The Creators Part 38

"I like it very much indeed."

"Well----" (He said it sadly.) "Do you write in this room? At that table?"

"Yes."

He looked at the table as if he thought it all very interesting and very incomprehensible and very sad. He looked at the books on the shelf close to the table and read George Tanqueray's name on them. He frowned slightly at the books and turned away.

She sat down. He did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another where he could see her rather better. He was certainly a man who knew his own mind.

"I've called," he said, "a great many times. But I've always missed you."

"So at last you gave it up? Like everybody else."

"Does it look as if I'd given it up?"

She could not say it did.

"No," he said. "I never give anything up. In that I'm not like everybody else."

He wasn't, she reflected. And yet somehow he ought to have been. There was nothing so very remarkable about him.

He smiled. "I believe," he said, "you thought I was the man come to tune the piano."

"Did I look as if I did?"

"A little."

"Do I now?" She was beginning to like Brodrick.

"Not so much. As it happens, I have come partly for the pleasure of seeing you and partly--to discuss, if you don't mind, some business."

Jane was aware of a certain relief. If it was that he came for----

"I don't know whether you've heard that I'm bringing out a magazine?"

"Oh yes. I remember you were bringing it out----"

"I was thinking of bringing it out when I last met you. It may interest you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. I'm going in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. No politics."

"Won't that limit your circulation?"

"Of course it'll limit it. Still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go in for politics."

"I see. Rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?"

He blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of vaunting his own honesty.

"Oh, well, I don't know about that. Politics means my brother-in-law. If I keep them out I keep him out, and run the thing my own way. I dare say that's all there is in it."

Certainly she liked him. He struck her as powerful and determined. With his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the forlorn hope of literature.

"It's taken me all this time to get the capital together. But I've got it."

"Yes. You would get it."

He looked up gravely inquiring.

"You strike me as being able to get things."

He flushed with pleasure. "Do I? I don't know. If I can get the authors I want I believe I can make the magazine one of the big things of the century." He said it quietly, as if inspired by caution rather than enthusiasm. "_They_'ll make it--if I can get them."

"Are they so difficult?"

"The ones I want are. I don't want any but the best."

She smiled.

"It's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really been tried before. There's room for it."

"Oh, oceans of _room_."

"And it will have all the room there is. Now's its moment. All the good old magazines are dead."

"And gone to heaven because they were so good."

"Because they were old. My magazine will be young."

"There has been frightful mortality among the young."

"I know the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much as you."

She seemed to have hardly heard him.

"Have you asked Mr. Tanqueray?"

"Not yet. You're the first I've asked. The very first."

"You should have asked him first."

"I didn't want him first."

"You should have wanted him. Why" (she persisted), "did you come to me before him?"

"Because you're so much more valuable to me."

"In what way?"

"Your name is better known."