"And you never seem to think I might not _want_ my wife to go on the
stage?"
I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me;
but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led
on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in
Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself
whirled about this attitude of his in the deep-seated passionate Why of
my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things?
What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since
Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us
should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides
that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in
the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad
by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community
interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with
strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first
time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable
taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any association with
the stage.
Whatever attitude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining
the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first
professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering
his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present
opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands,
the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me ...
words, looks ... sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by
the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the
general attitude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to
whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long
letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness
lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by
her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of
having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by
loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a
duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.
"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and
then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New
York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as
far as that."
It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy
over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little
plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling
dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on,
and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she
made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.
"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit
than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the
hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the
great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I
could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton
Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs.
Bettersworth--Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."
Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning,
afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to
catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his
traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her
home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should
have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was
that it left too much over.
"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any
minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise
to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of
us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.
I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and
from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could
see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was
in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible
attitudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her
own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.
"You dear, ridiculous child," she hovered over the point with indulgent
patronage, "what will you think of next?"
Pauline herself was going through a phase at the time. They had moved
out to a detached house at Evanston on account of its being better for
the baby, and there was a visible diminution of her earlier effect of
housewifely efficiency, in view of Henry's growing prosperity. You could
see all Pauline's surfaces like a tulip bed in February, budding toward
a new estimate of her preciousness in terms of her husband's income.
When she took me by the shoulders, holding me off from her to give play
to the pose of amused, affectionate bewilderment, I could see just where
the consciousness of a more acceptable femininity as evinced by her
being provided with a cook and a housemaid, prompted her to this
gracious glozing of my not being in quite so fortunate a case. I was to
be the Wonder, the sport on the feminine bush, dear and extenuated, made
adorably not to feel my excluding variation; an attitude not uncommon in
wives of well-to-do husbands toward women who work. It was an attitude
successfully kept up by Pauline Mills for as long as I provided her the
occasion. Just at first I suspect I rather contributed to it by my own
feeling of its being such a tremendous adventure for me, Olivia
Lattimore, with Taylorville, Hadley's pasture and the McGee children
behind me, to be going on the stage. How I exulted in it all, the hall
bedroom where I finally settled across from Sarah Croyden, the worry of
rehearsals, the baked smell of the streets bored through by the raw lake
winds, the beckoning night lights--the vestibule of doors opening on the
solemn splendour of the world.
At the rehearsals I met Cecelia Brune, if anything prettier than before,
and quite perceptibly harder, and Jimmy Vantine, still in love with her,
still with his bald crown not quite clean and the same objectionable
habit of sidling about, fingering one's dress, laying hands on one as he
talked. I met Manager O'Farrell, not a whit altered, and Miss Laurine
Dean. I liked and I didn't like her. She drew by a certain warm charm of
personality that repelled in closer quarters by its odours of
sickliness. There was a quality in her beauty as of a flower kept too
long in its glass, not so much withered as ready to fall apart. She had
small appealing hands, such as moved one to take them up and handle
them, and served somehow to mitigate a subtle impression of impropriety
conveyed by her slight sidewise smile. She was probably good-natured by
temperament and peevish through excessive use of cigarettes. She made a
point of always speaking well of everybody, but it was a long time
before I learned that no sort of blame was so deadly as her
commendation. "Such a beautiful woman Miss Croyden is," she would say,
"isn't it a pity about her nose," and though I had never thought of
Sarah's nose as mitigating against her perfection, I found myself after
that thinking of it. You could see that magnanimity, which was her
chosen attitude, was often a strain to her. I do not think she had any
gift at all, but she had a perception of it that had enabled her to
produce a very tolerable imitation of acting and kept her, in a covert
way, inordinately jealous of the gift in others. She was jealous of
mine.
