As if the attraction Miss Rathbone had for my husband had been a spell,
the mere naming of which dissipated it, we spent the ensuing three or
four days in the glow of renewal. It was Miss Rathbone herself who drew
us out of that excluding intimacy; set us apart where we could feel the
cold stiffness of our hurts and the injury we had inflicted each on the
other.
Whatever there had been between them, and I never knew very clearly
what, they had failed to reckon on the recrudescence of the interest I
had always had for my husband, and the tie of association. At any rate
Miss Rathbone failed. I must suppose that she loved Tommy, that she was
hungering for the sight of him, needing desperately to feel again the
pressure of whatever bond had been between them. She came into the store
on the fourth evening after my husband's admission of it, on one of the
excuses she could so easily make out of her father's being there. I was
sitting upstairs with some sewing when she came and neither saw nor
heard her, but the unslumbering instinct, before I was half aware of it,
had drawn me to the head of the stair.
As I came down it, still in the shadow of the upper landing, I saw her
leaning across the counter with that factious air of modishness which
was so large a part of her stock in trade with Higgleston. She had on
all her newest things, and I think she was rouged a little. Even with
the width of the counter between them she had the effect of enveloping
my husband with that manner of hers as with a net; to set up in him the
illusion of all that I was in fact; mystery, passion, the air of the
great world. I was pierced through with the realization that with men it
is not so much being that counts, as seeming. There was a touch of the
fatuous in the way Tommy submitted to the implication of her attitude as
she took a flower from her breast and pinned it in his coat. The foot of
the stair came almost to the end of the counter where they stood, and a
trick of the light falling from the hanging lamp threw the upper half of
it in shadow. I stood just within it with my hand upon the rail.
Something in the avidity of yielding in my husband's manner was like a
call in me; I moved involuntarily a step downward.
They heard and then they saw me; they stopped frozen in their places and
the thing that froze them was the consciousness of guilt. They stood
confessed of a disloyalty. I turned full in their sight and walked back
up the stair. It was very late that night when Tommy came up to me.
"If that is going on in the house," I notified him, "you can't expect me
to stay."
"I dare say you'd be glad of a chance to leave."
"Is that why you are offering it to me?"
It was by such degrees we covered the distance between our situation and
the open question of divorce. But there were lapses of tenderness and
turning back upon the trail.
"I don't want anybody but you, Olivia," Tommy would protest. "If you
would only stay with me!"
"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"
If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would
have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even
if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't
or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and
out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of
being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming
caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for
it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went
on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an
unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see
that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a
ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these
affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the
deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if
we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis,
she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic
loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the
dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her
eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour--some criticism
which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being
dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an
occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my
mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of
Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in
Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as
anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim
of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of
romance.
"I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me."
He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot."
"What do you owe her that you can't pay?"
"Well, I couldn't marry as long as you----"
"You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marry _her_?"
"I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again;
"you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter.
"You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a
great space out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to
shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world,
but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things.
"We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home
any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want
anybody but you; just stay with me!"
"You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higgleston
_forever_?" The unfairness of this overcame me.
"Well, why not, if you're married to me?"
I believe he would have done it. He would have wasted me like that and
thought little of it. I was married, and not altogether to Tommy, but to
Higgleston and the clothing business. The condition he demanded of me
was not of loving and being faithful, but of living over the store.
Until now, though I knew I did not love my husband as life had taught me
men could be loved, I had never given up expecting to. Somewhere,
somehow, but I was certain it was not in Higgleston, the transmuting
touch should find him which would turn my husband into the Lord of Life.
Now I discovered myself pulled over into another point of view. He had
become a man capable of being interested in the village dressmaker. The
farther she drew him from me the more the stripe of Higgleston came out
in him.
I had planned to go up to Chicago for a week in August; to consult with
Mr. Harding about the plays he was to produce the next season. I had not
signed with him yet, but I knew that I should, that I could no more
dissever myself from that connection than I could voluntarily surrender
my own breath; I might try, but after the few respirations withheld,
nature would have her way with me. It was not that I came to a decision
about it; the whole matter appeared to lie in that region of finality
that made the assumption of a decision ridiculous. I do not know if I
expected to divorce my husband or if he or Miss Rathbone expected it. I
think we were all a little scared by the situation we had evoked, as
children might be at a dog they let loose. We felt the shames of
publicity yelping at our heels.
The day before I left, I went to see Miss Rathbone; I had to have a
skirt shortened. It was absurd, of course, but there was really no one
else to go to. If there had been I shouldn't have dared; all Higgleston
would have known of it and drawn its own conclusion. As it was,
Higgleston was extremely dissatisfied with the affair. It did not know
whom properly to blame, me for neglecting my husband or Miss Rathbone
for snapping him up; they felt balked of the moral conclusion.
I hardly know what Miss Rathbone thought of my coming to her. I think
she had braved herself for some sort of emotional struggle sharp enough
to drown the whisper of reprobation. My quiet acceptance of the
situation left her somehow toppling over her own defences. Sometimes I
think the emotionalism which the attitude of that time demanded to be
worked up over a divorce, drew people to it with that impulse which
leads them to rush toward a fire or hurl themselves from precipices.
Miss Rathbone must have been aching to fling out at me, to justify her
own position by abuse of mine, and here she was down on the floor with
her mouth full of pins squinting at the line of my skirt. It was then
that I told her what I was going to Chicago for. "You'll be away from
home all winter, then?" The question was a challenge.
"I don't know, I haven't signed yet." For the life of me I couldn't have
foreborne that; it was exactly the kind of an advantage she would have
taken of me. If I chose not to sign for the next winter, where was she?
She stood up blindly at last. "I guess I can do the rest without you,"
she said. Some latent instinct of fairness flashed up in me.
"But I think I shall sign," I admitted. "I couldn't stand a winter in
Higgleston." I was glad afterward that I had said that; it gave her
leave for the brief time that was left to them, to think of him as being
given into her hands.
I was greatly relieved to get away, even for a week, from the cold
curiosity of Higgleston which, without saying so, had made me perfectly
aware that I showed I had been crying a great deal lately. But no sooner
was I freed from the pull of affection than I began to feel a deep
resentment against Tommy. His attempt to charge his lapse of loyalty, on
my art, on that thing in me which, as I read it, constituted my sole
claim upon consideration, appeared a deeper indignity than his interest
in the dressmaker. It was all a part of that revelation which sears the
path of the gifted woman as with a flame, that no matter what her value
to society, no man will spare her anything except as she pleases him. At
the first summer heat of it I felt my soul curl at the edges. His
repudiation of me as an actress began to appear a slight upon all that
world of fineness which Art upholds, a thing not to be tolerated by any
citizen of it. In its last analysis it seemed that my husband had
deserted me in favour of Higgleston quite as much as I had deserted him,
and it was for me to say whether I should consent to it. In that mood I
met Mr. Harding and signed with him for the ensuing season, and then
quite unaccountably, ten days before I was expected, I found myself
pulled back to Higgleston. I had wired Tommy, and was surprised to have
Mr. Ross meet me at the station.
"Mr. Bettersworth is not very well," he explained, as he put me into
Higgleston's one omnibus. "It came on him rather suddenly. Some kind of
a seizure," he admitted, though I did not gather from his manner that it
was particularly serious until the 'bus, instead of stopping at our
store, drove straight on up the one wide street.
"I thought you'd want to see him immediately," the attorney interposed
to my arresting gesture. "You see he was taken at his partner's house."
He seemed to avoid some unpleasant implication by not mentioning
Rathbone's name.
I scarcely remember what other particulars he gave me at the time; my
next sharp impression was of my husband lying white and breathing
heavily in the bed in the Rathbone's front room, the drapery of which
had been torn hastily down to make room for him, regardless of the
finished pieces of Miss Harvey's trousseau still crowding the chairs
upon which they had been hastily thrust. Empty sleeves hung down and
vaguely seemed to reach for what they could not clasp; strangely I was
aware in them of an aching lack and loss which must have sprung in my
bosom. I took my husband's hand and it dropped back from my clasp,
waxlike and nerveless. I think I had been kneeling by the bed for some
time, talk had been going on whisperingly around me; finally the light
faded and I discovered that the doctor had gone. The beribboned bridal
garments hung limply still on the chairs and mocked me with their empty
arms. Presently I was aware that Miss Rathbone had come in with a lamp.
She stood there on the other side of the bed and we looked at him and at
one another.
"How long?" I asked her.
"Two or three days maybe, the doctor says."
"Will he know me again."
"The doctor says not."
"Oh, Tommy, Tommy!" I began to shake with suppressed sobbing. Miss
Rathbone looked at me with cold resentment.
"You can cry as much as you like, it won't disturb him," she said.
She seemed to have taken the fact that she wasn't to cry herself, as
final. In a few minutes old Rathbone shuffled in from the shop and stood
peering at Tommy with his little red-lidded eyes, wiping them furtively.
I believe the old man was fond of his partner and it was not strange to
him that Tommy should be lying ill at his home. Miss Rathbone came and
took him by the shoulders as one does to a grieving child and turned his
face to her bosom. She was a head taller than he, and as she looked
across him to me there was compulsion in her look and pleading.
"He is never to know," the look said, and I looked back, "Never."
It was then that I realized how genuine her affection was for the
feeble, snuffling old man; she would suffer at being lessened in his
eyes.
Some one came and took me away for a while, and by degrees I got to know
the story. It had been the night before, just about the time I was taken
with that strange impulse to return, that Tommy had shut up the store
and gone over to the half-furnished room belonging to the Board of
Trade, which had become a sort of club for the soberer men of the
community. A great deal of talk went on there which gave them the
agreeable impression of something being done, though there must have
been much of it of the character of that which was going on in a group
around Montague when Tommy came in at the door. He came in very quietly,
blinded by the light, and they had their backs to him, shaking with the
loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description. Then Montague's
voice took it up again.
"Rathbone'll get him," he said. "She's got the goods. The other one has
probably got somebody on the side; these actresses are all alike."
