The Creators Part 117

"Not altogether." She pondered. "No doubt G.o.d had some wise purpose when he made Hugh marry me. I can see the wise purpose in Owen's marrying Laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying Nina; but when it comes to poor, innocent Hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman like me----"

"Don't put it on G.o.d. His purpose was wise enough."

"What was it?"

"Why--obviously--that I should have married you, that Hugh should have married Gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have married Rose."

"Poor little Rose!"

"Poor little Rose would have been happy with her draper; Gertrude would have been happy with Brodrick; you--no, I, would have been divinely happy with you."

She laughed. "Oh, would you!"

"_That_ was the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of us, bent on frustrating the divine will--I beg Gertrude's pardon--Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."

"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."

"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you--look at me."

She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have quite as much of each other as is good for us. If _we_ were to tear each other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."

Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.

Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.

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.

Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very ease with which it a.s.similated all food of earth and heaven, it starved them at the roots.

It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds.

His cruelty (for it _was_ cruelty from the poor parasite's point of view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.

It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved almost complete oblivion of her.

But Jane--Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic about Jane. She had the freedom of all the s.p.a.ces of earth and heaven.

She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.

He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.

Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever.

She had added that invincible quality to the s.e.xless charm that had drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from disaster.

(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)

They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay between them and the farm lane.

The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.

Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly.

She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green gra.s.s ran like water.

"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're talking."

"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."

The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see.

A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.

Then Tanqueray spoke.

"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"

"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."

"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats."

"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."

"Ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight."

Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.

"Jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from Wendover?"

She did not answer him.

"Jinny--we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."

It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circ.u.mstance, all that had come between. It was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.

"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.

"Don't let's talk about it any more."

"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns it to poison."

"Yes."

"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"

"Not in the beginning. If we only had----"

"We didn't know it then."

"_I_ knew it," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me, then?"