I went home to my husband after it began to seem certain that my
mother's condition would not change for some time, but I knew in the
going that neither Tommy nor Higgleston could ever present themselves to
me again in the aspect of an absolute destiny. By the incidents of the
past few weeks I had been pulled free from the obsession of
inevitableness with which my life had clothed itself until now; I stood
outside of it and questioned it in the light of what it might have been,
what it might yet become. Suppose I had received Helmeth Garrett's
letter; suppose my interest in Mr. O'Farrell had wavered a hair's
breadth out of the community of work into that more personal and
particular passion----?
I quaked in the cold blasts which blew on me out of unsuspected doors
opening on my life.
And still I went back to Higgleston. There seemed nothing else to do. I
think I deceived myself with the notion that there was something in
Tommy's resistance to a more acceptable destiny, that could be resolved
and dissipated by the proper stimulus. But I knew, in fact, that he and
Higgleston suited one another admirably. To my husband, that he should
keep a clothing store in a town of five thousand inhabitants was part
of the great natural causation. The single change to which our condition
was liable was that the business might take a turn which would enable us
to move out of the store into a house of our own. It had not occurred to
Tommy to take a turn himself. The Men's Tailors and Outfitters lay like
most business in Higgleston, in the back water, rocking at times in the
wake of the world traffic, but never moving with it. There was a vague
notion of progress abroad which resulted in our going through the
motions of the main current. The Live Business Men organized a Board of
Trade and rented a room to hold meetings in, but I do not remember that
when they had met, anything came of it. The great tides of trade went
about the world and our little fleet rocked up and down. If I had ever
had any hope that Tommy and I might out of our common stock, somehow
hoist sail and make a way out of it, in that spring and summer I
completely lost it.
I believe Tommy thought we were perfectly happy. Considering how things
turned out, I am glad to have it so; but the fact is, there was not
between us so much as a common taste in furniture. In the five years of
married life, our home had filled up with articles which by colour and
line and unfitness jarred on every sense. Tommy had what he was pleased
to call an ear for music, and if the warring discords of our furnishings
could have been translated into sound he would have gone distracted
with it; being as it was he bought me a fire screen for my birthday.
Miss Rathbone hand-painted it for the Baptist bazaar, and Tommy had
bought it at three times what we could have afforded for a suitable
ornament. It was his notion of our relations that we and the Rathbones
should do things like that by one another. I suppose you can find the
like of that fire screen at some county fair still in Ohianna, but you
will find nothing more atrocious. Tommy liked to have it sitting well
out in the room where he could admire it. He would remark upon it
sometimes with complacency, evenings after the store was shut up, before
he sat down in his old coat and slippers to read the paper. Occasionally
I read to him out of a magazine or a play I had picked up, in the
intervals of which I used to catch him furtively keeping up with his
newspaper out of the tail of his eye.
Now and then we went out to a sociable or to the Rathbones for supper.
Less frequently we had them to a meal with us. It was characteristic of
business partnerships in Higgleston that they involved you in
obligations of chicken salad and banana cake and the best tablecloth.
Tommy enjoyed these occasions, and if he had allowed himself to
criticise me at all, it would have been for my ineptitude at the happy
social usage. Things went on so with us month after month.
And if you ask me why I didn't take the chance life offers to women to
justify themselves to the race, I will say that though the hope of a
child presents itself sentimentally as opportunity, it figures primarily
in the calculation of the majority, as a question of expense. The hard
times foreseen by Burton Brothers hung black-winged in the air. We had
not, in fact, been able to do more than keep up the interest on what was
still due on the stock and fixtures. Nor had I even quite recovered the
bodily equilibrium disturbed by my first encounter with the rending
powers of life. There was a time when the spring came on in a fulness,
when the procreant impulse stirred awake. I saw myself adequately
employed shaping men for it ... maybe ... but the immediate deterring
fact was the payment to be made in August.
I went on living in Higgleston where human intercourse was organized on
the basis that whatever a woman has of intelligence and worth, over and
above the sum of such capacity in man, is to be excised as a superfluous
growth, a monstrosity. Does anybody remember what the woman's world was
like in small towns before the days of woman's clubs? There was a world
of cooking and making over; there was a world of church-going and
missionary societies and ministerial coöperation, half grudged and half
assumed as a virtue which, since it was the only thing that lay outside
themselves, was not without extenuation. And there was another world
which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with
futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children
overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers,
heretical but persistent, of methods of circumventing it, of a secret
practice of things openly condemned. It was a world that went half the
time in faint-hearted or unwilling or rebellious anticipation, and half
on the broken springs of what as the subject of the endless,
objectionable discussions, went by the name of "female complaints."
In all this there was no room for Olivia. Somehow the ordering of our
four rooms over the store didn't appeal to me as a justification of
existence, and I didn't care to undertake again matching the adventures
of my neighbours in the field of domestic economy with mine in the
department of self-expression. Let any one who disbelieves it try if he
can assure the acceptance of his art on its merit as work, free of the
implication of egotism. You may talk about a new frosting for cake, or
an aeroplane you have invented, but you must not speak of a new verse
form or a plastic effect.
