“That is art,” she said dreamily, “conception, gestation, travail, birth. It does not matter whether the thing born is a poem, a picture, a statue, a sonata, a temple——”
“Or a cash register,” I said.
The thing born might apparently be anything except an ordinary baby. The true artist does not think much of babies. They are bourgeois things.
“Or a cash register,” she said. “It makes no difference. The man who creates, who brings into being, has only one desire, that his child, whatever it may be, shall live. If it is stifled, killed, a sword goes through his heart.”
It seemed to me even then with Mrs. Ascher’s eyes on me, that it was rather absurd to talk about a cash register living. I do not think that men have ever personified this machine. We talk of ships and engines by the names we give them and use personal pronouns, generally feminine, when we speak of them. But did any one ever call a cash register “Minnie” or talk of it familiarly as “she”?
“He thinks,” said Mrs. Ascher, “indeed he is sure—he says his brother told him——”
“I know,” I said. “The machine isn’t going to be put on the market at all. It is to be used simply as a threat to make other people pay what I should call blackmail.”
“That must not be,” said Mrs. Ascher.
Her voice was pitched a couple of tones higher than usual. I might almost say she shrieked.
“It must not be,” she repeated, “must not. It is a crime, a vile act, the murder of a soul.”