Understand that up to this time I had not yet thought of the stage as a
career for myself. I hadn't yet needed it. I had not then realized that
the insight and passion which have singled me out among women of my
profession couldn't be turned to render the mere business of living
beautiful and fit. I hardly understand it now. Why should people pay
night after night to see me loving, achieving, suffering, in a way they
wouldn't think of undertaking for themselves? Life as I saw it was
sufficiently dramatic: charged, wonderful. I at least felt at home in
the great moments of kings, the tender hours of poets, and I hadn't
thought of my participation in these things rendering me in any way
superior to Higgleston or even different. If I had, I shouldn't have
settled there in the first place. If I had glimpsed even at Tommy's
exclusion from all that mattered passionately to me, I shouldn't have
married him. It was because I had not yet begun to be markedly
dissatisfied with either of them that I presently got myself the
reputation of having trampled both Tommy and Higgleston underfoot. I
must ask your patience for a little until I show you how wholly I
offered myself to them both and how completely they wouldn't have me.
The point of departure was of course that I didn't accept the
Higglestonian reading of married obligations to mean that my whole time
was to be taken up with just living with Tommy. It was as natural, and
in view of the scope it afforded for individual development, a more
convenient arrangement than living with my mother, but not a whit more
absorbing. I couldn't, anyway, think of just living as an end, and
accordingly I looked about for a more spacious occupation; I thought I
had found it in the directing of that submerged spiritual passion which
I had felt in the sustaining drama of the war. I had a notion there
might be a vent for it in the shape of a permanent dramatic society by
means of which all Higgleston, and I with them, could escape temporarily
from its commonness into the heroic movement. It was all very clear in
my own mind but it failed utterly in communication.
I began wrongly in the first place by asking the Higgleston ladies to
tea. Afternoon tea was unheard of in Higgleston, and I had forgotten, or
perhaps I had never learned, that in Higgleston you couldn't do anything
different without implying dissatisfaction with things as they were. You
were likely on such occasions to be visited by the inquiry as to whether
the place wasn't good enough for you. As a matter of fact afternoon tea
was almost as unfamiliar to me as to the rest of them, but I had read
English novels and I knew how it ought to be done. I knew for instance,
that people came and went with a delightful informality and had tea made
fresh for them, and were witty or portentous as the occasion demanded.
My invitations read from four to five, and the Higgleston ladies came
solidly within the minute and departed in phalanxes upon the stroke of
five. They all wore their best things, which, from the number of black
silks included, and black kid gloves not quite pulled on at the finger
tips, gave the affair almost a funereal atmosphere. They had most of
them had their tea with their midday meal, and Mrs. Dinkelspiel said
openly that she didn't approve of eating between meals. They sat about
the room against the wall and fairly hypnotized me into getting up and
passing things, which I knew was not the way tea should be served. In
Higgleston, the only occasion when things were handed about, were Church
sociables and the like, when the number of guests precluded the
possibility of having them all at your table; and by the time I got once
around, the tea was cold and I realized how thin my thin bread and
butter and chocolate wafers looked in respect to the huge, soft slabs of
layer cake, stiffened by frosting and filling, which, in Higgleston went
by the name of light refreshments. The only saving incident was the
natural way in which Mrs. Ross, our attorney's wife who visited East
every summer and knew how things were done, asked for "two lumps,
please," and came back a second time for bread and butter. I think they
were all tremendously pleased to be asked, though they didn't intend to
commit themselves to the innovation by appearing to have a good time.
And that was the occasion I chose for broaching my great subject,
without, I am afraid, in the least grasping their incapacity to share in
my joyous discovery of the world of Art which I so generously held out
to them.
It hadn't been possible to keep my professional adventure from the
townspeople, nor had I attempted it. What I really felt was that we were
to be congratulated as a community in having one among us privileged to
experience it, and I honestly think I should have felt so of any one to
whom the adventure had befallen. But I suspect I must have given the
impression of rather flaunting it in their faces.
I put my new project on the ground that though we were dissevered by our
situation, there was no occasion for our being out of touch with the
world of emotion, not, at least, so long as we had admission to it
through the drama; and it wasn't in me to imagine that the world I
prefigured to them under those terms was one by their standards never to
be kept sufficiently at a distance.
