The Creators Part 1

The Creators.

by May Sinclair.

I

Three times during dinner he had asked himself what, after all, was he there for? And at the end of it, as she rose, her eyes held him for the first time that evening, as if they said that he would see.

She had put him as far from her as possible, at the foot of her table between two of the four preposterous celebrities whom she had asked him, George Tanqueray, to meet.

Everything, except her eyes, had changed since he had last dined with Jane Holland, in the days when she was, if anything, more obscure than he. It was no longer she who presided at the feast, but her portrait by Gisborne, R.A. He had given most of his attention to the portrait.

Gisborne, R.A., was a solemn egoist, and his picture represented, not Jane Holland, but Gisborne's limited idea of her. It was a sombre face, broadened and foreshortened by the heavy, leaning brows. A face with a straight-drawn mouth and eyes prophetic of tragedy, a face in which her genius brooded, downcast, flameless, and dumb. He had got all her features, her long black eyebrows, her large, deep-set eyes, flattened queerly by the level eyebrows, her nose, a trifle too long in the bridge, too wide in the nostril, and her mouth which could look straight enough when her will was dominant. He had got her hair, the darkness and the ma.s.s of it. Tanqueray, in his abominable way, had said that Gisborne had put his best work into that, and when Gisborne resented it he had told him that it was immortality enough for any one to have painted Jane Holland's hair. (This was in the days when Gisborne was celebrated and Tanqueray was not.)

If Jane had had the face that Gisborne gave her she would never have had any charm for Tanqueray. For what Gisborne had tried to get was that oppressive effect of genius, heavily looming. Not a hint had he caught of her high levity, of her look when the bright devil of comedy possessed her, not a flash of her fiery quality, of her eyes' sudden gold, and the ways of her delicate, her brilliant mouth, its fine, deliberate sweep, its darting tilt, like wings lifted for flight.

When Tanqueray wanted to annoy Jane he told her that she looked like her portrait by Gisborne, R.A.

They were all going to the play together. But at the last moment, she, to Tanqueray's amazement, threw them over. She was too tired, she said, to go.

The celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course, if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration.

And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get rid of them.

She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for.

Her tired eyes helped her.

Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.

"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"

"I am certainly not going with them----" He paused, hesitating.

"Then--you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she hesitated too.

"But you're tired?" he said.

"Not now."

She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her appeal.

That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose to put it down to the strange circ.u.mstance of her celebrity; and, though he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.

That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the first time in many weeks.

She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified her.

Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him.

There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping him.

"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.

"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."

"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"

"It won't work."

"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."

She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.

There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her writing-table. His "Works"--five novels--were on a shelf by themselves at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.

For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the Master, told her was "_the_ unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on his tremendous height.

But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.

"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"

"What hasn't?"

"Your pop--your celebrity."

"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they----"

"_They_ needn't. I must. Celebrity--you observe that I call it by no harsher name--celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to end that way."

"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I hate it sometimes."

"You hate it, yet you're drawn."

"By what? By my vanity?"

"Not by your vanity, though there is that."

"By what, then?"

"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."

"Mayn't I be?"

"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."

For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.

"Because you've genius."

"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"