There was a word or two more to that before Tommy's fist in his jaw
stopped him. Montague struck back, he was a heavier man than my husband,
but in a minute the others had rushed in between them. They were drawn
back and held; Tommy's nose bled profusely, he appeared dazed, and
accepted Montague's forced apology without a word. The men were all
scared and yet excited; some of them were ashamed of themselves. They
suspected it was not the sort of thing that should go on at a Board of
Trade, and agreed it ought to be kept out of the papers. Some one walked
home with my husband, and on the way he was seized with a violent fit of
vomiting.
"Who was it hit me?" he asked at the door, and seemed but vaguely to
remember what it was about. The next morning he opened the store as
usual and appeared quite himself to old Rathbone, who came shuffling and
sidestepping in to his nest at the accustomed hour. About half-past ten
the tailor was made aware by the rapping of a customer on the deserted
counter, that Tommy had gone out without a word. He must have gone
straight to Miss Rathbone; those who met him on the street recalled that
his gait was unsteady. She must have been greatly concerned to have him
there at that hour, for people were moving about the streets and
customers beginning to come in, and in the presence of Tillie Hemingway
he could offer her no adequate explanation.
She was desperately revolving the risk of taking him into the front room
to have out of him what his distrait presence half declared, when he was
taken with a momentary retching; she went into the next room to fetch
him a glass of water and a moment after her back was turned she heard
him pitch forward on the floor.
When Rathbone had sent for me by the wire that passed me on the way
home, he sent also to Tommy's father, who got in before noon the next
day. I remember him as a quizzical sort of man always with his hands in
his pockets, and a bristling brown moustache cut off square with his
upper lip, and a better understanding of the situation than he had any
intention of admitting. I had by some unconscious means derived from him
that though he was fond of Tommy, he never had much opinion of his
capacity. I think now it must have been his presence there and his
manner of being likely to do the most unexpected thing, that pulled
those same live business men who had stood listening in loose-mouthed
relish of Monty's ribaldry, out of the possibility of entertainment in
the case that might be made out of his implication in my husband's
death, to the consideration of the town's repute as a place where such
things could not possibly happen. By the time Forester came on, a covert
discretion had supplied the event with its sole consoling circumstance
of secrecy. Not even my family got to know what led up to that blow
which had precipitated an unsuspected weakness. It was quite in
accordance with what they believed of the life I had chosen, that my
husband's death in a brawl should be among its contingencies. Poor
Tommy's end took on a tinge of theatricality.
It was toward the end of the second day that he began to respond to the
stimulants the doctor had been pouring into him. He opened his eyes and
looked at us, conscious, but out of all present time. Feebly his glance
roved over the figures by the bed, and fell at last on me.
"Ollie," he whispered, "Ollie!" It was a name he had not called for a
long time.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" I took his hand again and felt a faint pressure.
Miss Rathbone hardly dared to look at him with the others standing
about. I whispered her name to him, and his partner's, but he did not so
much as turn his eyes in their direction. I could see him studying me
out of half-shut glances; there would be an appreciable interval before
the sense of what he saw penetrated the dulled brain; I thought I knew
the very moment when the significance of our standing all about his bed
crying, took hold of him. All at once he spoke out clearly:
"Is my father here?" I fancied he must have hit on that question as a
confirmation; but before there could be any talk between them he slid
off again into the deeps of insensibility. At the end of half an hour or
so he started up almost strongly.
"Ollie!" he demanded, "where is the baby?"
"Asleep," I told him.
"Then I will sleep too," and in a little while it was so.
* * * * *
The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved
from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the
rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my crape for me. I believe
it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my
husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an
effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the
books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was
shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we
were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement
to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I
felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of
Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away
from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to
get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly
expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been
Christian to forgive her.
I did see her, however, the night before I went away. It was the dusk of
the first of September. There was a moon coming up, large and dulled at
the edges by the haze, and that strange earthy smell with the hint of
decay in it, kept in by the banded mists that lay below the moon. The
darkness crept close along the earth and spread upward like an
exhalation into the sky where almost the full day halted. I had slipped
out down a side street and across an open lot to the cemetery. I would
have that hour with my dead free from observation.
I went between the white head stones and the flower borders. As I neared
my husband's grave, something moved upon it. It arose out of the low
mound as I approached; for one heart-riving second I stopped,
speechless; it moved again and showed a woman.
"Miss Rathbone!" I called. "Henrietta!" I had not used her name before;
I have just now remembered it.
"You might have left me this," she said. I saw that she had covered the
mound with flowers, and I was glad I had not brought any.
"I am leaving," I answered. "I am going to-morrow ... where my work is."
"Yes, _you_ can go. But I have to stay ... where my work is. I stay with
him. You can go ... you always wanted to go. And I, I have been talked
about and I daren't even cry for him, not even at night, for my father
hears me." She was crying now, deeply, bitterly. "You never cared for
him," she insisted, "and now he knows it; he knows and has come back to
me ... to _me_."
"He comes back," I admitted. I was stricken suddenly with the futility
of all human conviction. Moving about the house that day I had been
conscious of him beside me then, and now, lying there beside my boy,
touching him ... mine ... sealed to me in the certainty of death. And he
had come back to _her_. I did not know even now what she and my husband
had been to one another.
It swept over me somehow, drowningly, that this was the secret that the
dead know, how to belong to all of us. They had no bond, how could they
be unfaithful? For a moment I was caught up by the thought to nobility.
"Look here, Henrietta, if you feel that way, I'll leave it to you. I'll
not come here any more." I did not know what else I could do about it.
"It's the least you _can_ do." She was accepting it as her right. Any
woman will understand how I wanted to lay my hand there, above his
breast. She must really have believed I did not love him. I turned back
across the borders.
"Good-bye, Henrietta." She made a nearly inarticulate sound. The last I
saw of her in the dusk she was tucking her flowers into the fresh sod as
one tucks a coverlet about a child. He had been, I suppose, both man and
child to her.
BOOK III
CHAPTER I
I have to take up my story again about eighteen months later at the
point of my going out to Suburbia to ask Gerald McDermott for a part in
his new play, which was being rehearsed with Sarah in the _rôle_ of
_Bettina_. But before that there had been some rather mortifying
experiences to teach me that though I was done with Higgleston, it was,
to a certainty, not done with me. In any case I suppose the shock of my
husband's death must have affected my work unfavourably, but the
knowledge of his secret defection, and the excuse he found for it in
what was best in me, made still corroding poison at the bottom of my
wound.
What it all amounted to in my career was that the season which should
have swept me back to Chicago in triumphant establishment of my gift,
trickled out in faint praise and cold esteem. It was not that you could
place your finger and say just there was the difficulty, but what came
of it was another year on the road with Cline and Erskine, in stock. The
Hardings, notwithstanding their disappointment in what they expected to
make of me, managed to be kind.
"You'll pull up," they assured me; "it's because you are really an
artist that you show what you've been through!" And they didn't know the
half of what that was.
To Henry Mills my engagement with Cline and Erskine, was a step forward
into that blazoned and banal professionalism which passes in America for
dramatic success; but Sarah knew, and I think I knew myself, that the
dance they led us in the spotlight of copious advertisement, was a dance
of death to much that the plastic art should be. In this instance it was
demonstrated even to the hopeful eye of Henry Mills, for the play chosen
proved so little suited to the semi-rural, Middle West cities where we
played it, that before the season was half over we were recalled, and,
after an empty interval, finished out the engagement in one of those
sensation mongering shows with which such combinations as Cline and
Erskine clutch at the fleeing skirts of a public they never understand.
It was about a month after the closing of this engagement that I took
Sarah's suggestion about applying to Gerald McDermott, but not before I
had tried several other things. The truth was, as I knew very well when
I faced it, that I had at the time nothing in me. To those who haven't
it, a gift is a sort of extra possession, like an eye or a hand that can
be commanded to its accustomed trick on any occasion; but to the owners
of it it is a libation poured to the Unknown God. I had emptied my cup
of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder
experience from which it should be fed and filled again, and I had no
technique to supply the insufficiencies of my inspiration. Somewhere
within me I felt the stuff of power, stiff and unworkable, needing the
flux of passion and the shaping hand of skill.
Looking back now from the vantage of a tolerable success, if you were to
ask me what, more than any other thing, prevents the fulness of our
native art, I should say the blank public misapprehension of its
processes. Turning every way to catch the favourable wind, what met me
then, was the general conviction on the part of my friends that if you
had talent you succeeded anyway, and if you weren't succeeding it was
because you hadn't any talent. I suffered many humiliations before I
learned how absolutely, by that same society that so liberally resents
the implication of any separateness in art, the artist is thrust back
upon himself. To do what seemed necessary for the development of my
gift, to have a year or two to travel and study, to connote its powers
with its limitations, required money; and though there in Chicago there
was money for every sort of adventure that stirred the imagination of
man, there was none for the particular sort of investment I represented.
At least not at the price I was prepared to pay.
The half of what had been put into setting my brother on his feet would
have served me, but I learned from Effie, that as much of my mother's
capital as had been put into Forester's business, was not only
impossible to be withdrawn from keeping him upright, but threatened not
to hold him so for as long as it was necessary for mother to see in him
the figure of a provider. This had been made plain at Christmas, when
Effie had written me that a particular wheeled chair which my mother had
set her heart upon because of a hope it held out of church-going, would
be impossible unless I came forward handsomely. I did come forward on a
scale commensurate with the Taylorville estimate of my salary, which was
by no means comparable to its purchasing power in Chicago; and now I was
beginning to realize that unless some one came forward for me, I stood
to lose the Shining Destiny to which I felt myself appointed. I was slow
in understanding that it was not to be looked for by any of the paths by
which interest and succour are traditionally due. Not, for instance,
from Pauline and Henry Mills.
