Very closely on the loss of my baby, of which I have spared you as much
as possible, came crowding the opening movement of my artistic career.
Within a month I was in a hospital in Chicago, recovering from the
disastrous termination of another expectancy that had come, scarcely
regarded in the obsession of anxiety and overwork during the last weeks
of my boy's life, and had failed to sustain itself under the shock of
his death. And after the hospital there was a month of convalescence at
Pauline's. It was the first time I had seen her since her marriage.
I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one
room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling, scattered homes of
Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp, until I discovered a kind of
spaciousness in the life within. It was really very little else than
relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic air
and light that answered perfectly so long as you believed it real.
Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her
windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in
tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline
gave them tea which she made in a brass kettle over a spirit lamp. You
can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of
the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered
unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life
which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to
press toward expression. It rose insistently against the depressing
figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of
Pauline's bright competency and the quality of assurance in her choice
of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour
or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the
plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the
people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and
at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to
the particular department store where I saw rows of them shining in the
ticketed inaccessibility of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From
point to point of such eminent practicability I was pricked to think of
preëmpting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding
myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to
throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which
the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still
in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the
plentitude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and
fit so that nobody need have lacked a portion of it, save for an
inexplicable error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who
had within me the witness of heirship, had none of it.
That I should have felt it so, was no doubt a part of that Taylorvillian
fallacy in which I had been reared, that all that was precious and
desirable was shed as the natural flower and fruit of goodness. Here
confronted with the concrete preciousness of the shop windows, I
realized that if there had been anything originally sound in that
proposition, I had at least missed the particular kind of goodness to
which it was chargeable. I wanted, I absurdly wanted just then to
collect my arrears of privilege and consideration in terms of hardwood
furniture and afternoon teakettles, in graceful, feminine leisure, all
the traditional sanctity and enthronement of women, for which I had paid
with my body, with maternal anxieties and wifely submission. What
glimmered on my horizon was the realization that it was not in such
appreciable coin the debt was paid, the beginning of knowledge that
seldom, except by accident, is it paid at all. What I learned from
Pauline was that most of it came by way of the bargain counter. Not even
the Shining Destiny was due to arrive merely by reason of your own
private conviction of being fit, but demanded something to be laid down
for it; though if you had named the whole price to me at that juncture,
I should have refused to pay.
Besides all this, the most memorable thing that came of my visit to
Pauline was that I went to the theatre. It was Henry's suggestion; he
thought I wanted cheering. Pauline was not going out much that season
and her reluctance to claim my attention, in the face of my bereavement,
to her own approaching Event, threw at times a shadow of constraint on
our quiet evenings. Henry had fallen into a way of taking me out for
timid and Higglestonian glimpses of the night sights of the city, but I
am not sure it was the obligation of hospitality which led him to
propose the theatre. I recall that he displayed a particular knowingness
about what he styled "the attractions." What surprised me most was that
I discovered no qualms in myself over a proceeding so at variance with
my bringing up; and the piece, a broad comedy of Henry's selection, made
no particular impression on me other than the singular one of having
known a great deal about it before. My criticism of the acting brought
Pauline around with a swing from the City Cousin attitude in which she
had initiated the experience for me, to one æsthetically sympathetic.
"The things men choose, my dear--and to anybody who has been saturated
in Shakespeare as you have! You really must see Modjeska; it will be an
inspiration to you. Henry, you must take her to see Modjeska."
I had not yet made up my mind as to whether I liked Henry Mills, but I
was willing to go and see Modjeska with him; we had orchestra seats and
Pauline insisted on my wearing her black silk wrap. On the way, Henry
told me a great deal about Madam Modjeska with that same air of
knowingness which fitted so oddly with his assumption of the model
husband. I had accustomed myself to think of Henry as an attorney, which
in Taylorville meant a man who could be trusted with the administration
of widows' property and Fourth of July orations. Henry, it transpired,
was a sort of junior partner in one of those city firms whose concern is
not with people who have broken the law, but with those who are desirous
to sail as close to the wind as possible without breaking it. They had a
great deal to do with stock companies, in connection with which Henry
had found some personal advantage. He always referred to it as "our
office" so that I am in doubt still as to the exact nature of his
connection with it; its only relation to his private life was to lead to
his habitually appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air
of shrewd reliability. If in the beginning he had any notions of his own
as to what a husband ought to be, he had discarded them in favour of
Pauline's, and if as early as that he had devised any system of paying
himself off for his complicity in her ideals, I didn't discover it.