Mrs. Miller put the case for most of them with the suggestion thrown out
guardedly that she didn't "know as she held with plays for church
members"; she was a large, tasteless woman, whose husband kept the
lumber yard and derived from it an extensive air of being in touch with
the world's occupations. "And I don't know," she went on relentlessly,
"that I ever see any good come of play acting to them that practise it."
Mrs. Ross, determined to live up to her two lumps, came forward
gallantly with:
"Oh, but, Mrs. Miller, when our dear Mrs. Bettersworth----"
"That's what I was thinking of," Mrs. Miller put it over her.
"Well for my part," declared Mrs. Dinkelspiel, with the air of not
caring who knew it, "I don't want my girls to sell tickets or anything;
it makes 'em too forward." Mrs. Harvey, whose husband was in hardware,
began to tell discursively about a perfectly lovely entertainment they
had had in Newton Centre for the missionary society, which Mrs. Miller
took exception to on the ground of its frivolity.
"I don't know," she maintained, "if the Lord's work ain't hindered by
them sort of comicalities as much as it's helped."
I am not sure where this discussion mightn't have landed us if the
general attention had not been distracted just then by my husband, an
hour before his time, coming through the front gate and up the walk. He
had evidently forgotten my tea party, for he came straight to me, and
backed away precipitately through the portières as soon as he saw the
assembled ladies sitting about the wall. It was not that which disturbed
us; any Higgleston male would have done the same, but it was plain in
the brief glimpse we had of him that he looked white and stricken. A
little later we heard him in the back of the house making ambiguous
noises such as not one of my guests could fail to understand as the
precursor of a domestic crisis. I could see the little flutter of
uneasiness which passed over them, between their sense of its demanding
my immediate attention and the fear of leaving before the expressed
time. Fortunately the stroke of five released them. The door was hardly
shut on the last silk skirt when I ran out and found him staring out of
the kitchen window.
"Well?" I questioned.
"I thought they would never go," he protested. "Come in here." He led
the way to the living room as if somehow he found it more appropriate to
the gravity of what he had to impart, and yet failed to make a beginning
with his news. He shut the door and leaned against it with his hands
behind him for support.
"Has anything happened?"
"Happened? Oh, I don't know. I've lost my job."
"Lost? Burton Brothers?" I was all at sea.
He nodded. "They're closing out; the manager's in town to-day. He told
us...." By degrees I got it out of him. Burton Brothers thought they saw
hard times ahead, they were closing out a number of their smaller
establishments, centering everything on their Chicago house. Suddenly my
thought leaped up.
"But couldn't they give you something there ... in Chicago?" I was dizzy
for a moment with the wild hope of it. Never to live in Higgleston any
more--but Tommy cut me short.
"They've men who have been with them longer than I have to provide
for.... I asked."
"Oh, well, no matter. The world is full of jobs." Looking for one
appealed to me in the light of an adventure, but because I saw how pale
he was I went to him and began to kiss him softly. By the way he yielded
himself to me I grasped a little of his lost and rudderless condition,
once he found himself outside the limits of a salaried employment. I
began to question him again as the best way of getting the extent of our
disaster before us.
"What does Mr. Rathbone say?" Rathbone was our working tailor, a thin,
elderly, peering man of a sort you could scarcely think of as having any
existence apart from his shop. He used to come sidling down the street
to it and settle himself among his implements with the air of a brooding
hen taking to her nest; the sound of his machine was a contented
clucking.
"He was struck all of a heap. They're better fixed than we are." Tommy
added this as an afterthought as likely to affect the tailor's attitude
when he came to himself. "They" were old Rathbone and his daughter, one
of those conspicuously blond and full-breasted women who seem to take to
the dressmaking and millinery trades by instinct. As she got herself up
on Sunday in her smart tailoring, with a hat "from the city," and her
hair amazingly pompadoured, she was to some of the men who came to our
church, very much what the brass teakettle was to me, a touch of the
unattainable but not unappreciated elegancies of life. Tommy admired her
immensely and was disappointed that I did not have her at the house
oftener.
