The Creators Part 97

He sheltered himself behind a semblance of irrelevance. "Laura is very fond of you."

The significance of the statement lay in its implication that he was very fond of Laura. Taken that way it was fuel heaped on to Nina's malignant fire. Under it she smouldered darkly.

"She's getting unhappy about you," he went on. "You don't want to make her unhappy, do you?"

"Did I ever want to make her unhappy?" she answered, with a flash. "And if it comes to that, why should it?"

"The Kiddy has a very tender conscience."

She saw what he meant now. He was imploring her not to put it into Laura's head that she had come between them. That would hurt Laura. His wife was never to suspect that her friend had suffered. Nina, he seemed secretly to intimate, was behaving in a manner likely to give rise to that suspicion. He must have been aware that she did it to save herself more suffering; but his point was that it didn't matter how much she suffered, provided they saved Laura. There must be no flaw in that perfect happiness.

"You mean," she said, "she won't understand it if I don't come?"

"I'm afraid I mean she will understand it if you keep on not coming. But of course you'll come. You're coming with me now."

It was the same voice that had told her three years ago that she was not coming with him, that she was going to stay and take care of Laura, because that was all that she could do for him. And as she had stayed then she went with him now, and for the same reason.

She felt, miserably, that her reluctance d.a.m.ned her; it proved her coa.r.s.e, or at any rate not fine enough for the communion he had offered her, the fineness of which she had once accepted as the sanction of their fellows.h.i.+p. She must seem to him preposterous in her anxiety to break with him, to make an end of what had never been. All the same, what he was forcing on her now was the fact of separation. As they approached the house where he and Laura lived she had an increasing sense of estrangement from him and of distance.

He drew her attention to the iron gate that guarded their sanctuary, and the untrodden gra.s.s behind it. His dreams came in by that gate, and all other things by the postern door, which, he said, was the way he and she must go.

Nina paused by the gate. "It won't open, Owen."

"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."

"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."

"It will last my time," he said.

L

Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect a.s.surance that they had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between them.

It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or conscience in the matter.

It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray, of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.

It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove her on.

Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.

And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face in the gla.s.s met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she _had_ stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand.

But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coa.r.s.ened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster.

She accentuated its effect by the masculine fas.h.i.+on of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw her doing it now.

"I like your face," was her comment.

"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."

She began was.h.i.+ng them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.

At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence, was babbling about Owen.

"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look there!"

She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.

"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?"

Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone shabby.

"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every evening."

"Put it on now," said Nina.

"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."

"You must," said Nina.

Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for Nina to "fasten her up the back."

Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long deft hands trembling as he performed this office.

The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful gown.

"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it!

How he knew one gown from another--how he knew the shops--what hand guided him--I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."

"Or yours."

"Yes--when you think of the horrors he might have got."

Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she was pulling up a fold of lace above her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. As she did this she looked at her own image in the gla.s.s and smiled softly, unaware. Nina saw then that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were slightly and delicately rounded; she recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last touch of the pa.s.sion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its perfection. Her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaved as the wild fang pierced them.

Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch.

There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man, since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a mouse-coloured velvet gown.

The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the gla.s.s regarding her sombrely. She turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"]

Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could I?"