The Creators Part 70

"No woman," said Frances, "knows anything till she's had a child."

"Oh, you married women!"

"Even a married woman. She doesn't know what her love for her husband is until she's held his child at her breast. And she may be as stupid as you please; but she knows more than you."

"I know what she knows--I was born knowing. But if I were married, if I had children, I should know nothing, nothing any more."

Frances was silent.

"They--they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing--not even them."

"Don't you want them to press?"

"It doesn't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they wouldn't let me see."

"They'd make you feel," said Frances.

"Feel? I should think they would. I should feel _them_, I should feel for them, I should feel nothing else besides."

"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."

"Do you think I don't?" said Jane.

"Well, there are some things--I don't see how you can--without experience."

"Experience? Experience is no good--the experience you mean--if you're an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you, twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know women--artists--who have never got over their experience, women who'll never do anything again because of it."

"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a light of sword-play in her eyes.

"I do say it--if they're thinking of their genius."

"Would you say it to Hugh?"

The thrust flashed sharp and straight.

"Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.

Sophy appeared again at that moment and said good-bye. They held her at parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable.

Their very embrace dismissed her and disapproved.

Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home, he said. He wanted to talk to her. They could walk through Regent's Park towards Baker Street.

They had left the Levines' some way behind them when he turned to her.

"Jinny," he said, "what are you doing in that galley?"

"What are you doing in it yourself, George?"

"I? I came to see you. I was told you would be there. You know, you _do_ let yourself in for people."

"Do I?"

"You do. And these Brodricks aren't your sort. No good can come of your being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.

"They're kind to me," she pleaded.

"Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you're working yourself to death for that fellow and his magazine."

"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he'd rather his magazine smashed than I did."

"And you believed him?"

"I believed him."

"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."

His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil.

"Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.

"Do I like him? Yes."

"Why do you like him?"

"I think, perhaps, because he's good."

"That's how he has you, is it?"

He paused.

"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."

"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."

"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."

He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the gravel measured the moments of his thought.

"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."

"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs.

Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because you're human. But they pa.s.s. They pa.s.s. Especially if you don't attend to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need, the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pa.s.s. You know that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary, pa.s.sing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do.

Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."

He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.

"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."

"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."