All this time, in spite of my recent revulsion from it, I was consumed
with the desire of acting. My new-found faculty ached for use. It woke
me in the night and wasted me; I had wild thoughts such as men have in
the grip of an unjustifiable passion. All my imaginings at that time
were of events, untoward, fantastic, which should somehow throw me back
upon the stage without the necessity on my part, of a moral conclusion.
Sarah Croyden, to whom I wrote voluminously, could not understand why I
resisted it; there was after all no actual opposition except what lay
inherent in my traditions. Sarah had such a way of accepting life; she
used it and her gift. Mine used me. I saw that it might even abuse me.
She went, by nature, undefended and unharmed from the two-edged sword
that keeps the gates of Creative Art, but me it pierced even to the
dividing of soul and spirit. My husband stood always curiously outside
the consideration. I think he was scarcely aware of what went on in me;
if any news of my tormented state reached him, he would have seen,
except as it was mollified by affection, what all Higgleston saw in it,
the restlessness of vanity, a craving for excitement, for praise, and a
vague taint of irregularity. He was sympathetic to the point of
admitting that Higgleston was dull; he thought we might join the
Chatauqua Society.
"Or you might get up a class," he suggested hopefully; "it would give
you something to think about."
"Teach," I cried; "TEACH! when I'm just aching to learn!"
"Well, then," he achieved a triumph of reasonableness, "if you don't
know enough to teach in Higgleston, how are you going to succeed on the
stage?"
It was not Tommy, however, but a much worse man who made up my mind for
me. He had been brought out from Chicago during my absence, to set up in
Higgleston's one department store, that factitious air of things being
done, which passed for the evidence of modernity. He had, in the set of
his clothes, the way he made the most of his hair and the least of the
puffiness about his eyes, the effect of having done something
successfully for himself, which I believe was the utmost recommendation
he had for the place. He preferred himself to my favour on the strength
of having seen more than a little of the theatre. Very soon after my
return, he took to dropping into my husband's store which, in view of
its being patronized by men who were chiefly otherwise occupied during
the day, was kept open rather late in the evenings. From sheer
loneliness I had fallen into the habit of going down after supper to
wait on a stray customer while Tommy made up the books. Mr. Montague,
who went familiarly about town by the name of Monty, would come in then
and loll across the counter chatting to me, while Tommy sat at his desk
with a green shade over his eyes, and Mr. Rathbone, who never came more
than a step or two out of his character as working tailor, clattered
about with his irons in the back, half screened by the racks of custom
made "Nobby suits, $9.98," which made up most of our stock in trade.
I had already, without paying much attention to it, become accustomed
to the shifting of men's interest in me the moment my connection with
the stage became known: a certain speculation in the eye, a freshening
of the wind in the neighbourhood of adventure; but by degrees it began
to work through my preoccupations that Mr. Montague's attention had the
quality of settled expectation, the suggestion of a relation apart from
the casual social contact, which it wanted but an opportunity to
fulfill. It took the form very early, when Tommy would look up from his
entries and adding up to make his cheerful contribution to the
conversation, of an attempt to include me in a covert irritation at the
interruption. If by any chance he found me alone, his response to the
potential impropriety of the occasion, awoke in me the plain vulgar
desire to box his ears. But no experience so far served to reveal the
whole offensiveness of the man's assurance.
The week that Tommy went up to Chicago to do his summer buying, we made
a practice of closing rather early in the long, enervating evenings,
since hardly any customer could have been inveigled into the store on
any account. I found it particularly irritating then, to have Mr.
Montague leaning across the counter to me with a manner that would have
caused the dogs in the street to suspect him of intrigue. The second or
third time this happened I made a point of slipping around to Mr.
Rathbone with the suggestion that if he would shut up and go home I
would take the books upstairs with me and attend them.
I was indifferent whether or not Mr. Montague should hear me, but I
judged he had not, for far from accepting it as a hint that I wished to
get rid of him, that air he had of covert understanding appeared to have
increased in him like a fever. He made no attempt to resume the
conversation, but stood tapping his boot with a small cane he affected,
a flush high up under the puffy eyes, the corners of his mouth loosened,
every aspect of the man fairly bristling with an objectionable maleness.
I made believe to be busy putting stock in order, and in a minute more I
could hear old Rathbone come puttering out of his corner to draw the
dust cloths over the racks of ready-made suits and, after what seemed an
interminable interval, fumbling at the knobs of the safe.
"Oh," I snatched at the opportunity, "I changed the combination; let me
show you." I was around beside him in a twinkling.
"Good-night," I called to Montague over my shoulder.
"Good-night," he said; the tone was charged. The fumbling of the locks
covered the sound of his departure. I got Mr. Rathbone out at the door
at last, and locked it behind him. I turned back to lower the flame of
the acetylene lamp and in the receding flare of it between the shrouded
racks I came face to face with Mr. Montague. He stood at the outer ring
of the light and in the shock of amazement I gave the last turn of the
button which left us in a sudden blinding dark. I felt him come toward
me by the sharp irradiation of offensiveness.