"They've got her business to fall back on," Tommy suggested now with an
approach to envy. He had never seen Miss Rathbone as I had,
professionally, going about with her protuberant bosom stuck full of
pins, a tape line draped about her collarless neck, and her skirt and
belt never quite together in the back, so he thought of her
establishment as a kind of stay in affliction.
"And I have the stage," I flourished. It was the first time I had
thought of it as an expedient, but I glanced away from the thought in
passing, for to say the truth I didn't in the least know how to go about
getting a living by it. I creamed some chipped beef for Tommy's supper,
a dish he was particularly fond of, and opened a jar of quince
marmalade, and all the time I wasn't stirring something or setting the
table, I had my arms around him, trying to prop him against what I did
not feel so much terrifying as exciting. We talked a little about his
getting his old place back in Taylorville, and just as we were clearing
away the supper things we saw Miss Rathbone, with her father tucked
under her arm, pass the square of light raying out into the spring dusk
from our window, and a moment later they knocked at our door. It was one
of the things that I felt bound to like Miss Rathbone for, that she took
such care of her father; she did everything for him, it was said, even
to making up his mind for him, and this evening by the flare of the lamp
Tommy held up to welcome them, it was clear she had made it up to some
purpose. It must have been what he saw in her face that made my husband
put the lamp back on the table from which the white cloth had not yet
been removed, as if the clearing up was too small a matter to consort
with the occasion.
I was relieved to have my husband take charge of the visit, especially
as he made no motion to invite them into the front room where the
remains of the bread and butter and the chairs against the wall would
have apprised Miss Rathbone of my having entertained company on an
occasion to which she had not been invited. It was part of Tommy's sense
of social obligation that we ought never to neglect Mr. Rathbone, whom,
though his connection with the business was as slight as my husband's,
he insisted on regarding as in some sort a partner. So we sat down
rather stiffly about the table still shrouded in its white cloth, as
though upon it were about to be laid out the dead enterprise of Burton
Brothers, and looked, all of us, I think, a little pleased to find
ourselves in so grave a situation.
Miss Rathbone, who had always a great many accessories to her toilet,
bags and handkerchiefs and scarves and things, laid them on the table as
though they were a kind of insignia of office, and made a poor pretence
to keep up with me the proper feminine detachment from the business
which had brought them there. We neither of us, Miss Rathbone and I, had
the least idea what the other might be thinking about or presumably
interested in, though I think she made the more gallant effort to
pretend that she did. On this evening I could see that she was full of
the project for which she had primed her father, and was nervously
anxious lest he shouldn't go off at the right moment or with the proper
pyrotechnic.
I remember the talk that went on at first, because it was so much in the
way of doing business in Higgleston, and impressed me even then with its
factitious shrewdness, based very simply on the supposition that
Capitalists--it was under that caption that Burton Brothers
figured--never meant what they said. Capitalists were always talking of
hard times; it was part of their deep laid perspicacity. Burton Brothers
wished to sell out the business; was it reasonable to suppose they would
think it good enough to sell and not good enough to go on with?
"Father thinks," said Miss Rathbone, and I am sure he had done so
dutifully at her instigation, "that they couldn't ask no great price
after talking about hard times the way they have."
It was not in keeping with what was thought to be woman's place, that
she should go on to the completed suggestion. In fact, so far as I
remember it never was completed, but was talked around and about, as if
by indirection we could lessen the temerity of the proposal that old
Rathbone and Tommy should buy out the shop on such favorable terms as
Burton Brothers, in view of their own statement of its depreciation,
couldn't fail to make.
"You could live over the store," Miss Rathbone let fall into the
widening rings of silence that followed her first suggestion; "your rent
would be cheaper, and it would come into the business."
I felt that she made it too plain that the chief objection that my
husband could have was the lack of money for the initial adventure; but
because I realized that much of my instinctive resistance to a plan that
tied him to Higgleston as to a stake, was due to her having originated
it, I kept it to myself. I had a hundred inarticulate objections, chief
of which was that I couldn't see how any plan that was acceptable to the
Rathbones, could get me on toward the Shining Destiny, but when you
remember that I hadn't yet been able to put that concretely to myself,
you will see how impossible it was that I should have put it to my
husband. In the end Tommy was talked over. I believe the consideration
of going on in the same place and under the same circumstances without
the terrifying dislocation of looking for a job, had more to do with it
than Miss Rathbone's calculation of the profits. We wrote home for the
money; Effie wrote back that everything of mother's was involved in the
stationery business, which was still on the doubtful side of prosperity,
but Tommy's father let us have three hundred dollars.
