The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair

But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each other and that he hoped they would be friends.

It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.

He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been, though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness. She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife. As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart than Tanqueray, if their cases had been reversed, could have taken into his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it would end there.

It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.

Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let him go for a scruple finer than a hair.

And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was so pre-eminently her failure) came of feeling and of understanding at every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain, passion and insight in her running disastrously together.

It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of response.

Her heart, of course, he must have heard. It had positively screamed at him. But her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. She remembered how she had said to him that night, "Mayn't I be a woman?" and he had answered her brutally. What had concerned him was her genius. If there had been twenty women in her he would have made her sacrifice them all to that. He had cared for it to the point of tenderness, of passion. She had scores of his letters in a drawer, there; love-letters written to her genius. She knew one of them, the last, by heart. It was written at Hampstead.

"Jinny," it had said, "I'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet. I'm in the dust, Jinny, kissing your feet. Shivers of exquisite adoration are going up and down my spine. Do you know what you've done to me, you unspeakably divine person? I've worn out the knees, the knees of my trousers; I've got dust in my hair, Jinny, kissing your feet."

That letter (there was a great deal more of it) had tided her over Tanqueray's worst absence; it had carried her on, so to speak, to Wendover. As she thought of it her heart was filled with hatred and jealousy of her genius.