"Oh, you clever little joker, you!" The tone was fatuous.
I dodged by instinct and felt for the button again to throw on the flood
of light; it caught him standing square in the middle of the aisle in
plain sight from the street; almost unconsciously he altered his
attitude to one less betraying, but the response of his mind to mine was
not so rapid.
"I'm going to shut up the store," I was very quiet about it. "You'll
oblige me by going----"
"Oh, come now; what's the use? I thought you were a woman of the world."
I got behind the counter, past him toward the door.
"You an actress ... you don't mean to say! By Jove, I'm not going to be
made a fool of after such an encouragement! I'm not going without----"
"Mr. Montague," I said, "Tillie Hemingway is coming to stay with me
nights; she will be here in a few minutes; you'd better not let her find
you here." I unbarred the door and threw it wide open.
"Oh, come now----" He struggled for some footing other than defeat. "Of
course, if you can't meet me like a woman of the world----you're a nice
actress, you are!" I looked at him; the steps and voices of passersby
sounded on the pavement; he went out with his tail between his legs. I
locked the door after him and double locked it.
I climbed up to my room and locked myself in that. The boiling of my
blood made such a noise in my ears that I could not hear Tillie
Hemingway when she came knocking, and the poor girl went away in tears.
After a long time I got to bed and sat there with my arms about my
knees. I did not feel safe there; I knew I should never be safe again
except in that little square of the world upon which the footlights
shone, from which the tightening of the reins of the audience in my
hands, should justify my life to me. I was sick with longing for it,
aching like a woman abandoned for the arms of her beloved. I fled toward
it with all my thought from illicit solicitation, but it was not the
husband of my body I thought of in that connection, but the choice of my
soul.
People wonder why sensitive, self-respecting women are not driven away
from the stage by the offences that hedge it; they are driven deeper and
farther into its enfoldment. There is nothing to whiten the burning of
its shames but the high whiteness of its ultimate perfection. It is so
with all art, not back in the press of life, but forward on some
over-topping headland, one loses behind the yelping pack and eases the
sting of resentment. I did not agree in the beginning to make you
understand this. I only tell you that it is so. All that night I sat
with my head upon my knees and considered how I might win back to it.
I tried, when my husband came home, to put the incident to him in a way
that would stand for my new-found determination. I did not get so far
with it. I saw him shrink from the mere recital with a man's
timorousness.
"Oh, come--he couldn't have meant so bad as that." His male dread of a
"situation" plead with me not to insist upon it. "And he went just as
soon as you told him to. Of course if he had tried to force you ... but
you say yourself he went quietly."
He was seeing and shrinking from what Higgleston would get out of the
incident in the way of vulgar entertainment if I insisted on his taking
it up; by the code there, I shouldn't have been subject to such if I
hadn't invited it.
"Of course," he enforced himself, "you did right to turn him down, but I
don't believe he'll try it again."
"He won't have a chance. I'm going back on the stage so soon;" the
implication of my tone must have got through even Tommy's
unimaginativeness; he said the only bitter thing that I ever heard from
him.
"Well, if you hadn't gone on the stage in the first place it probably
wouldn't have happened."
He came round to the situation in another frame when he learned that I
had written to Sarah putting matters in train for an engagement.
"You will probably be away all winter," he said. "It seems to me,
Olivia, that you don't take any account of the fact that I am fond of
you." We were sitting on a little shelf of a back balcony we had, for
the sake of coolness, and I went and sat on his knee.
"I'm fond of you, Tommy, ever so. But I can't stand the life here; it
smothers me. And we don't do anything; we don't get anywhere."
"I don't know what you mean, Olivia; we're building up quite a business;
we'll be able to make a payment this year, and as the town improves----"
"Oh, Tommy, come away; come away into the world with me. Let us go out
and do things; let us be part of things."
"Higgleston's good enough for me. We're building up trade, and everybody
says the town is sure to go ahead----"
"Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what do I care about a business here if we lose the
whole world--and we'll be old and gray before we get the business paid
for. Oh, it isn't because I don't care about you, Tommy, because I am
not satisfied with you; it is the glory of the world I want, and the
wonder of Art, and great deeds going up and down in it! I want us to
have that, Tommy; to have it together ... you and I, and not another.
It's all there in the world, Tommy, all the colour and the splendour ...
great love and great work ... let us go out and take it; let us go...."
I had slipped down from his knees to my own as I talked, pleading with
him, and I saw, by the light of the lamp from within, his face, charged
with pained bewilderment, settle into lines of habitual resistance to
the unknown, the unknowable. My voice trailed out into sobbing.
"Of course, Olivia, I don't want to keep you if you are not happy here,
but I have to stay myself." His voice was broken but determined, with
the determination of a little man not seeing far ahead of him. "I have
to keep the business together."
I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September.
Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My
going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made
hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise
to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with
her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her
absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction.
The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not
supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they
couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it
very aptly.
"I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not
a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me.