The Creators Part 3

"I do not, thank G.o.d. But it would be all the same if I did. I can't get a single thing I do want."

"Can't you? I should have thought you could have got most things you really wanted."

"I could if I were a grocer or a draper. Why, a hair-dresser has more mastery of the means of life."

He was telling her, she knew, that he was too poor for the quest of the matchless lady; and through all his young and sombre rage of frustration there flashed forth his anger with her as the unfit.

He began to tramp up and down the room again, by way of distraction from his mood. Now and then his eyes turned to her with no thought in them, only that dark, unhappy fire.

He was quiet now. He had caught sight of some sheets of ma.n.u.script lying on her desk.

"What's this?" he said.

"Only the last thing I've written."

"May I look?"

"You may."

He took it up and sat beside her, close beside her, and turned the leaves over with a nervous hand. He was not reading. There was no thought in his eyes.

He looked at her again. She saw that he was at the mercy of his moment, and of hers.

For it was her moment. There was a power that every woman had, if she cared to use it and knew how. There was a charm that had nothing to do with beauty, for it was present in the unbeautiful. These things had their life secret and apart from every other charm and every other power. His senses called to the unknown and unacknowledged sense in her.

She knew that he could be hers if she answered to that call. She had only to kindle her flame, send out her signal.

And she said to herself, "I can't. I can't take him like this. He isn't himself. It would be hateful of me."

In that moment she had no fear. Love held her back and burning honour that hardly knew itself from shame. It accused her of having man[oe]uvred for that moment. It said, "You can't let him come in like this and trap him."

Another voice in her whispered, "You fool. If you don't marry him some other woman will--in this mood of his." And honour cried, answering it, "Let her. So long as it isn't I."

She had a torturing sense of his presence. And with it her fear came back to her, and she rose suddenly to her feet, and stood apart from him.

He flung the ma.n.u.script into the place she had left, and bowed forward, hiding his face in his hands. He rose too, and she knew that his moment had gone. She had let it go.

Then, with a foreboding of his departure, she tried to call him back to her, not in his way, but her own, the way of the heart.

"Do you know what I should like to do?" she said. "I should like to sweep it all away, and to get back to that little room, and for n.o.body to come near me but you, n.o.body to read me but you, n.o.body to talk about me but you. Do you remember?"

He did, but he was not going to talk about it. In the fierceness of his mortal moment he was impatient of everything that for her held immorality.

"We were so happy then," she said. "Why can't we be happy now?"

"I've told you why."

"Yes, and I can't bear it. When I think of you----"

He looked at her with the lucid gaze of the psychologist, of the physician who knew her malady.

"Don't think of me," he said. His eyes seemed to say, "That would be worst of all."

And so he left her.

II

He really did not want her to think of him, any more than he wanted to think intensely and continuously of her. What he had admired in her so much was her deep loyalty to their compact, the way she had let him alone and insisted on his letting her alone.

This desire of Tanqueray's for detachment was not so much an att.i.tude as an instinct. His genius actually throve on his seclusion, and absorption in life would have destroyed its finest qualities. It had no need of sustained and frequent intercourse with men and women. For it worked with an incredible rapidity. It took at a touch and with a glance of the eye the thing it wanted. It was an eye that unstripped, a hand that plunged under all coverings to the essential nakedness.

His device was, "Look and let go." He had never allowed himself to hold on or be held on to; for thus you were dragged down and swamped; you were stifled by the stuff you worked in. Your senses, he maintained, were no good if you couldn't see a thing at the first glance and feel it with the first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-s.e.xed, or that it was even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine, rather, humble and pa.s.sive in its att.i.tude to life. It yearned perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal with was the germ, the undeveloped thing; the growing and shaping and bringing forth must be its own. The live thing, the thing that kicked, was never produced in any other way. Genius in a great realist was itself flesh and blood. It was only the little men that were the plagiarists of life; only the sterile imaginations that adopted the already born, and bargained with experience to do their work for them.

And yet there was no more a.s.siduous devotee of experience than George Tanqueray. He repudiated with furious contempt any charge of inspiration. There was no such thing as inspiration. There was instinct, and there was eyesight. The rest was all infernal torment and labour in the sweat of your brow. All this Tanqueray believed sincerely.

It would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same time so unsophisticated as he.

For five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it, among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk perceptibly from their advances. He condemned their manner as a shade too patronizing to his proud obscurity. And now, at two-and-thirty, of three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, Jane Holland.

He had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people, persistent, insufferable people.

For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead. The charm of Hampstead was that n.o.body whom he knew lived there.

He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too steep for traffic. He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the gra.s.s of his slope turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to purple. He looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in Hampstead whom he knew. And that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last he had found peace. He would stay there for ever, in those two rooms.

Here, on the morning after he had dined with Jane Holland, he sat down to write. And he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it created. In those days Tanqueray could never count upon his genius. The thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. At times it seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. He courted it, and it avoided him. He let it go, and it came back to him, caressing and tormenting him, compelling his embrace. There were days when it pursued and captured him, and then it had wings that swept him divinely to its end. There were days when he had to go out and find it, and lure the winged thing back to him. Once caught, it was unswerving in its operations.

But Tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius failed him. And apparently it had failed him now. In forty-eight hours he had accomplished nothing.

At the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. His genius had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. But still he had cared for it supremely. Now, the horrible thing was that he did not care. His genius was of all things that which interested him least. He was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating because it was aimless and obscure.

That came of dining with Jane Holland.

He was not in love with Jane. On the contrary, he was very angry with her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. And he was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was not in it.

But wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were always running upon Jane. They ran on her now. He conceived of her more than ever as the unfit. "She's too d.a.m.nably clever," he kept saying to himself, "too d.a.m.nably clever." And he took up her last book just to see again how d.a.m.nably clever she was.

In an instant he was at her feet. She wasn't clever when she wrote that.

What a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. It matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. Almost as clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. Reading Jane Holland, Tanqueray became depressed or exalted according to his mood. He was now depressed.

But he could not leave her. In spirit he remained at her feet. He bowed himself in the dust. "I couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my life. I shall never do anything like that."

He wrote and told her so. But he did not go to see her, as he would have done six weeks ago.

And then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did not feel them. "I don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. She's like me." Too like him to be altogether fit.