I was seeing a great deal of them since I had come to Chicago, not only
because of our earlier friendship, but because I found myself constantly
thrown back on all that they stood for, by my distaste for much that I
saw myself implicated in as a theatrical star who had not quite made
good. I hated, quite unjustly, I believe, the players with whom for the
time I was professionally classed; I loathed the shallow shop talk, the
makeshift rooms we lived in, the outward smartness and the pinch of
anxiety it covered. I was irritated by my external and circumstantial
resemblance to much that I felt instinctively, kept them where they
were, and vexed at some cheapness in myself which seemed to be revealed
by the irritation. I had been thrown up out of the freemasonry of the
preliminary struggle into a kind of backwater of established
second-rateness, where there were also second-rate manners and morals
and social perceptions. It was a great relief to get away from it to
Pauline's home in Evanston, and the air it had of being somehow
established at the pivot of existence. Pauline had two children by now,
and a manner of being abundantly equal to the world in which she moved,
a manner which I was only just realizing was largely owing to the figure
of her husband's income. What Pauline furnished me at her home, over and
above the real affection there was still between us, was a sort of
continuous performance of the domestic virtues.
That faculty for knowing exactly what she wanted, which had led her to
make the most of her housekeeping allowance in the days when making the
most of it was her chief occupation, now that the centres of her
activity had been shifted from the practical to the social and cultural,
stood her in remarkable stead. I was so constantly amazed by the
celerity and sureness with which she seized on just the attitude or
opinion which suited best with the part she had cast herself for as the
perfect wife and mother, that it was only when I discovered its complete
want of relativity to the purpose of the play or to the rest of the
company, that I was not taken in by it. I doubt now if Pauline ever had
an idea or permitted herself a behaviour which was not conditioned by
the pattern she had set for herself, which she intrigued both Henry and
myself into believing was the only real and appreciable life.
At the time of which I write it was a great comfort to me to get away
from my own dreary professionalism, to the nursery at Evanston, or to
add my small flourish to the _scene à faire_ of Henry's homecoming, made
every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, from
which, indeed, it took its excuse for being. For all of this was so well
in line with what Henry, who with the amplification of his income had
taken on a due rotundity of outline and a slight tendency to baldness,
conceived as proper for a man's home to be, that he played up to it as
much as was in him. He had still his air of knowingness about the
theatre, and if there was at times in his manner a suggestion that he
might have found it pleasanter to adjust his relation to me on the basis
of what I was as an actress, if I had not been quite so much the friend,
it was so far modified by his genuine admiration for his wife and his
cession to her of every right of judgment in the home, that I was
inclined to accept him at his own and Pauline's estimate as the model
husband.
It was only a few days before my visit to Gerald McDermott, that I had
undertaken to state to Pauline the nature of the help I required and my
title to it. I had gone out to dinner and found her putting on a new
gown, one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of
evening dress and the intimacy of negligée, in which Evanston ladies of
that period were wont to receive their lords.
"I'm needing something new myself," I said for a beginning, "and I'm
divided between the certainty that if I don't get an engagement I can't
afford it, and if I don't afford it I probably won't get an engagement."
Pauline stopped in the process of hooking up, to take stock of me.
"You absurd child!" The note of amused admonition with which she
ordinarily accepted my professional exigencies turned on the note of
correction. "Don't you think you put too much stress on those things?"
"What things?" She had touched upon the spring of irritation.
"Clothes, you know, and appearances. Isn't it better just to do your
work well and rest upon that?"
"Pauline, if you had ever looked for an engagement you would know that
getting it is largely a matter of appearing equal to it, and clothes
are the better part of appearing."
"But if you know that your work is good, what do you care what people
think of you?" I dodged the moral situation about to be precipitated on
me.
"It's about the only way you know it is good, knowing what people think
of it."
"Now see here," Pauline protested, reinforced by the evident superiority
of her viewpoint to mine, "you're getting all wrong; these things you
are thinking of, they are not the real things; they don't count, not in
the long run; it's only the spiritual things that really matter." She
had put on all the plastic effect of nobility that was part of her stock
in trade with Henry Mills. I thrust out against it sharply.
"Do you realize, Pauline, that if I don't get an engagement soon I
shan't be able to pay my board?"
"Oh, you poor dear!" She came over and took my hand. I don't know why
women like Pauline do that, but when they do it it is a sign they are
not equal to the situation and are trying to fake it with you.
"I know it is hard"--she found the cooing note with facility--"but it
will come right; it always does. I've always found that there is a way
provided."
Something flashed into my mind that I had read in the newspapers
recently about the corporations Henry worked for, and I wondered if
Pauline had the least notion how the way, for her, was humanly provided,
but the sound of Henry's latchkey put an end to the conversation, which
I hadn't felt sufficiently encouraging to warrant my taking up again.
I went from Pauline's, at the very first opportunity, to Sarah Croyden,
who was playing in Chicago, and doing her kindliest to blow the wind of
hope into my sagging sails. I met Cecelia Brune there. It had been to me
the witness of how far I had fallen from my mark, that I had been thrown
with her again in my last engagement. Hers was the sort of talent that
Cline and Erskine could play up to the limit of the inadmissible. There
were not wanting intimations that Cecelia had moved her own limit a
notch or two in that direction. She had taken a characteristic view of
my reappearance in her neighbourhood.
"Got into the band-wagon, didn't you?" she remarked. "I saw Dean on the
road last year and she said you was going in for high-brow stunts.
Nothin' to it. You stay with Cline and Erskine; they get you on like
anything." Her own notion of getting on was to figure as the sole female
attraction in a song and dance skit in what she pronounced "Vawdville."
"It's the only place havin' a figgur does you any good!" That she did
not recommend it for me must be taken for her estimate of mine.
Nevertheless I was amused by her, and Sarah, I knew, was even a little
fond. Sarah's affections were a sort of natural emanation from her, like
the rays of a candle, and warmed all they lighted on. On this afternoon
I found Cecelia drinking tea there and I wasn't able to conceal my
professional depression from her sharp, shallow inquisitiveness. There
were never two or three players got together, I believe, but the talk
turned on the comparative ineffectiveness of Merit as against Pull in
the struggle for success.
"There's no two ways about it," insisted Cecelia Brune; "you gotta get a
hold of some rich guy and freeze to him." The extent to which Cecelia
had blossomed out in ostrich tips and orchids that bright spring
afternoon, might have suggested to an experienced eye, that the freezing
process had already begun. I say might have, because Sarah and I found
it difficult to disassociate her from the hard, grubby innocence in
which our acquaintance had begun. Sarah, I know, believed in her and had
her in often to informal occasions as a bulwark against what, with all
her faith and pains, she didn't finally save her from.
"You can talk all you want to," Cecelia asseverated, "about man being
the natural provider. I've noticed he don't work at the job much without
he's gettin' something out of it. If you're sufferin' with that little
old song and dance about men doin' for you because you're a woman and
need it, you gotta get over it. There's nothin' laid down over that
counter unless you deliver the goods." She was nibbling lumps of sugar
moistened in her tea, and the wild rose of her cheeks and the
distracting rings of her hair made her offensiveness a mere childish
impertinence.
"Look at Helen Matlock," she ran on, "gettin' five hundred a week. And
when old Sedgwick put it up to her she said she'd die rather; and then
she went home and found her mother sick, and what did she do? Never
batted an eye, but told her she'd got an engagement, and went back and
made it good. An' now she's gettin' five hundred. That's what I call
doin' well by yourself."
"She can't mean it," Sarah extenuated when Cecelia had gone; "she's too
frank about it. When she stops talking I shall begin to suspect her."
"But is it true, about Miss Matlock, I mean?" Just at that juncture
Helen Matlock was doing the work I felt most drawn to, most fit to
undertake.
"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the
footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She
came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain,
did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic,"
she said.
"None that want me," I averred.
"Oh," she cried, "you don't mean----?"
"No," I had to own, "I don't mean that I have a chance to get on even
by misbehaving myself. I'm not the kind to whom that sort of chance
comes." Sarah stroked my hand a while.
"I've been thinking, if you could get a small part or a season, you
could take it under another name until you are quite yourself again.
It's often done." I could see she had gone much farther than that with
it in her thought. It was just such cover as that I was seeking for the
renaissance of my acting power.
And that was what led to my going out to Suburbia to see Gerald
McDermott about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_ in "The Futurist."
It was out quite in the frayed edge of outer fringe of real estate
ventures which hedged Chicago round, in a district which was spoiled for
country and not quite made into town, and from the number of weedy plots
not built upon between the scroll-saw cottages, had almost a rural air.
Leaning trolleys went zizzing along the banked highways, and at the ends
of the unpaved avenues there were flat gleams of the lake. Depressed as
I was by the consciousness of having fallen from the estate of actresses
who command engagements to those who seek them, I was still able to be
touched a little by curiosity by what Sarah had told me of McDermott and
his wife, whom he had married for her pretty, feminine inconsequence,
who, having no point of attachment to her husband's life but femininity,
was able to imagine none for any other woman, and suffered incredibly in
consequence.
"If one could only discover why clever men marry that sort of women!" I
wondered.
"Oh, Jerry thought he was going to bend her to his will," Sarah
explained. "But that kind don't bend, they just slump." I had hardly
knocked at the door before I had an inkling of how painful to the author
of "The Futurist" the process of slumping might be.
I could hear the fretting of a child, hushed suddenly by my knock, then
the patter of little feet across the floor and voices startled and
pitched low. I was just debating whether I shouldn't pretend I hadn't
heard anything and go away again, when Mr. McDermott opened the door. I
had met him once at Sarah's and should have known him again by the
pallor of his countenance against the dead blackness of his hair,
straight and shining like an Indian's. The effect of boyishness that one
derived from his tall, thin figure was increased now by the marks of
weeping about his eyes. In the glimpse of the room behind him I was
aware of a disorder only excusable in the face of a family catastrophe;
one of the children that ran to his knee was still in its little
petticoat, without a slip, and had not been washed or combed that day. I
wavered an instant between the obligation of politeness to ignore the
situation and the certainty that I couldn't.
"Oh!" I cried. I snatched at my repertory for the proper mixture of
commiseration and consternation. "Is any one ill?"
His desperate need of help opened the door to me.
"My wife" ... he began, but the state of the room accounted for that, as
he perceived, taking it in afresh through my eyes. Mrs. McDermott was
lying on the sofa in the coma of exhaustion. She lifted her face to me
for a moment, swollen with crying, and then let herself go again into
that pit in which a woman sinks an impossible situation. She was really
faint, poor thing, and, if I judged by the state of the house, had had
no luncheon. I took all that in at a glance, but it was none of my
business.