I saw Modjeska with Henry, in "Romeo and Juliet," and afterward stole
away to a matinée by myself and saw her as Rosalind. I do not know now
if she was the great artist she seemed, it is so long since I have seen
her, but she sufficed. I had no words in which to express my
extraordinary sense of possession in her, the profound, excluding
intimacy of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial
pillow I remained walking up and down in my room in a state of intense,
inarticulate excitement. I did not think concretely of the stage nor of
acting; what I had news of, was a country of large impulses and
satisfying movement. I felt myself strong, had I but known the way, to
set out for it. When I found sleep at last, it was to dream, not of the
theatre, but of Helmeth Garrett. I was made aware of him first by a
sense of fulness about my heart, and then I came upon him looking as he
had looked last in the Willesden woods, writing at a table, a pale blur
about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet
underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red
boughs of sycamore and oak depended through the dream-fogged atmosphere.
I stood and read over his shoulder what he wrote, and though the words
escaped me, the meaning of them put all straight between us. He turned
as he wrote and looked at me with a look that set us back in the wrapt
intimacy of the flaming forest ... somehow we had got there and found it
softly dark! In the interval between my dream and morning, that kiss
which had been the source of so much secret blame and secret exultation
was somehow accounted for: it was a waif out of the country of Rosalind
and Juliet. The sense of a vital readjustment remained with me all that
day; there had been after all, in the common phrase, "something between
us." But I explained the recrudescence of memory on the basis that it
was from Helmeth Garrett that I had first heard of Chicago and Modjeska.
I came back to Higgleston reasonably well, with some fine points of
achievement twinkling ahead of me, to have my new-found sense of
direction put all at fault by the trivial circumstance of Tommy's having
papered the living room. The walls when we took the house, had been
finished hard and white, much in need of renewing, from the expense of
which our immediate plunge into the cares of a family had prevented us.
Casting about for any way of ridding it against my return, of the
sadness of association, Tommy had hit upon the idea of papering the room
himself in the evenings after closing hours, and by way of keeping it a
pleasant surprise, had chosen the paper to his own taste. Any one who
kept house in the early 80's will recall a type of paper then in vogue,
of large unintelligent arabesques of a liverish bronzy hue, parting at
regular intervals upon Neapolitan landscapes of pronounced pinks and
blues. Tommy's landscapes achieved the added atrocity of having Japanese
ladies walking about in them, and though the room wanted lighting, the
paper was very dark. It must have cost him something too! From the
amount of his salary which he had remitted for my hospital expenses he
could hardly have left himself money to pay for his meals at
Higgleston's one doubtful restaurant. The appearance of the kitchen,
indeed, suggested that he had made most of them on crackers and tinned
ham.
I was glad to have discovered this before I said to him how much better
it would have been for him to send me the money and let me select the
paper in Chicago. What leaped upon me as he waved the lamp about to show
me how cleverly he had matched the borders, was the surprising, the
confounding certainty that after all our shared sorrow and anxiety we
hadn't in the least come together. I had lived in the house with him for
two years, had borne him a child and lost it, and he had chosen this
moment of heartrending return, to give me to understand that he couldn't
even know what I might like in the way of wall papers.
I suppose all this time when the surface of my attention was taken up
with the baby, I had been making unconscious estimates of my husband,
but that night just as we had come from the station, the moment of
calculating that on a basis of necessary economy, I should have to live
at least three years with the evidence of his ineptitude, was the first
of my regarding him critically as the instrument of my destiny. And I
hadn't primarily selected him for that purpose. I do not know now
exactly why I married Tommy, except that marriage seemed a natural sort
of experience and I had taken to it as readily as though it had been
something to eat, something to nourish and sustain. I hadn't at any rate
thought of it as entangling. I did not then; but certainly it occurred
to me that for the enlarged standard of living I had brought home with
me, a man of Tommy's taste was likely to prove an unsuitable tool.
