instance, all about us."

"Us?"

"You and I. We've both of us been there. And Nina."

"How do you know?"

"She was flagrant!"

"Flagrant?"

"Flagrant isn't the word for it. She was flamboyant, magnificent, superb!"

"You forget she's my friend," said little Laura.

"She's mine. I'm not traducing her. Look at George Tanqueray. I defy any woman not to care for him. It's nothing to be ashamed of--like an infatuation for a stockbroker who has no use for you. It's--it's your apprenticeship at the hands of the master."

XIII

Nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the Strand, overlooking the river. You approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you wonder.

In a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final, consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them.