"Is it her heart?" I wanted to know of her husband as I bent over her.
He caught up the suggestion eagerly.
"Yes, her heart ... she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on
that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not
feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder
than I was willing to tax him with.
We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve
in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection
which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working
for anything but to save Jerry--I came to call him that before many
weeks--from the embarrassment of what I was sure had been a family
fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested
tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was
making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to
get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then
how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how
charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress
of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the
superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give
the children by washing their faces surreptitiously, I explained to Mr.
McDermott that I had come about the part of _Mrs. Brandis_.
"Oh, you'll do," he assented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. _Mrs.
Brandis_ is a widow you know ... that is, the _Mrs. Brandis_ that I
created----"
"Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play
it that way."
"The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to
make changes in the part."
"Well ..." I was prepared to make concessions.
"I'm afraid he has somebody in mind ..."
"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!..."
Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I
knew where I was in a twinkling.
"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"
"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."
"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was
positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap,
chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just
been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb
over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was
tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own
notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.
Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.
"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he
protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to
him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get
anybody so good."
We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette
for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer
desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a
delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great
hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning,
but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight
after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon
as I could and went straight to Sarah.
"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.
"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was
certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if
you get the part."
I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was
not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy
fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech
which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.
"Mr. McDermott thinks it will suit me admirably," I told him.
"Ah, yes, the author," the manager mentioned him as though it were a
fact indulgently admitted to the discussion, "but then, my dear Miss
Lattimore, we have to think of the audience."
There was this peculiarity of Moresco's handling of an audience, that he
treated it as an entity, a sort of human stratification of which the
three front rows were lubricious, the body of the orchestra high-brow,
the first balcony sentimental and virtuous, the gallery facetious. As
far as possible he arranged his plays to meet the requirements.
"Now we have Miss Croyden for _Bettina_, she is your type."--He meant as
a woman, not as an artist; Sarah and I were both serious and
respectable.--"For _Mrs. Brandis_ I think we should have something a
little more snappy."
"It isn't written snappy in the play," I reminded him.
"Ah, no, that is the trouble; I have spoken to Mr. McDermott; he will
perhaps change it."
"And if he doesn't you will keep me in mind for it." I kept my voice
with difficulty from being urgent. "You see, I don't feel like playing a
heavy part this year." I glanced down at my mourning; I hoped he would
accept it as an explanation. Two or three days later I saw Sarah and she
remarked that Jerry was rewriting some parts of his play at the request
of the manager.
"The part of _Mrs. Brandis_?" Sarah nodded.
"Mr. Moresco wants it more--more----"
"Snappy," I supplied. "And who is to have it, have you heard?"
"Fancy Filette!"
"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."
"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part
wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that
was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.
CHAPTER II
I saw more than a little of Jerry McDermott during the spring and summer
that I stayed in Chicago, haunting managers' offices in my winter's suit
and a fixed determination not to let any of them suspect that I knew I
couldn't, for the moment, act at all. Where the gift had gone I did not
know, nor when, in some desperate encounter with the chance of an
engagement, I attempted to draw about me the tattered remnants of my old
facility, had I any notion what would bring it back again.
Effie wrote me to come home for the hot weather, but though I regretted
afterward not having done so I could not make up my mind to leave
Chicago. It seemed to me then that the deadly quality of Taylorville lay
waiting like a trap, which in my present benumbed condition might close
on me if I put myself in the way of it. I thought that if I got out of
reach of the flare of light from the theatre doors, of the smell of back
scenes and the florid grip of the posters, that I should never in this
world win back to them. A summer in Taylorville would have saved me
money, would have rested and perhaps restored the balance of my powers,
but the inward monitor of which I was the mere shell and surface,
clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon
whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circumstances afforded,
like the drowned upon a rope, and waited for the resuscitating touch.
Somewhere beyond me I was aware of succour; not knowing from whence it
should come, I grasped at everything within reach and was buffeted and
torn about in the eddy of reverses.
What more even than his need of me, drove me back on Gerald McDermott,
was the certainty that he was deriving from Fancy Filette the quality I
missed. She was playing in one of the cheaper theatres in one of those
entertainments that men are supposed to resort to when their families
are out of town, and I had a moment's feeling that he exposed his sex to
ridicule by the avidity with which he surrendered himself to her
perfectly obvious methods. Until he sent his family north to one of the
lake resorts for the hot weather, I found myself involved in certain
obligations of visiting at his house, where I saw that his wife created
for him by her incompetence much the same sort of background that my
bereaved and purse-pinched condition made for me, and watched with
alternate sympathy and resentment his flight from it to the effective
self-complacency which Miss Filette induced in him.
I don't mean that Jerry wasn't fond of his wife in a way, and faithful
to her, in so far as she didn't interfere with his male prerogative of
being played upon by other women, but I do not think he had ever an
inkling that the vortex of anger and despair which she forced him to
share with her, in lieu of the passion which she couldn't any more
excite, was of the same stripe as his need of the high, inflated mood
that Miss Filette provided for him with her little bag of tricks. For
from the first Jerry seized on me, poured himself out, despoiled himself
of all the hopes, conjectures, half-guesses of his career, and that
without in the least discovering that I was in need of much the same
sort of relief myself. After his wife had taken the children to the
country--though she used even then to come down on him suddenly with
both of them and break up his work for days, or just when it was running
smoothly, wire to him to rush up to Lake View and allay the horrors of
her too active imagination--often evenings after the day's work, he
would take me to dine at queer little French or Italian restaurants
which were supposed to be preferred on account of the "atmosphere"
rather than their cheapness, and uncoil for me there all the intricate
turnings of his work upon itself, and the rich shapes and colours it
took, played upon by the slanting eyes and carmine smile of Miss
Filette. He would sit opposite me with a cigarette and a glass of "Dago
red," his black, shining hair, which he wore too long, slanting above
his forehead like a boding wing, uncramping his soul; and though I liked
him as a friend, and as a playwright thought him immensely worth while,
I was divided between exasperation at his tacit exclusion of me from the
world of excited powers in which any stimulation of his maleness threw
him, and fear that in missing his capacity for quick, shallow passions,
I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art.
"It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be reassuring me, "to
delineate a character that will be so intimate an expression of the one
who is to play it ... it's really extraordinary that she should have
been named Fancy ... it's symbolic."
"Oh, if you imagine she is really in the least like the _Mrs. Brandis_
you are creating ... besides, I happen to know her name is Powers,
Amanda Powers." He caught at this delightedly.
"Ah, she's a poet, a poet! Such self-knowledge! To think of her knowing
what would suit her so exactly!"
But I was not in the least interested in Miss Filette's psychology. What
I was trying to get at was the source of the creative mood which I was
sensible did not arise from anything Miss Filette was, but from what
Jerry was able to think of her. I admitted it was a mood you had to be
helped to, but I wasn't going to accept it from any male compliment to
his inamorata. I set up Jerry's case alongside of Miss Dean and Manager
O'Farrell, and a kind of fine intolerance drove me from it as ships are
driven apart upon the tide.
It drove me back in the first instance upon what Pauline and Henry Mills
stood for in my life. I was full of a formless importunate capacity,
like the motor impulses of a paralytic, and I imagined a relief from it
in the shadow of some succoring male who, by assuming the traditional
responsibility of getting a living, should leave me free to produce the
perfect flower of Art. At the time I was as far from realizing as
Pauline, that she was eminently the sort of woman the sheltered life
produced; had Henry Mills been upon the market I should have seized upon
him promptly as the solution of all my difficulties.
Pauline did her best for me--that is to say, she brought out for me an
infinite variety and arrangement of the sentimentalized sex attractions
with which she charmed dull care from Henry's brow. It was only by
degrees that I perceived that the utter want of relativity of the
quality that was known in Evanston as True Womanliness, was due to its
being conditioned very much as I thought of myself as happiest to be. It
was not until Pauline went to the country for the hot weather without
making any sensible change in my affairs, that I began to understand how
little she contributed. What I chiefly missed was a place to walk to
when I went out for exercise.
I spent a great deal of time just walking, for there was not much doing
in the theatrical line to interest me, and I was sustained and
tormented by intimations that somewhere, not far from me, my Help walked
too. I don't know where this conviction came from that there was help
somewhere in the world; but by the middle of the summer the terrible,
keen need of it walked with me through all my days and lay down with me
at night. There were times when the certainty that it was there seemed
almost enough to lift me again to a plane of power, other times when the
sheer hunger of it bit into the bone. It was most like the sense I had
had as a child of the large friendliness that brooded over Hadley's
pasture; it was like the promise of the shining destiny that had moved
between my youth and the common occurrence; but now at times, just along
the edge of sleep, or out of the thick, waking drowse of heat, it shaped
familiarly human. I think about that time I must have dreamed again the
dream I had of Helmeth Garrett just after I had seen Modjeska, writing
that letter in his uncle's house; and with the help of what my mother
had told me I was able to read it plain. I do not distinctly remember
dreaming this, but there were times when, just after waking, my mind
would be full of him, and there would be a stir in me of the wings of
power. But in the broad day, though I thought of him often, I could not
so much as recall his face clearly.
The one thing that I remembered about him was that I had pleased him. It
was a mortifying certainty that Jerry's ready acceptance of me as a
woman of whom his wife could not possibly be jealous, had defined for
me, that I didn't in general know how to please and interest men. They
often were interested in me, but I was never in the least conscious of
what drew them or caused them to sheer away. I had a suspicion,
doubtless of Taylorvillian extraction, that there was a sort of
culpability in knowing; but it came back to me now almost with a thrill
that I had known with Helmeth Garrett. I had been able, out of all the
possible things which might be said, to choose the thing that swayed
him. I hadn't known ever for what things my husband loved me; but in a
brief hour with Helmeth Garrett I was conscious of much in my manner to
him arising from his conscious need. And I had no more than shaped this
in my mind than I felt a faint stirring within me as of power.
