The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair

XXX

It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's. Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want?

The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance. Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept Gertrude on.

He had said at the time that he didn't think she would do, but he would try her. He regarded Gertrude with the suspicion a Brodrick invariably entertained for any idea that was not conspicuously his own. But Gertrude had managed, with considerable adroitness, to convince him that she was, after all, his own idea. And when Sophy Levine triumphed, as a Brodrick invariably did triumph, in the proved perfection of her scheme, he said, Yes, Miss Collett was all right, now that he had trained her. If he approved of Miss Collett it was because she was no longer recognizable as the Miss Collett they had so preposterously thrust on him. He could not have stood her if she had been.

Brodrick was right. Gertrude was not the same woman. She did not even look the same. She had come to Moor Grange lean, scared, utterly pathetic, with a mouth that drooped. So starved of all delight and of all possession was Gertrude that she flushed with pleasure when she heard that she was to have for her very own the little north room where the telephone was now. There was such pathos in her meek withdrawal into that little north room, that Brodrick hadn't the heart to keep her in it. The drawing-room, he had intimated, also might be hers, when (it was understood rather than stated) he wasn't there himself.

By that time he no longer objected to Gertrude's being all over the place. Brodrick, though he did not know it and his sisters did, was the sort of man who could not be happy without a woman to look after him. Silently, almost furtively, Gertrude made herself indispensable to him. She knew what he wanted before he knew it himself, and was on the spot to supply it. Thus, watching the awful increase of Brodrick's correspondence, as the editor grew great, she was prepared for the coming of a secretary and had forestalled it.

She had kept herself prepared for the coming of a wife, a mistress of Brodrick's house, and by making Brodrick supremely comfortable she had managed to forestall that too. His secretary had become the companion that his housekeeper could not hope to be. Hitherto he had kept Gertrude Collett out of his library as far as possible. Now her intrusion had the consecration of business, and it was even permissible for Gertrude to spend long hours with him in the sanctuary. Brodrick invariably breakfasted alone. This habit and his deadly and perpetual dining out, had been a barrier to all intimacy. But now a large part of his work on the "Monthly Review" could be done at home in the evenings, so that the editor had less time for dining out. And latterly he had taken to coming home early in the afternoons, when he rather liked to have Gertrude in the drawing-room pouring out tea for him. She filled the place of something that he missed, that he was as yet hardly aware of missing. It seemed to him that he had got used to Gertrude.

He could not think what life would be like without Gertrude, any more than he could think what it would be like with her in a closer and more intimate relation. For none of them had ever suggested that he should marry Gertrude. No Brodrick would have dreamed of marrying his housekeeper. Gertrude would not have dreamed of it herself.

And yet she dreamed. But her dream was of continuance in the silent, veiled adventure, the mystery and religion of her service. Service to Brodrick, perpetual, unwearying service, constituted to her mind the perfect tie. It was the purity of it that she counted as perfection. She desired nothing further than her present surrender to the incorruptible, inassailable passion of service. Whenever, in her dream, she touched the perilous edges of devotion, Gertrude had pulled herself back. She had told herself that she was there for nothing in the world but to save Brodrick, to save him trouble, to save him worry, to save him expense; to save and save and save. That was really what it came to when she saved him from having to keep a secretary.

For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick. Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity, Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging, intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.