The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair

Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with his question. He had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution, a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as I do? Why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"

It seemed so simple, Tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the world and she shall be my daughter."

But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick's death. Jane had been with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.

After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude's hands. Every day brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room with Gertrude, led by her hand.

For six weeks Brodrick had been left very much to Gertrude. And Gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered herself into the peace she made.

But in March Jane was on her feet again. In April Brodrick took her to the Riviera, and her return (in May) was the return of that brilliant and distracting alien who had invaded Brodrick's house seven years ago. Jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that Henry admitted that he would not have known her. To which she had rather ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well.

Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had been inclined to agree with Henry that genius—her genius at any rate—was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more. Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified. She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray had said she was not to be—a mere woman.

Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she was to go on.

But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health, and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her low.

It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent.