The Creators: A Comedy

by May Sinclair

It pleased him now when he came, mooning drearily, into the drawing-room, to find Gertrude in possession. He was almost always tired now, and he was glad to lie back in an easy-chair and have his tea handed to him by Gertrude. He looked forward, in fancy, to the children's hour that followed tea-time, and he had made a great point at first of having them to himself. But as a matter of fact, being almost always tired, he enjoyed their society far more sincerely when Gertrude was there to keep them in order.

That was her gift. She had been the genius of order ever since she had come into his house—good gracious, was it ten years ago? Her gift made her the most admirable secretary an editor could have. But she was more than that now. She was a perfect companion to a physically fatigued and intellectually slightly deteriorated man. He owned to the deterioration. Jane had once told him that his intellect was a "lazy, powerful beast." It seemed to him now, humbly regarding it, that the beast was and always had been much more lazy than powerful. It required constant stimulus to keep it going. His young ambition and his young passion for Jane Holland had converged to whip it up. It flagged with the dying down of passion and ambition. Things latterly had come a bit too late. His dream had been realized too late. And he hadn't realized it, either. Jane had realized it for him. No sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. He had become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. He showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and harassed father of a family. He had put off intellectual things. His deterioration weighed on him when he thought of Jane. But Gertrude's gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state.

Sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the September evenings, there would be long silences. Gertrude never broke a silence. She was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it—he could almost feel her holding it—tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as if she were afraid that it would break. She gave him so much sense of her presence and no more. She kept before him, humbly, veiled from his vision, the fact that she was there to serve him.

Sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. It was not the poignant shyness of her youth which Brodrick had once found so distressing. It conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. Its physical sign was the pale, suffused flame in Gertrude's face, and that web of air across her eyes. There was a sort of charm about it.

Sometimes, coming upon Gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find her sad. He said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety. It was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another woman's responsibilities. He thought that Jane had sometimes been a little hard on her. He supposed that was her (Jane's) feminine way. The question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her. He was, in fact, profoundly sorry for Gertrude, more profoundly sorry than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. Well, he wanted her enough now in all conscience.

Then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing Gertrude were to go? It was not conceivable, her going.

For, above all her gifts, Gertrude was an incomparable mother to those unfortunate children (since Jane's departure Brodrick had begun to think definitely of his children as unfortunate). It was distinctly pleasurable the feeling with which he watched her ways in gathering them to her side and leading them softly from the room when "Daddy was busy," or when "poor Daddy was so tired." More than once he found himself looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys in the garden. Solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered whether little Jacky were not too solemn, too preternaturally quiet for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding Gertrude's hand. He remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when Jinny——And remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a sore heart and a set face.

Three weeks passed thus. There was a perceptible increase in Gertrude's shyness and sadness.

One evening after dinner she came to him in his study. He rose and drew forward a chair for her. She glanced at his writing-table and at the long proof-sheets that hung from it, streaming.

"I mustn't," she said. "You're busy."