The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair

The wonder passed with a sense of shifting in her brain.

But there was terror for her in this resurgence of her unwedded self. In any settlement of affairs between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick it would be the younger, the unwedded woman who would demand of the other her account. It was she who was aware, already, of the imminent disaster, the irreparable loss. It was she who suffered when they talked about the genius of Jane Holland.

For they were talking more than ever. In another week it would be upon her, the Great Event of nineteen-five. Her frightful celebrity exposed her, forced her to face the thing she had brought forth and was ashamed to own.

She might have brazened it out somehow but for Nina Lempriere and her book. It appeared, Nina's book, in these hours that tingled with expectation of the terrible Event. In a majestic silence and secrecy it appeared. Jane had heard Tanqueray praise it. "Thank heaven," he said, "there's one of us that's sinless. Nina's genius can lay nothing to her charge." She saw it. Nina's flame was pure. Her hand had virginal strength.

It had not always had it. Her younger work, "Tales of the Marches," showed violence and torture in its strength. It was as if Nina had torn her genius from the fire that destroyed it and had compelled it to create. Her very style moved with the vehemence of her revolt from Tanqueray. But there had been a year between Tanqueray and Owen Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection; further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place; there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.