It was not all at once I discovered it. In the beginning, because I
never detected her in any of the obvious snatchings of lines and
positions that went on at rehearsals, but even making a stand for me
against incursions into my part which I was too unaccustomed to
forestall, I thought of her as being of rather better strain than most
of the company. I was probably the only member of it unaware of her
deliberate measures not to permit me such a footing as might lead to my
supplanting her with Manager O'Farrell, toward whom I began to find
myself in what, for me, was an interesting and charming relation. It was
a relation I should have been glad to maintain with any member of the
company, but it was only O'Farrell who found himself equal to it. I was
full and effervescing with the joy of creation; night by night as I felt
the working of the living organism we should have been, transmitting
supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very
communicating act became a part of us, I felt myself also warming toward
my fellow players. I was so charged I should have struck a spark from
any one of them when we met, but for the fact that by degrees I
discovered that they presented to me the negative pole.
I was aware of such communicating fluid between particular pairs of
them. I saw it spark from eye to eye, heard it break in voices; it
flashed like sheet lightning about our horizons on occasions of great
triumph; but I was distinctly alive to the fact that the medium by which
it was accomplished was turned from me. At times I was brushed by the
wing of a suspicion that among the men, there was something almost
predetermined in their denial of what was for me, the sympathetic,
creative impulse. I was a little ashamed for them of the gaucherie of
withholding what seemed so important to our common success, and yet I
seemed always to be surprising all of them at it, except Jimmy Vantine
and the manager. I couldn't of course, on account of his propensity for
laying hands on one, take it from Jimmy, but between Mr. O'Farrell and
me it ran with a pleasant, profitable warmth. I was conscious always of
acting better the scenes I had with him. The thrill of them was never
quite broken in off-the-stage hours. I felt myself sustained by it. For
one thing the man had genuine talent, and I think besides Sarah Croyden
and Jimmy Vantine, no one else in the company had very much. Jimmy had a
gift, besmeared and discredited by his own cheapness, but O'Farrell had
a real flowing genius and a degree of personal vitality that sketched
him out as by fire from the flat Taylorville types I had known. We used
to talk together about my own possibilities and I had many helpful hints
from him, but in spite of this friendliness I never made any way with
him against Miss Dean. Not that I tried, but by degrees I found that
suggestions made and favours asked, were granted or accepted on the
basis of their non-interference with our leading lady. I was not without
intimations, which I usually disregarded because I found their
conclusions impossible to maintain, that she even triumphed over me in
little matters too inconsiderable to have been taken into account except
on the understanding that we were pitted in a deliberate rivalry. I was
hurt and amazed at times to discover that we presented this aspect to
the rest of the company. I felt that I was being judged by my conduct of
a business in which I was not engaged.
The situation, however, had not developed to such a pitch by the time we
played in Kincade, that it could affect my pleasure in the visit Tommy
paid me there; I was overjoyed to have the arms of my own man about me
again; I was proud of his pride in my success as _Polly Eccles_, and
pleased to have him and Sarah pleased with one another. I thought then
that if I could only have Tommy and my work I should ask no more of
destiny; I do not now see why I couldn't, but I like best to think of
him as he seemed to me then, wholesome and good, raised by his joy of
our reunion almost to my excited plane, generous in his sharing of my
triumphs. It seemed for the moment to put my feet quite on solid ground.
I knew at last where I was.
It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted
against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with
the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate,
convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the
expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not
backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to
Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her sex
attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow,
commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the
discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels,
irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with
colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe
neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at
Louisville.
I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my
part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still
suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to
go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew
she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and
taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the
draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of
powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting
carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T,
with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it
facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's
room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively
into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling
that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and
shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a
tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away
from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable
sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry
at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back
slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed
directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T.
Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell
instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that
could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not
seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a
casual errand as my own.
But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the
tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home
from the theatre more than an hour!
I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with
the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to
remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort.
Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the
man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept
intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the
conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It
was part of the admitted business of the men of my class to keep their
women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter
into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman--with his mistress.
I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a
knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a
situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have
instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary
celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion
of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and
exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the
withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the
manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs;
other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up
to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box
clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the
dark circles under my eyes.
"What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted
it out.
"Mr. O'Farrell ... I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room ... at a
quarter of one. He was ... oh, Sarah ... he was!..." I relapsed again
into the horror of it.
"Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently
under the covers and got into bed beside me.
