And Jane turned away across the gra.s.s 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, pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sion that the world absorbs from things that feel, and the soul that pa.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 beat.i.tude 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.

That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.

"Do you like him?" said Jane.

"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary taint.

"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"

"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with him?"

"Not a thing."

If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura spoke again.

"How George would have loved him."

Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were dead.

Nina broke their silence.

"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"

They did not answer.

"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"

"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Suss.e.x," said Jane.

"And where's she?"

"Wherever he is, I imagine."

"I gave her six months, if you remember."

"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."

"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."

"He might write. It isn't like him not to."

"No," said Jane, "it isn't like him." She rose. "Good-bye, I'm going."

She went, with a pain in her heart and a sudden fog in her brain that blurred the splendour of Hambleby.

"Perhaps," Laura continued, "he thinks _we_ want to drop him. You know, if he has married a servant-girl it's what he would think."

"If," said Nina, "he thought about it at all."

"He'd think about Jinny."

"If he'd thought about Jinny he wouldn't have married a servant-girl."

It was then that Laura had her beautiful idea. She was always having them.

"It _was_ Jinny he thought about. He thought about nothing else. He gave Jinny up for her own sake--for her career. You know what he thought about marrying."

She was in love with her idea. It made George sublime, and preserved Jinny's dignity. But Nina did not think much of it, and said so. She sat contemplating Laura a long time. "Queer Kiddy," she said, "very queer Kiddy."

It was her tribute to Laura's moral beauty.

"I say, Infant," she said suddenly, "were you ever in love?"

"Why shouldn't I be? I'm human," said the Infant.

"I doubt it. You're such a calm Kiddy. I'd like to know how it takes you."

"It doesn't take me at all. I don't give it a chance."

"It doesn't give _you_ a chance, when it comes, my child."

"Yes, it does. There's always," said the Infant, speaking slowly, "just--one--chance. When you feel it coming."

"You don't feel it coming."

"I do. You asked me how it takes _me_. It takes me by stages. Gradual, insidious stages. In the first stage I'm happy, because it feels nice.

In the second I'm terrified. In the third I'm angry and I turn round and stamp. Hard."