About this time I began to be more aware of the Something Without,
toward which my work tended, just after I had been asleep, as if the
self of me had gone on seeking more successfully in the silences. I
would arise very early with such a faint consciousness as a vine might
have toward the nearest wall, and get up in the blue of the morning to
go for long walks through the pleasant, empty streets, sometimes out to
the lake shore where the glint of the moving water under the mist,
struck faint sparkles from my stagnant surfaces. I would come back from
these excursions beginning to faint with the day's heat, to wear through
the afternoon with books and long drowses, and then in the cool of the
evening It would call me again, and I would seek It until late at night,
sometimes in the lit streets, fetid with the day's smells, sometimes on
a roof garden or at a park concert, where the lights, the gayety, and
the music served merely as a drug to my outer sense, which went on
busily at its absorbing quest. Sometimes men spoke to me in these lonely
wanderings; I would remember it afterward as one recalls little,
unnoticed incidents in the midst of great excitement; but for the most
part I was, except for the invisible presence, as unaccompanied as if
the city had been quite empty. If I could have laid the anxiety of my
diminishing bank account and the dread of not getting an engagement, I
should have been almost happy.
It was along early in August that Chicago was greatly stirred by the
visit of one of the Presidential candidates--for that was a Presidential
year--who was also a popular hero. It had come rather unexpectedly and
the preparations for it were of the hastiest. There was to be speaking
at Armory Hall, and a reception afterward, and I thought I would go and
clasp hands with the great man, as if, perhaps, I might find in it, as
many of his admirers did, a sort of king's touch for the lethargy of my
spirit. The meeting began early in the sweating afternoon and dragged
out three heavy hours. Nothing of any importance transpired there until
we were moving up the right side of the hall toward the receiving
committee. The hall was split lengthwise by a bank of chairs, and down
the left aisle the company of those who had already gripped the broad
palm of the candidate, had been elbowed to oblivion by the committee. It
was in the very beginning of the handshaking and there were not so many
of them as of us. They lingered in groups and talked with one another. I
was about midway of the aisles and several persons deep in the crush,
when I saw him. How well I knew the lock falling over his forehead, and
the quick unconscious motion of the head that tossed it back! There was
the indefinable air of the outdoor man about him, though he was quite
correctly dressed and had a lady's light wrap over his arm.
"Helmeth! Helmeth!" I cried out to him from the centre of my will. I
fought my way to the outer edge of the moving crowd, I caught at chairs
and struggled to maintain my position opposite him. He was talking to
two or three men, and just at the edge of the group a woman stood with
an air of waiting. I resented her immobility, so near him and so little
moved by him.
"Helmeth, Helmeth, Look! Look at me!" I demanded voicelessly across the
bank of chairs.
He heard me; slowly he turned; his attention wandered from the group.
"Helmeth! Helmeth!" All my will was in my cry. Now he looked in my
direction. There was that in his face that told me my cry had touched
the outer ring of his consciousness. Then the lady who stood by, took
advantage of his detachment to touch him on the arm. Only a man's wife
touches him like that. I knew her at once; she was the type of woman who
subscribes to the _Delineator_, and belongs to the church because she
thinks it is an excellent thing for other people. She had blond hair,
discreetly frizzled about the temples, and her dress had been made at
home.
As soon as she touched him, Helmeth Garrett turned to her with divided
attention. I saw her take his arm; he looked back; the cry held him; his
eyes roved up and down; the moving mass closed between us and carried me
completely out of sight.
It was fully a quarter of an hour before the crowd released me, and by
that time he had quite vanished. I hung about the entrance to the hall,
I pushed here and there in the press, elbowed out of it by resentful
citizens. At last when the hall was closed and even the policemen had
gone from before it, I went home, to lie awake half the night planning
how to get at him. And the moment I woke from the doze of exhaustion
into which I finally fell, I knew that the thread which bound me to
Chicago had snapped. I stayed on two or three days, vaguely hoping to
come across him. I even looked in the hotel registers before I accepted
Sarah's urgent invitation to spend the rest of the month with her at
Lake View.
One night when the wind out of the lake was fresh enough to suggest, in
the closed window and the drawn blind, a reciprocated intimacy, I told
Sarah all about Helmeth Garrett.
"And to think," I said, "how different it all might have been if only I
had got that letter."
"Yes," Sarah admitted, "but that doesn't prove you'd have been happy."
"Not if we loved one another?"
"Oh, I am not sure loving has anything to do with happiness, or is meant
to. Sometimes I think God--or whoever it is manages things--has a very
poor opinion of happiness, because you don't find it invariably along
with the best of experiences. It happens, or it doesn't. If love does
anything for you it is just to give you the use of yourself."
"But it hasn't," I protested; "I'm just stumping along."
"You haven't really had it--just being kissed once, what does that
amount to?"
"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, that is what hurts me! I haven't really had it. I'm
never going to. I'll just go halting like this all my life."
"No, you won't," Sarah shook her head, piecing her own knowledge slowly
into comfort for me. "You remember what I told you that time when you
found out about Dean and Mr. O'Farrell? There's a kind of feeling that
goes with acting that is like loving, only it isn't. I don't know where
it comes from. Maybe it is what they call genius, but I know you can
slide off from loving into it. That is what makes Jerry think he has to
be in love all the time; it is a little stair he climbs up, and then he
goes sailing off. You don't think Fancy Filette really does anything for
him?"
"Goodness, no; she hasn't a teaspoonful of brains!"
"Well, then," she triumphed. "After a while his genius will be so strong
in him that he won't need that sort of thing and he will think it
ridiculous."
"And you think that will come to me?"
"It did come. You didn't have to be in love to begin," Sarah objected.
"Sarah, I will tell you the truth! I was in love all the time, I didn't
know with whom, but always wanting somebody ... trying to get through to
something; trying to mate. That was it. Nights when I would do my best,
and the house would be storming and cheering, I would look around
for ... for somebody. And I would go to my room, and he wouldn't be
there! I used to think Tommy would be He, I wanted him to be. I thought
some day I would turn around suddenly and find him changed into ...
whatever it was I wanted. But I know now he never could have been that.
And all this summer ... I've heard it calling. I've walked and walked.
Sometimes it was just around the corner, but I never caught up with it.
And when I saw Helmeth Garrett, I _knew_!"
I had leaned back out of the circle of our small shaded lamp to make my
confession, but Sarah came forward into it the better to show me the
condoning tenderness of her smile.
"It's no use, Sarah, I'm no genius; I have to be in love like the rest
of them." She shook her head gently.
"You'll get across. Love would help; I wish you had it. But I'll confess
to you; I had love and it only opened the door. There's something
beyond, bigger than all men. You must reach out and lay hold of it. Oh,
if it were love one needed, I should die--I should die!" I had never
seen her so moved before.
"Tell me, Sarah; I've always wanted to know."
"I want you to know, but it isn't easy! I didn't know anything about
love ... how could I the way I was brought up! My father was a Baptist
preacher. I had been taught that it was wrong to let anybody ... touch
you; and when he kissed me I felt as if he had the right...."
"I know, I know!" I had been kissed that way myself.
"How can anybody know? I loved him, and I was the only one of many. He
left me without a word, ... like a woman of the street ... not looking
backward." She got up and moved about the room, the thick coil of her
rich brown hair slipping to her shoulders, and her bodily perfection
under the thin dressing gown distracting me even from the passion of her
speech. I had a momentary pang of sympathy with the delinquent Lawrence,
I could see how a man might be afraid almost, of the quality of her
beauty.
"Sometimes," she said, "I think marriage is a much more real relation
than people think--that something real but invisible happens between
them so that even if they are parted they are never quite the same
again. It is like having a limb torn from you; you ache always, in the
part you have lost." I knew something of what that ache could be, but I
could only turn my face up to hers that she might see my tears.
"You have enough of your own to bear," she said. "I must not lay my
troubles on you; but I wanted to tell you how I know it is not love that
makes art. I was dying for love when Mr. O'Farrell put me to acting. I
was bleeding so ... and suddenly I reached out and laid hold of Whatever
is, and I found I could act. It was as if the half of me that had been
torn away had been between me and It, and I laid hold of It. That's how
I know." She came behind me, leaning on my chair, and I put up my hands
to her.
"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, help me to lay hold of it, too!" But for all her shy
confidences, deep within I didn't believe her.
Toward the first of September we went back to the city, Sarah to begin
rehearsals for _The Futurist_, and I to take up the dreary round of
manager's offices and dramatic agencies. The best that was offered me
was poor enough, but it had a faint savour of a superior motive clinging
to it. It was from a Mr. Coleman, an actor manager of the old,
heavy-jowled Shakespearian type, who was projecting a classic revival
with himself in all the tragic parts, and I signed with him to play
_Portia_, _Cleopatra_, and the wife of _Brutus_. We had been busy with
rehearsals about ten days when I had a telegram from Forester saying
that mother had died that day and I was to come immediately.
It was late Sunday evening when I received it and I hunted up the
manager at the hotel.
"I'm going," I told him.
"Well, of course, your contract----"
"I'm going anyway ... and I know the lines." He was as considerate, I
suppose, as could be expected.
"I can give you three days," he calculated.
"Four," I stipulated.
"Well, four," he grudged. That would allow two days for the funeral.
CHAPTER III
As it turned out I was more than a month in Taylorville and so saved
myself from the Coleman players for a more kindly destiny, though at the
time it did not appear so. It grew out of my realizing, in Effie's first
clasp of me, something more than our common loss, more than family,
something that I felt myself answer to before we could have any talk
together that did not relate to the funeral and the manner of my
mother's death.
