Part 6

"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our families have cast us off."

"Mine hasn't yet."

"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.

He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake. He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the "consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.

Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.

"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet that's our temptation, yours and mine."

Again he paused.

"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws them by one divine sense. Ours drags us by the heart and brain, by the very soul, into the thick of it. The unpardonable sin is separating literature from life. You know that as well as I do."

She did. She worked divinely, shaping unashamed the bodies and the souls of men. There was nothing in contemporary literature to compare with the serene, inspired audacity of Jane Holland. Her genius seemed to have kept the transcendent innocence of the days before creation.

Tanqueray continued in his theme. Talking like this allayed his excitement.

"We're bound," he said, "to get mixed up with people. They're the stuff we work in. It's almost impossible to keep sinless and detached. We're being tempted all the time. People--people--people--we can't have enough of 'em; we can't keep off 'em. The thing is--to keep 'em off us. And Jane, I know--they're getting at you."

She did not deny it. They were.

"And you haven't the--the nerve to stand up against it."

"I have stood up against it."

"You have. So have I. When we were both poor."

"You want me to be poor?"

"I don't want you to be a howling pauper like me, but, well, just pleasantly short of cash. There's nothing like that for keeping you out of it."

"You want me to be thoroughly uncomfortable? Deprived of everything that makes life amusing?"

"Thoroughly uncomfortable. Deprived of everything that stands in the way of your genius."

She felt a sudden pang of jealousy, a hatred of her genius, this thing that had been tacked on to her. He cared for it and could be tender to it, but not to her.

"You're a cruel beast," she said, smiling through her pain.

"My cruelty and my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be prepared to be burnt."

"It's all very well for you, George. I don't like being burnt."

That roused him; it stirred the devil in him.

"Do you suppose I like it? Why, you--you don't know what burning is. It means standing by, on fire with thirst, and seeing other people drink themselves drunk."

"You don't want to be drunk, George. Any more than I do."

"I do not, thank God. 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."