The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of
proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic
exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as
I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a
better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the
cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift
stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common
human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals
of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium
of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself
as an occasion was the Fourth of July.
I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or
three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.
"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of
a month to get the children ready."
"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our
house Thursday----" She went on to tell me who was to read the
Declaration and who deliver the oration.
"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these
twenty years!"
"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind
of a celebration, they've a right to have it."
"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.
They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had
never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too
quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have
reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing
the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on
the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It
appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of
this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.
I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible
sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions.
The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he
fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation--the air of being
man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to
avoid doing it. Er ... yes, he believed there had been a meeting ... he
hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular
member, was I?
"No," I admitted, "but last year----" The intention of the slight began
to dawn on me.
"You see, the programme is usually made up from the children of the
united Sunday schools...."
"I know, of course, but what has that?..." He did know how mean it was;
I could see by the dexterity with which he delivered the blow.
"A good many of the mothers thought they'd rather not have them exposed
to ... er ... professional methods." As an afterthought he tried to give
it the cast of a priestly remonstrance which he must have seen didn't in
the least impose on me.
I suppose it was the fear of how I might put it to one of his best
paying parishioners that led him to go around to the store the next
morning and make matters worse by explaining to Tommy that though the
children weren't to be contaminated by my professionalism, it could
probably be arranged for me to "recite something." To do Tommy justice,
he was as mad as a hatter. Being so much nearer to village-mindedness
himself, I suppose my husband could better understand the mean envy of
my larger opportunity, but his obduracy in maintaining that I had been
offended led to the only real initiative he ever showed in all the time
I was married to him.
"I'd just like to _show_ them!" he kept sputtering. All at once he
cheered up with a snort. "_I'll_ show them!" He was very busy all the
evening with letters which he went out on purpose to post, with the
result that when a few days later he made his contribution to the
fireworks fund, he made it a little larger, as became a live business
man, on the ground that he wouldn't be able to participate as his wife
had "accepted an invitation to take charge of the programme at Newton
Centre." Newton Centre was ten miles away, and though I couldn't do much
on account of the difficulty of rehearsals, I managed to make the
announcement of it in the county paper convey to them that what they had
missed wasn't quite to be sicklied over with Mrs. Miller's asseveration
of a notable want of moral particularity at Newton Centre. The very
first time I went out to a Sunday-school social thereafter it was made
plain to me that if I wanted to take up the annual Library
entertainment, it was open to me.
"And I always will say," Mrs. Miller conceded, "that there's nobody can
make your children seem such a credit to you as Mrs. Bettersworth."
"It's a regular talent you have," Mrs. Harvey backed her up, "like a
person in the Bible." This scriptural reference came in so aptly that I
could see several ladies nodding complacently. Mrs. Ross sailed quite
over them and landed on the topmost peak of approbation.
"I've always believed," she asserted, "that a Christian woman on the
stage would have an uplifting influence."
But by this time my ambition had slacked under the summer heat and the
steady cluck of old Rathbone's machine and the mixed smell of damp
woollen under the iron, and creosote shingle stains. There had been no
loss of social standing in our living over the store; such readjustments
in Higgleston went by the name of bettering yourself, and were
commendable. But somehow I could never ask ladies to tea when the only
entrance was by way of a men's furnishing store. The four rooms, opening
into one another so that there was no way of getting from the kitchen to
the parlour except through the bedroom, I found quite hopeless as a
means of expressing my relation to all that appealed to me as inspiring,
dazzling. Because I could not go out without making a street toilet, I
went out too little, and suffered from want of tone. And suddenly along
in September came a letter from O'Farrell offering me a place in his
company, and a note from Sarah begging me to accept it. If up to that
time I had not thought of the stage as a career, now at the suggestion
the desire of it ravened in me like a flame.