They thought from little things that came to mind afterward, that she
must have been prepared for it, but forebore to trouble them with a
presentiment of what could not in any case have been much longer
delayed: she had clung to them more and been still more loath to trouble
them with her wants. The Saturday before, she had made Effie understand
that she wished all the photographs of my father brought together,
queer, little old daguerrotypes of him as a young man, a tintype of him
in his volunteer soldier dress, and a large, faded photo of him as an
officer leaning on his sword. She kept them by her and would be seen
poring upon them, as though she tried to fix the identity of one about
to be met under unfamiliar or confusing circumstances, though they did
not think of this until afterward. The Sunday of her death Cousin Judd
had come in to sit with her, as his custom was, an hour earlier than the
morning service. He had read the day's lesson from the Bible and sung
the hymn, and then after an interval Effie, who was busy about the back
of the house, heard him sing again my mother's favourite hymn,
"Come, Thou fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy praise."
and as he sung she saw the tears rolling down his face. So she turned
her back on them and let them say their good-byes without her, though
she had no notion how near the final parting was.
Forester was dressing--he and Effie had taken turns at church-going ever
since mother's stroke--and he was surprised to find that Cousin Judd had
gone off without him. Mother clung to him when he went to kiss her
good-bye; she struggled with her impotence, but they made out that it
was not because she wanted him to stay at home with her; and for the
first time since her illness she wished not to be propped up at the
window where she could sign to the neighbours going by, but seemed to
want greatly to sleep. Effie wheeled her into the corner of the sitting
room; and a little later she noticed that mother's head had slipped down
on the pillow as it did sometimes, past her power to lift it up again.
So my sister straightened the poor head with a kiss and went back to
getting the dinner. She moved softly because mother seemed asleep, but
at last when she went as usual to tell her that Forester was visible at
the end of the street, on the way home, she saw that the head had
slipped down again, and this time as she lifted it up there was no life
in it at all.
One of the strange incidents of that morning, and yet not strange when
you think how much they had been to one another, was that Cousin Judd,
though he had started home directly after church, could not get there,
but when he had driven a little way out of town, drawn by he knew not
what unseen force, turned back and pulled up in front of our door just
as the doctor who had been summoned hastily was saying that mother had
been dead an hour.
It was Monday morning when I arrived, and the funeral could not be until
Tuesday, to allow time for the news to penetrate to all the distant
country places from which my mother's relatives would be drawn to it,
moved and anxious to come, though many of them had not seen her for a
matter of years. I think I realized at once how it would be about my
getting back to Chicago, especially when I spoke to Effie about it. She
cried out and clung to me in a way that made me see that I stood for
something more to her than just sisterliness. Without saying anything I
wrote to Mr. Coleman that I should be detained a week or longer, and
that though I hoped he would be able to save my place for me, I didn't
really expect that he would.
It was not in the Taylorville cemetery that we buried my mother, but in
a little plot set aside from the old Judd place, along with the rest of
the Wilsons, Judds, and Jewetts, those that had dropped back peacefully
to their native sod, and those sent home from Gettysburg and Appomattox.
It was a longish ride; from turn to turn of the country road, teams
dropped into the procession that led out from town. On either side the
woods blazed like the ranked Cherubim, host on host; great shoals of
fiery leaves lay in the shallows of the burying ground. At the last,
shaken by the light breeze that sprung up, little flamy darts from the
oak whirled into the grave with her. They were to say in their own
fashion that there was nothing more natural. I think my mother must have
found it so.
We had scarcely got home again, still sitting about, veiled and
voluminous, when I was drawn out of grief to meet Effie's emergency. It
was Almira Jewett who brought me face to face with it. Almira had taken
off her things and was getting tea for us in her brisk, capable way.
"Anyhow," she said, "I 'spose you'll stay with your sister until she
gets sort of used to things." It flashed on me that what she was
expected to get used to, was going on just as she had been without the
excuse of my mother's needing her.
"Oh, I'll stay till the breaking up," I met her promptly.
"My land!" said Almira Jewett, "you talking of the breakin' up and your
mother ain't hardly out of the house yet. They do say there's nothing
like play-acting to make you nimble in your feelings." I knew of course
that they would lay it to the defibricating influence of my profession
that I should take the breaking up of my mother's home so lightly, but I
had caught a brief hiatus in Effie's sobs and I realized that what the
poor child was afraid of, was being hypnotized into a situation against
which her natural good sense revolted. I was bracing myself against the
tradition of filial obligation that I felt was going to be put in force
against me, when suddenly help arrived from an unsuspected quarter.
"I 'spose you're going with a troupe yet?" Cousin Lydia interposed, for
the first time in her life, I believe, delivering herself of a
conclusion. "It's a pity, because if you was anyways settled you could
take Effie with you. Forester was a good son;" she ruminated on that for
a while. "He was what you call a real model son, but I don't know as I
want to see Effie married to him the same as your mother was." It gave
me a shock to think that all these years she must have been seeing how
things were.
"She shan't," I assured her, "not if I have to stay with Forrie myself."
I had thought a good many times what was to become of Effie. I couldn't
take her with me, of course, but I wasn't in the least prepared to see
her intrigued by the popular sentiment into becoming a mere figurehead
for Forester's _rôle_ of provider. "Keeping up a home" they called it in
Taylorville, as though the house and furniture and the daily habit of
coming back to it, were the pivotal facts of existence.
It almost seemed as if it might come to that. After the others were all
gone and the night closed in on us three, the spirit of the dead came
and stood among us. Effie wept in Forrie's arms and said that he should
not be quite bereft, he should have her anyway.
"You poor child ... you've got a brother left; you too, Olivia. You
shan't want for a home while I live." That of course was the sort of
thing Taylorville expected of him. It began to seem as if I might have
to make good my word about staying with my brother to let Effie free. I
believe he would have accepted that without even a suspicion of what I
surrendered by it. If anything, he would have seen in it only another
dramatization of his _rôle_ of dutifulness. That a woman had any
preferred employment beside cushioning life for the males of her family,
had not impinged on the consciousness of Taylorville.
But the very next morning I awoke anew to the purpose of rescuing Effie,
and to the recollection of an incident of the funeral, noted but not
taken into the reckoning in the stress of more absorbing emotions.
"Effie, wasn't that Mrs. Jastrow I saw at the cemetery yesterday with
her head done up in a black veil--crape, too? I have just recalled it."
Effie nodded.
"One would have thought," I resented, "that she was one of the family."
"Ah, that's it; she thinks she is."
"One of the family? Oh! you don't mean that Forrie----Where was Lily
then?" I demanded.
"She wouldn't come, of course, not being recognized as one of the family
and yet counting herself one."
"But, explain ... how could she? I thought that was broken off long
ago."
"When mother was first taken," Effie agreed, "but you see she made such
a dead set at him, she had to keep it up somehow; she couldn't admit
that Forrie hadn't wanted her. So they made it up between them, Lily and
her mother, I mean, that she and Forrie had really been engaged, but it
had been broken off because Forrie couldn't marry so long as mother----"
She broke off with tears again, remembering how mother was now.
"That was two years ago; you don't mean to say they've kept it up all
the time?"
"They've had to. You see Lily hadn't been careful about not getting
herself talked about with Forester. Oh, not scandal, of course, but you
know how it is when a girl is crazy after a man; everybody gets to hear
of it. And then they had to make so much of the engagement never coming
to anything on mother's account, it quite spoiled Lily's chances, and
you know, Forester...."
"Oh, he was taken in by it, no doubt; it was something to sentimentalize
over and be self-sacrificing about."
"Well, of course, he couldn't quite abandon the poor girl; and she
really _is_ fond of him."
"And perfectly safe to philander with. Well, now that he has no one
depending on him I suppose he will marry her!"
"That's what is worrying me," protested Effie; "you see it all depends
on whether I go on depending on him." She broke down over that. Mother
hadn't wanted Forester to marry Lily Jastrow, and everybody by the mouth
of Almira Jewett, had thought it was Effie's duty to keep him from it if
she could.
"And I could, by just staying on. It's mother's money in the business,
your's and mine as much as his, and this house ... it's partly ours ...
if we stay in it."
"Well if you _want_ to...."
Effie came over and sobbed on my shoulder, "Oh, I don't," she said. "I
suppose it is horrid and selfish. I'm fond of Forrie, but I want to do
things in the world ... like you have ... and I want to marry and have
babies. Oh, oh!" She was quite overwhelmed with the turpitude of it.
"You shall, you shall," I determined for her.
"Oh, Olivia, I have _wanted_ you so. I knew you'd understand. It was all
right so long as mother lived; I could do anything for her, but now I
want--I want to be _me_!" I understood very well what that want was. But
first off I had to explain to Effie why I couldn't take her with me. It
was wonderful how she entered into my feeling about my work, and my lack
of success in Chicago.
"_Of course_, you ought to go to New York. You'll be a great tragic
actress, Olive, I know _that_. You could go, too, if you could get your
share out of the business. You could have mine and yours!" She glowed
over it. But the fact was we couldn't get the money out of the business.
As it stood we couldn't have sold the shop for what mother had put into
it, and, besides, we should have had to deal first with Forester's
conviction that he was taking care of our shares for us. I needn't have
worried about Effie; she was too pretty and competent not to have
arranged for herself. The principal and his wife drove over from
Montecito to say that they would be glad to have her come back and
finish the course interrupted within a few months of graduation by my
mother's illness. And for her board and tuition she was to act as the
principal's secretary. Within a year she wrote that she was engaged to
their son.
In the meantime I undertook to stop the capacious maw of Forrie's need
of being important; and the only way I saw to do it, involved my
surrender of any hope I had of finding my own release in what my mother
had left us of my father's hard won savings. I shouldn't have had any
compunction, so fierce was my own need of success, about forcing my
brother's hand, but I meant definitely not to leave any gap in his life
for Effie to be drawn back into. Before we had come to this point, the
second afternoon after the funeral in fact, circumstances had begun to
work for me. Effie and I, looking out of the window, saw Mrs. Jastrow
coming along by the front fence with all her gentility spread, as it
were, by the feeling she had of her call on us being a diplomatic
function.
"She's coming to see how we take it," Effie averred.
"Her coming to the funeral as one of the family? Well, how do we take
it, Effie?"
"Mother couldn't bear the idea of it." Tears came into my sister's eyes;
I could see the wings of self-immolation hovering over her.
"Look here, Effie, you go and take home Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons." There
had been so many out of town connections dropping in for a meal that we
had been obliged to fall back on our nearest neighbour.
