Part 50

"I have paid. I paid beforehand. Which is a mistake."

She looked down at her feet. They were fine and feminine, Nina's feet, and exquisitely shod. She frowned at them as if they had offended her.

"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me. You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"

Her murky face cleared suddenly.

"Look here," she said. "I believe, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But I know it means that for you and me."

XIV

August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.

Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves. They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it, vanished when they went.

She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.

Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking, this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way." When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite. And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington Gardens."

He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning.

So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and round in her cage of Kensington Gardens.

She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So she hardened it.

She hardened it, not only against the clever little people who had never touched it, but against Nicky and Nina and Laura. Laura's face in August had grown whiter than ever; it was taking on a fixed, strained look. This face, the face of her friend, appeared to Jane like something seen in a dream, something remotely, intangibly, incomprehensibly sad. But it had no power to touch her. She had hardened her heart against everybody she knew.

At last she succeeded in hardening it against the world, against the dawn and the sunset, and the grey skies at evening, against the living grass and the trees; she hardened it against everything that was beautiful and tender, because the beauty and the tenderness of things pierced it with an unbearable pain. It was hard to the very babies in the Gardens, where she walked.

One day she came upon a little boy running along the Broad Walk. The little boy was unable to stop because he believed himself to be a steam-engine, so he ran his small body into Jane and upset it violently at her feet. And Jane heard herself saying, "Why don't you look where you're going?" in a voice as hard as her heart.

Then she looked at the little boy and saw his eyes. They were the eyes that children have for all strange and sudden cruelties. They held her so that she did not stoop and pick him up. He picked himself up and ran to his mother, sobbing out his tale, telling her that he was a steam-engine, and he couldn't stop.

And Jane turned away across the grass and sat down under a tree, holding her head high to keep her tears back, for they hurt. Her thoughts came in a tumult, tender, passionate, incoherent, mixed with the child's wail.

"I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. I mustn't care for George if it makes me knock little boys down in their pretty play and be cruel to them. I'll stop thinking about George this minute--I was a steam-engine and I couldn't stop. No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman who could do a thing like that. I'll never, never think of him again--I wonder if he knew I was like that."

The pain that she had been trying to keep out had bitten its way through, it gnawed at her heart for days and made it tender, and in growing tender she grew susceptible to pain. She was aware of the world again; she knew the passion that the world absorbs from things that feel, and the soul that passes perpetually into its substance. It hurt her to see the beauty that came upon the Gardens in September evenings, to see the green earth alive under its web of silver air, and the trees as they stood enchanted in sunset and blue mist.

There had been a procession of such evenings, alike in that insupportable beauty and tenderness. On the last of these, the last of September, Jane was sitting in a place by herself under her tree. She could not say how or at what moment the incredible thing happened, but of a sudden the world she looked at became luminous and insubstantial and divinely still. She could not tell whether the stillness of the world had passed into her heart, or her heart into the stillness of the world. She could not tell what had happened to her at all. She only knew that after it had happened, a little while after, something woke out of sleep in her brain, and it was then that she saw Hambleby.

Up till this moment Hambleby had been only an idea in her head, and Tanqueray had taught her a profound contempt for ideas in her head. And the idea of Hambleby, of a little suburban banker's clerk, was one that he had defied her to deal with; she could not, he had said, really see him. She had given him up and forgotten all about him.

He arose with the oddest irrelevance out of the unfathomable peace. She could not account for him, nor understand why, when she was incapable of seeing him a year ago, she should see him now with such extreme distinctness and solidity. She saw him, all pink and blond and callow with excessive youth, advancing with his inevitable, suburban, adolescent smile. She saw his soul, the soul he inevitably would have, a blond and callow soul. She saw his Girl, the Girl he inevitably would have. She was present at the mingling of that blond soul with the dark flesh and blood of the Girl. She saw it all; the Innocence of Hambleby; the Marriage of Hambleby; the Torture and subsequent Deterioration of Hambleby; and, emerging in a sort of triumph, the indestructible Decency of Hambleby.

Heavens, what a book he would be.

Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.

And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so possessed by the furious impulse to be born.

Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.

But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray. Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and Laura Gunning.