Slight as the incident of the wall paper was, it served to check my
dawning interest in domesticity, and set my hungering mind looking
elsewhere for sustenance. We were still a little in arrears on account
of the funeral expenses and my illness, and no more improvements were to
be thought of; Tommy and I were of one mind in that we had the common
Taylorvillian horror of debt. There were other things which seemed to
put off my conquest of the harmonious environment, things every woman
who has lost a child will understand ... starting awake at night to the
remembered cry ... the blessed weight upon the arm that failed and
receded before returning consciousness. I recall going into the bedroom
once where a shawl had been dropped on the pillow, like ... so like ...
and the memories of infinitesimal neglects that began to show now
preposterously blamable.
In my first year at Higgleston I had been rather driven apart from the
community by the absorption of my condition and the intimation that
instead of being the crown of life it merely saved itself by not being
mentioned. Now, in my desperate need of the social function, I began to
imagine, for want of any other likeness between us, a community of lack.
I thought of Higgleston as aching for life as I ached, and began to
wonder if we mightn't help one another.
As the colder weather shut me more into the haunted rooms, Tommy thought
it might be a good thing if I took an interest in the entertainment
which the I. O. O. F., of which he was a Fellow, was undertaking for the
benefit of their new hall. As the sort of service counted on from the
wives of prominent members, it might also be beneficial to trade. On
this understanding I did take an interest, with the result that the
entertainment was an immense success. It led naturally to my being put
in charge of the annual Public School Library theatricals and a little
later to my being connected with what was the acute dramatic crisis of
the Middle West.
There should be a great many people still who remember a large, loose
melodrama called "The Union Spy," or "The Confederate Spy," accordingly
as it was performed north or south of Mason and Dixon's line,
participated in by the country at large; a sort of localized Passion
play lifted by its tremendous personal interest free of all theatrical
taint. There was a Captain McWhirter who went about with the scenery and
accessories, casting the parts and conducting rehearsals, sharing the
profits with the local G. A. R. The battle scenes were invariably
executed by the veterans of the order, with horrid realism. Effie wrote
me that there had been three performances in Taylorville and Cousin Judd
had been to every one of them.
With the reputation I had acquired in Higgleston, it came naturally when
the town, by its slighter hold on the event, achieved a single
performance, for me to be cast for the principal part, unhindered by any
convention on behalf of my recent mourning. Rather, so close did the
subject lie to the community feeling, there was an instinctive sense of
dramatic propriety in my sorrow in connection with the anguish of
war-bereaved women. One can imagine such a sentiment operating in the
choice of players at Oberammergau. In addition to my acting, I began
very soon to take a large share of the responsibility of rehearsals.
I do not know where I got the things I put into that business. Where, in
fact, does Gift come from, and what is the nature of it? I found myself
falling back on my studies with Professor Winter, on slight amateurish
incidents of Taylorville, on my brief Chicago contact even, to account
to Higgleston for insights, certainties, that they would not have
accepted without some such obvious backing. Nevertheless the thing was
there, the aptitude to seize and carry to its touching, its fruitful
expression, the awkward eagerness of the community to relive its most
moving actualities. Never in America have we been so near the democratic
drama.
In the final performance I surprised Tommy and myself with my success,
most of all I surprised Captain McWhirter. He was arranging a production
of "The Spy" at the twin towns of Newton and Canfield, about two hours
south of us, and asked me to go down there for him and attend to
alternate rehearsals. Tommy was immensely flattered, pleased to have me
forget my melancholy, and the money was a consideration. I saw the
captain through with two performances in each town, and three at
Waterbury. All this time I had not thought of the stage professionally.
I returned to Tommy and the wall paper after the final performance with
a vague sense of flatness, to try to pull together out of Higgleston's
unwilling materials the stuff of a satisfying existence.
Suddenly in April came a telegram and a letter from Captain McWhirter at
Kincade, to say that on the eve of production, his leading lady had run
away to be married, and could I, would I, come down and see him through.
The letter contained an enclosure for travelling expenses, and a
substantial offer for my time. No reasonable objection presenting
itself, I went down to him by Monday's train.