"Lily's respectable, isn't she? and Forester has encouraged her. Well,
you don't want to spoil the poor girl's life, do you?"
"Oh," said Effie, "oh, Olivia!" I could see she was torn between
compunction and admiration for my way of putting it on high moral
grounds. I heard her counting out the spoons in the kitchen as I went to
let Mrs. Jastrow in.
I think she didn't know any more than Effie did, what to make of my
manner of receiving her. She sat on the edge of a chair and snivelled a
little into a handkerchief which was evidently her husband's, but it was
chiefly, I could see, because she had come prepared to snivel and
couldn't quickly adjust herself to my change of base.
"Poor Lily," she moaned, "she thought such a lot of Mr. Lattimore's
mother; but I tell her she must bear up."
"She must indeed," I assured her. "Forester needs all the sympathy he
can get just now." I could see her peeping over the top of her
handkerchief, trying to guess what to make of that; but the sentimental
was easy for her.
"That's what I tell her; they'll have to comfort each other. Them poor
young things, they'd ought to be together. But Lily's so sensitive she
couldn't bear to put herself forward."
"I'll tell Forrie you called," I assured her.
Mrs. Jastrow fanned herself with her damp handkerchief; her poor little
pretence broke quite down under my friendliness.
"He's got to marry her," she whispered. "Lily's been talked about, and
he's _got to_." I could guess suddenly what it meant to her to have
reached up so desperately for something better for her daughter than she
had been able to manage for herself, and to come so near not getting it.
I was able to put something like sympathy into my voice when I spoke to
Forester at supper.
"Mrs. Jastrow called to-day. She says Lily isn't bearing up as she
might. I suppose you ought to go and see her!"
Effie's eyes grew round at me over the teacups, but after all Forrie
didn't know what had passed between mother and me in regard to Lily. If
I chose to take his relation to her as a matter of course, he couldn't
object to it. We heard Forrie in his room changing his collar before he
went back to the shop again.
"He'll go to her to-night after he closes up," Effie told me. "It will
end with her getting him."
"So long as he doesn't get you----" But it was unfair to put ideas like
that in Effie's head. "After all it is a very good match for him in some
ways; she'll always look up to him, and that is what Forrie needs."
It was natural to Effie to judge every situation by what it had for
those concerned; she wasn't troubled as I was by the pressure of an
outside ideal. By the end of a month, when I thought of going back to
the city, it was tacitly understood that as soon as convenient Forester
was to marry Lily Jastrow. He meant, however, to be fair with us both
about the property; he had given us notes for our share, and expected to
pay interest. The note wasn't negotiable, as I learned immediately, and
the interest wasn't any more than Effie would need for her clothing. I
felt that the jaws of destiny which had opened to let Effie out, had
closed on me instead. I returned to Chicago early in November; my place
with the Coleman players had long been filled, and there was nothing
whatever to do.
CHAPTER IV
Jerry's play, which had had its premier while I was away, was going on
successfully. One of the first items of news Sarah told me about him was
that his wife was expecting another child, undertaken in the hope that,
if she couldn't hold her husband's roving fancy, she could at least fix
his attention on her situation. All that she had got out of it so far,
was a reason for staying at home, which left Jerry the freer to bestow
his society where it was most acceptable.
"Does she know--Miss Filette, I mean--about the child."
"Not unless Jerry has told her--which he'd hardly do." Sarah laughed a
little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour.
"Fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she
inspired it. I imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of Mrs. McDermott to
have intruded her condition on their relation. Of course it is
understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...."
"It is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." I hadn't Sarah's reason
for being lenient. "Somebody ought to speak to Jerry."
"You might--he would listen to you. It is just because there is so
little in it that it is so hard to deal with."
I suppose I took to interfering in the McDermott's affairs because I had
so little of my own to interest me. Besides, I was fond of Jerry and
didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle.
"But after all," Sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own
inspiration." It wasn't in me to tell her, even if I had understood it
myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should
be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. I wanted,
oh, I immensely wanted, what Jerry was getting out of his relation to
Miss Filette, but I wanted it free of the implication that my
abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything
like the same case.
"The real trouble with you," Jerry told me, "is that you are trying to
live in Chicago and Taylorville at the same time."
Not being able to make any headway with him, I went to call on Miss
Filette. I wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an assault on
her confidence, I didn't know her well enough to call on her in any
case, but I wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small
as a breech of manners in doing it. It wasn't so much the offense of my
undertaking it that counted, I found, as Miss Filette's determination
not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. I
had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for
me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the
road before Christmas.
"I should hope so," I dropped squarely on her; "Jerry's wife needs him.
There's a child coming in April."
"Yes," said Miss Filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the
second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "Have you seen what
we have done with the second act lately?"
"Anyway," I said to myself as I went, "she knows. She can't skid over
the facts as she has my telling her."
But it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with Jerry,
that drove me back on Pauline and Henry Mills. I fled to them to be
saved from what, in the only other society I had access to, fretted all
my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of
moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.
What I should have done was to take my courage in my hands and have gone
on from Taylorville to New York. But the most I was equal to was a fixed
determination to accept anything which would take me nearer Broadway,
which, even then, was to the player world all that the lamp is to the
moth. In the meantime I had settled in two housekeeping rooms in a
street that I wouldn't have dared to give to a manager as an address;
one of those neighbourhoods where there are always a great many
perambulators, and waste paper blowing about. There was never anything
for me, in the frame of life called Bohemian, more than a picturesque
way of begging the question of poverty. What I looked for in a lodging,
was escape from the bedraggled professionalism which went on in what
were called studios, by means of a cot bed, an oil stove, and a few
yards of art muslin. That I hadn't managed it so successfully as I
hoped, was made plain to me a few days after I had moved in, by the
discovery of a card tacked on the opposite door, that read, "Leon
Griffin, the Varieté." It was the same theatre at which Cecelia Brune
was playing the chief attraction in song and dance. In the glimpses I
had of Mr. Griffin in the dark hall going in and out, I was aware that
he gave much the same impression of unprofitable use that was associated
in my mind with the Shamrocks.
All this time I kept going through the motions of looking for an
engagement. Now and then some shining bubble of opportunity seemed to
float toward me, to dissolve in thin air as soon as I put my hand out to
it. One of these brought me to Cline and Erskine's waiting room on the
day that Cecelia Brune elected to register her complaint against what
she considered a slight of her turn at the Varieté. She flounced about
more than a little, not to let the rest of us escape the inference that
she was not used to being kept waiting. When she had hooked and unhooked
her handsome furs for the fourth time, she introduced me to Leon
Griffin, who except for the name, I shouldn't have recognized for my
hall neighbour. It was like being slapped in the face with my own hard
condition to have him crowded on me in that character before the whole
roomful. Life seemed so to have beggared him. In broad day he looked the
sort of a man who has failed to sustain himself in the man's world, and
must reinforce his value with the favour of women. Little touches of
effeminacy about his dress failed to take the attention away from its
shabbiness. His hair had the traditional thespian curl in spite of being
cropped short, to allow of various make-ups, one surmised, and his very
blue eyes were in a perpetual state of extenuating the meagreness of his
other features. Being ashamed of my shame at meeting him there, I began
to be very nice to him. Cecelia, in spite of her magnificent raiment,
perhaps on account of it, had been disposed to graciousness. She drew us
together with a wave of her hand.
"She ought to be doin' _Ophelia_ on Broadway," she introduced me
handsomely; "wouldn't that get you!"
"I saw you with the Hardings last year," Griffin assented, almost as
though I might think it a liberty. "Where are you playing now?" He had
the stamp of too many reverses on his face not to estimate mine at its
proper worth. He had fine instincts too, for as soon as I told him that
I was out of an engagement that season, he put himself on record quite
simply. "My turn goes off next week--I'm trying to get Cline to put it
on the circuit." When we came out of the office together he fell into
step with me. One of the young women ahead of us made the shape of a
bubble with her hands and blew it from her. "Pouff" she said. "There
goes another of my chances." She laughed with a fine courage.
"They all go through with it," Griffin affirmed. "There's Eversley----"
I have forgotten which of the well-known incidents he related.
"Eversley told me I might come to it. What made you think of him?" I
demanded.
"I saw his name in the paper; he's to play here this winter. He's a
wonder."
"He said wonderful things to me once." I had just recalled them.
"They'll come true then. Eversley never makes a mistake. Why, I remember
once----" He broke off as though he had changed his mind about telling
me. I was wondering if I couldn't get rid of him by stopping in at
Sarah's, when he broke out again suddenly.
"To think of you being out of an engagement and a girl like Cecelia
Brown--yes, I know her name is Brown, Cissy Brown of Milwaukee----"
"I've always suspected it," I admitted, "but it is her looks of course,
and the clothes; Cecelia has lovely clothes."
"Well, so could you if...." He checked himself. "I don't mean to say
anything against a lady...."
"I've always suspected that, too," I admitted, "but one doesn't like to
say it."
"Well, you know what she gets--thirty-five a week. A girl doesn't wear
diamond sunbursts on that."
"Mr. Griffin, I wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives
diamond sunbursts to Variety girls: I've never seen any of them."
"You have probably, but you don't know it. You meet their wives in
society."
"Henry Mills." I don't know what made me say it; the image of him came
tripping along the surface of my mind and slid off my tongue without
having more than momentarily perched there.
"Is he in business downtown, and has he got a perfectly proper family
and too many dinners under his vest?"
"Mr. Mills's home life is ideal; but I didn't mean----"
"Neither did I, but that's the type. They mostly have ideal families,
but they couldn't live up to them if they didn't have Cecelia Brunes on
the side.... I beg your pardon."
He had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it
wasn't on account of what he had intimated. I was blushing because of
the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life I
had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our
conversation had suggested for Henry Mills. I was conscious in those
days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation.
"You'll have to take a company out for yourself," was Jerry's solution.
"I'll write you a play. I've got a ripping idea--a man, with a gift, and
two women, good women both of them--that's where I score against the
eternal triangle--each of them trying to save him from the other and
breaking him between them." Jerry's plays were never anything more than
dramatizations of his immediate experience. "You and Sarah Croyden, you
set each other off; I'll write it for both of you." He walked up and
down in my little room with his hands in his pockets and his shining
black hair rising like quills.
