May Sinclair

“ He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact.
It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks, behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all the facts. ”

“ She, who had once felt that there was nothing in common between her and her husband's friends, was being gradually drawn to them. Jane's baby had been the link with Jane; Mr. Gunning had been the link with Laura; she shared with Laura and Prothero the rare genius of devotion to a person. Rose was shocked and bewildered by many of the little ways of the creators, but she understood their way. They loved each other more than they loved anything they created. They loved each other as she loved Tanqueray, but with a perfect comprehension. ”

“ Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it, past all bounds.
For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision. They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth ”

“ It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life.
It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray, could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was suicidal ”

“ Nicky raised his dark eyes and gazed upon them. "Good heavens! But a man wants a woman to inspire him."
"George doesn't," said Jane. "You may trust him to inspire himself."
"You may," said Nina. "In six months it won't matter whether George is married or not. At least, not to George."
She rose, turning on Nicky as if something in his ineffectual presence maddened her. "Do you suppose," she said, "that woman counts? No woman counts with men like George Tanqueray."
"She can hold you back," said Nicky.
"You think so? You haven't got a hundred horse-power genius pulling you along. ”

“ It was part of her queerness that she had the square brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant woman had borne her. And, queerer still, her genius had rushed in and seized upon that body, that it might draw wild nature into it through her woodland, pastoral blood. And for the blood it took it had given her back fire.
Latterly, owing to Tanqueray's behaviour, whenever Jane looked in the glass, it had been the element of queerness and ugliness that she had seen. ”

“ Jane was not interested in Mr. Brodrick. She could not stay and did not, and, going, she took Nina with her.
Laura would have followed, but Miss Bickersteth held her with a hand upon her arm. Nicholson left them, though Laura's eyes almost implored him not to go.
"My dear," said Miss Bickersteth. "Tell me. Have you any idea how much she cares for him?"
"She?"
"Jane."
"You've no reason to suppose she cares."
"Do you think he cared in the very least for her?"
"I think he may have—without knowing it."
"My dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. He knows, for instance, all about us." ”

“ Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal strength.
It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches," showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen Prothero. ”

“ Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.
He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.
If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty, yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. ”

“ Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were. He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired. They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. ”

“ There was no escaping his diabolical lucidity.
"Go and see her at once," he went on, "and take Prothero. That's more to the point, you know, than his seeing me. Jinny is a powerful person, and then she has a way with her."
Again the flame leaped in her face and died, slowly, as under torture.
"Even Laura can do more for him than I. She knows people on papers. Take him to see Laura." He was backing out of the doorway.
"It was you," she said, "that he wanted to see. I promised him."
Her face, haggard, restless with the quivering of her agonized nerves, was as a wild book for him to read. ”

“ Brodrick was aware that she wandered. That was how he had always put it. He had reckoned long ago with her propensity to wander. It was the way of her genius; it was part of her queerness, of the dangerous charm that had attracted him. He understood that sort of thing. It was his own comparative queerness, his perversity, that had made him fly in the face of his family's tradition. No Brodrick had ever married a woman who wandered, who conceivably would want to wander.
And Jinny wandered more than ever; more than he had ever made allowances for. ”

“ Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast, scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and gravity. ”

“ Nature's way was to weave over again the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's plan.
And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote, assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay. ”

“ She rose.
"I know," she said, "I've broken all the rules. A woman shouldn't come and tell a man she cares for him."
"Why not?" he said simply.
"I tell you, I don't know why not. I only know that I'm so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don't apply. Why shouldn't I tell you? You know it—as God knows it."
"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I'd been there."
"Owen—shall I ever be where you are now?"
"I had to die first. I told you my youth was dead. That, Nina, was what you cared for." ”

“ 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 assiduous devotee of experience than George Tanqueray. ”

“ 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 assurance 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. ”

“ They were going together to Miss Bickersteth's as if nothing had happened. His manner suggested that they were moving together in a world where nothing could happen; a world of delightful and amicable superficialities. She was not to be afraid of him; he was, as it were, looking another way; he wasn't even aware of any depths. The sheer beauty and gentleness of him showed her that he had seen and understood thoroughly what depths there were.
It was her certainty of Nicky's vision that drove her to the supreme act of courage.
"Why aren't we talking," she said, "about George Tanqueray?" ”

“ Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face, broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight enough when her will was dominant. ”

“ It was she, not Brodrick, who was sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.
She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she had had it. ”

“ It was a thing of pathos and of innocence, something between the uncontrollable tenderness, the divine infatuation of a mother, and the crude obsession of a girl uncertain of the man she has set her unhappy heart on; a thing, Rose's attitude, stripped of all secrecy by its sadness.
But there was nothing abject in it. It was strong; it was militant under its pathos and its renunciation. With such a look Rose would have faced gates of death closing between her and Tanqueray.
So Jane realized Rose.
And she said to herself, "What a good thing Tanks never did care for me. ”

“ It was through Owen's obscurity that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt. ”

“ She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought. It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound an instinct of self-preservation. ”

“ Laura lifted the hem of her skirt and revealed the marvel and absurdity of her feet.
"And they," said Nina, "stamped on George Tanqueray."
"It wasn't half as difficult as it looks."
"You're a wonderful Kiddy, but you don't know what passion is, and you may thank your stars you don't."
"I might know quite a lot," said Laura, "if it wasn't for Papa. Papa's a perfect safeguard against passion. I know beforehand that as long as he's there, passion isn't any good. You see," she explained, "it's so simple. I wouldn't marry anybody who wouldn't live with Papa. And nobody would marry me if he had to." ”