"Didn't you know?" she questioned.
"Did you?"
"No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to
suggest it to you."
"Do the others know?"
"As much as we do. It has been going on a long time."
"And you put up with it--you go about with them?" I was astonished at
the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it.
"My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not
that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more
difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many
people do such things."
"I know--_wicked_ people. I never thought of its being done by anybody
you liked."
"Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like
them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah
Croyden.
"You mustn't think Mr. O'Farrell such a bad man. He is probably fond of
her. In some respects he is a very good man. When I was--left, without a
penny, he might have made terms with me. Some managers would. But he
gave me a living salary and left me to myself. He has been very kind to
me."
"But she----" I choked back my sick resentment to get at what had been
tearing its way through my consciousness for the last three hours. "She
must have thought that _that_ was what I wanted of him...."
"Well, it is natural she should be anxious, with other women about. She
is in love with him."
"Did you think so? About me, I mean?"
"No," said Sarah. "No, I didn't think so."
It was light enough now to show the outline of the drifts along the
sills and the fine gritty powder which the wind dashed intermittently
against the panes; the filter of day under the scant blinds brought out
in the affair streaks of vulgarity as evident as the pattern of the
paper on the wall. It seemed to borrow cheapness from the broken castor
of the bureau, as from my recollection of the eaten face of the clock
and the leaning chandelier. I sat up in the bed and laid hold of Sarah
in my eagerness to get clear of what by my mere knowledge of it, seemed
an unbearable complicity.
"I had a feeling for him," I admitted. "I could act better with him; but
it was different from that--you know it was different."
"Yes," said Sarah, "I know. I know because I am that way myself; it is
_like_ that, but it isn't that." I was still, holding my breath while
she considered; we were very close upon the twined roots of sex and
art.
"There's a feeling that goes with acting, with other sorts of things,
painting and music, maybe, a feeling of your wanting to get _through_ to
something and lay hold of it, and your not being able to leaves you ...
aching somehow, and you think if there's a particular person ... I think
O'Farrell would understand ... it is being able to act makes you know
the difference I suppose. He really can act you know, and you can, but
Dean wouldn't understand, nor the others. My--Mr. Lawrence didn't
understand!" It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me.
"Sometimes I think they might have felt the difference just at first,
but nobody told them and they got used to thinking it is ... the other
thing." She drew me down into the bed again and covered me. "You mustn't
take it to hard ... we all go through it once ... and you are safe so
long as you know."
"But I can't go on with it." I was positive on that point. "Sarah,
Sarah, don't say I have to go on with it."
"I know you can't. But you just have to."
"I should never be able to face either of them again without showing
that I know."
"And then the others will know and they will think ..."
I threw out my arms, seeing how I was trapped. I wanted to cry out on
them; to despise the woman openly. "And they will think that I am
jealous ... that I wanted it myself...."
I rolled in the bed and bit my hands with shame and anger. Sarah caught
me in her arms and held me until the paroxysm passed. I was quieted at
last from exhaustion.
"You can stay in your room to-day," she suggested. "I can bring your
meals up to you; this neuralgia will give you an excuse, and you needn't
see any one until you go to the theatre. That will give you one day.
Maybe by to-morrow ..."
But I had no confidence that to-morrow would bring me any sensible
relief. The moral shock was tremendous. All my pride was engaged on the
side of never letting anybody know; to have been misunderstood in the
quality of my disgust would have been the intolerable last thing. Sarah
brought up my breakfast before she had her own; she reported nobody
about yet except Jimmy Vantine who had inquired for me. About half an
hour later she came softly in again with a yellow envelope open in her
hand. I saw by her face that it was for me and that the news it
contained put the present situation out of question.
"Is it from my husband?" I demanded. I hardly knew what I hoped or
expected, a possibility of release flashed up in me.
"It has been forwarded." She sat down on the bed beside me. "My poor
Olivia ... you must try to think of it as anything but a way out. Mr.
O'Farrell will let you go for this...." If it had to happen it couldn't
have happened better.
"Give it to me----"
"Remember it is a way out."
I read it hastily:
Mother had a stroke. Come at once.
Signed: FORESTER.