"Jerry, how long will it take you to write that play? And how much will
it cost to produce it?"
"Ten thousand dollars," he answered to the last question. "About
eighteen months if I go right at it."
"And I've money enough to last me to the end of February. No," to his
swift generous gesture. "You have to live eighteen months on yours--and
another child coming." I made up my mind that I should have to speak to
Pauline and Henry Mills.
Greater than any mystery of creative art to me, is the mystery by which
the recipients of its benefits manage to keep ignorant of its essential
processes. I have never been able to figure to myself how Pauline and
Henry escaped knowing that the creative mood, the keen hunger of which
is more importunate than any need of food or raiment, was to be had for
very little more than they spent fattening their souls on its choice
products. For it is always to be bought; it is the distinction of genius
as against talent, always to know in what far, unlikely market the
precious commodity is to be bought. How was it that Henry escaped
knowing that the appealing femininity which plays so large a part in the
success of an actress with an audience of Millses, is largely the result
of having been the object of that solicitious protection which it is
supposed to provoke? With what, since it was agreed between Pauline and
me that I was not to pay down on that counter what Cecelia and Jerry
parted with cheerfully, was I ultimately to pay for it? Now that I had
on all sides of me the witness of desperation, I began to be irritated
at the way in which, in view of our long friendship, they accepted it
for me.
As the holiday season approached, without any change in my circumstances
other than a steady diminution of my bank account, I came to the
conclusion that the only possible move was toward New York and that I
should have to ask Henry to advance me the money for it. In view of what
came to me afterward it was a reasonable proposition, but I reckoned
without that extraordinary blankness to the processes of art which is
common to those most entertained by it.
It was a day or two after Christmas, from which I had been excused by my
recent bereavement, that I went out to dinner there with the
determination to bring something to pass commensurate with their usual
attitude of high admiration for and confidence in my gift. We had gone
into the library after dinner, at least it was a room that went by that
name, though I don't know for what reason except that Henry smoked there
and the furniture was upholstered in leather, as in Evanston it was
indispensable that all libraries should be.
Here and there were touches that suggested that if Henry moved his
income up a notch or two, Pauline's taste might not be able to keep pace
with it. Henry warmed his back at the gas log and wished to know how
things went with me.
"As well as I could expect them _here_. I've made up my mind to try for
New York as soon as I can manage it."
"What's the matter with Chicago?" Henry's manner implied that whatever
you believed about it, you'd have to show him.
"Well, I'd have to be capitalized to do anything here the same as in New
York, and the field there is larger." I went on to explain something of
what the metropolis had to offer.
"I guess the worst thing about Chicago is that you're out of a job.
People don't get sore on a place where they are doing well."
"No. They generally light out for a place where there are more jobs." I
thought I should get on better if I took Henry in his own key, but he
forged ahead of me.
"If there's anything the matter with your acting, why don't you ask
somebody?"
"There's nobody to ask. Besides, there isn't anything the matter with
it; the matter is with me."
"Well, I must say I don't see the difference."
"Oh!" I cried. I hadn't realized that they wouldn't just take my word
for it. "It is because I am empty--empty!" I trailed off, seeing how
wide I was of his understanding. I shouldn't have questioned Henry
Mills's word about the capitalization of a joint stock company; and I
resented their discounting my own statement of my difficulties. Pauline
got hold of my hand and patted it. I wondered if it was because all her
own crises were complicated with Henry Mills that she always thought
that affectionateness was part of the answer.
"It is only that, with all your Gift, Henry can't understand how you
need anything else," she extenuated.
"I need food and clothes," I blurted out; "pretty soon I shall need a
lodging."
"Oh, my dear!" Pauline was shocked at the indelicacy. I don't know if
she didn't understand how poor I was, or if it was only the general
notion of the sheltered woman, to find in complaint a kind of heresy
against the institution by which they are maintained. "After all," she
caught up with her accustomed moral attitude, "there's a kind of
nobility in suffering for your art. It's what gives you your spiritual
quality." I thought I recognized the phrase as one that was current in
the women's clubs of that period. I took hold of my courage desperately.
"Well, I'm offering you a chance to suffer two thousand dollars' worth."
Pauline's tact was proof even against that.
"You Comedy Child!" she laughed indulgently.
"You're getting ideas," Henry burbled on cheerfully; "all these
long-hairs and high-brows you've been associating with, they've filled
you up. That friend of yours, McDermott, somebody had him to the club
the other day, talking about the conservation of Genius. Nothing in it.
Let them work for their money the same as other people, I say."
"You know you didn't have any money to begin with," Pauline reminded me.
I was made to feel it a consideration that she hadn't pressed the point
that if I couldn't do again what I had done then, there was something
lacking in the application. They must have taken my gesture of despair
for surrender.
"I guess you were just getting it out of your system," Henry surmised
comfortably.
It was not the first nor the last time that I was to come squarely up
against the lay conviction that whatever might be known about the
processes of art, it wasn't the artist that knew it. Later, when Henry
took me out to the car, he came round to what had been back of the whole
conversation.
"I suppose you could use more money in your business; most of us could,"
he advised me, "but you don't want to let people find it out. There's
nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking
about money."
It was a very cold night as I came down the side street to my door,
deserted as a country road. The narrow footpath trodden in the pavement
looked like the track of desolation, the cold flare of the lamps was
smothered in sodden splashes of snow. There had been the feeling of
uneasiness in the air that goes before a storm all that forenoon, and in
the interval that I had been revaluing a lifelong friendship in terms of
what it wouldn't do for me, it had settled down to a heavy clogging
snow. I was startled as I turned in at the entry to find a man behind
me. He had come up unsuspected in the soft shuffle and turned in with
me.
By the light that filtered through the weather-fogged transom I saw that
he was Griffin of the Varieté. Now as I fumbled blindly at the latch he
came close to me.
"Beg pardon!" He had put out his hand over mine and turned the key for
me.
"My fingers are so cold," I apologized. I turned my face toward him with
the stiffness of cold and tears upon it and there was an answering
commiseration in his eyes. I reached out for the key and he took my hand
in his, holding it to his breast with a movement of excluding human
kindness. If the gesture was at all theatrical I did not feel it. I let
him hold it there for a moment before I went in and shut the door.
CHAPTER V
Depression, as well as the storm which held on heavily all night and the
next day, kept me close, and the state of my coal bin kept me in bed
most of the next day. Along late in the afternoon I was aroused from a
lethargy of cold and crying, by Leon Griffin tapping at the door to know
how I did. The snow by this time had settled down to a blinding drift,
and the thermometer had fallen into an incalculable void of cold.
Griffin was in his overcoat as though he had just come in or was just
going out, though I learned later he had been sitting in it all day in
his room. The impression it created of his being in the act of passing,
led me to open my door to him, as I otherwise might not have done. A
terrible, cold blast came in with him and a clattering of the shutters
on the windward wall of the house. Outside, the day was falling dusk;
there was no light in the room but the square blank of the window
curtained by the sliding screen of snow, and my little stove which
glowed like a carbuncle in its corner.
"You're cozy here"--he put it as an excuse for lingering, for I hadn't
asked him to have a chair--"you hardly feel the wind. On my side there's
a trail of snow half across the room where the wind whips it in between
the casings."
Though he had come ostensibly to offer me a neighbourly attention, he
was plainly in need of it himself; it was his last night at the Varieté
and, between the storm and the depression of having nothing to turn to,
he was coming down with a cold. I had him into my one easy chair and
suggested tea.
"I hardly slept any last night," he apologized over his second cup, "the
shutter clacks so." I could hear it now like the stroke of desolation.
That night when I heard him stamping off the snow in the hall, I had a
hot drink for him, but when I saw him, by the rakish light of the hall
lamp, wringing his hands with the cold before taking it, I insisted he
should come on into my still warm room. I had to turn back first to
light my own lamp and, in respect to my being in my dressing gown with
my hair in two braids, to slip into my bedroom and experience, as I
looked back at him through the crack in the door, the kind of softening
a woman has toward a man she has made comfortable. The light of my lamp,
which was shaded for reading, like a miniature calcium, brought out for
me the frayed edge of his overcoat and all the waste and misuse of him,
the kind of faded appeal that sort of man has for a woman; forlorn as he
was, as he put the bowl back on the table, I was so much more forlorn
myself that I was glad to have been femininely of use to him.
Pauline wrote me to come out and stay with her during the protracted
cold spell, but owing to the difficulty in delivery, the invitation
failed to reach me until the severity of the weather was abated. In any
case I was still too sore at what seemed to me the betrayal of my long
confidence, to have been willing to have subjected myself to any
reminders of it. And whatever kindness Pauline meant, it could hardly
have done so much for me as Leon Griffin did by just needing me. It
transpired that he had no stove in his room, and the heat from the
register for which we were definitely charged in the rent, scarcely
modified the edge of the cold. For the next two or three days we spent
much of the time huddled over my stove. Snow ceased to fall on the
second day, and nothing moved in our view except now and then the
surface of it was flung up by the wind, falling again fountain-wise
into the waste of the untrampled housetops that stretched from my window
to the icy flat of the lake darkening under a dour horizon. Somehow,
though I had never been willing to confess to my friends how poor I was,
I made no bones of it with Griff, as I had heard Cecelia call him, a
name that seemed somehow to suit the inconsequential nature of our
relation better than his proper title. We frankly pooled our funds in
the matter of food, which one or another of us slipped out to buy, and
cooked on my stove. I took an interest in preparing it, such as I
hadn't since the times when I imagined I was helping Tommy on the way to
growing rich, and when the room was full of a warm savoury smell and the
table pulled out from the wall to make it serve for two, we felt, for
the time, restored to the graciousness of living. We fell back on the
uses of domesticity, by association providing us with a sense of life
going on in orderliness and stability. It came out for me in these
moments that it is after all life, that Art needs rather than feeling,
and that, to a woman of my capacity, was to be supplied not by innocuous
intrigues like Jerry's but by the normal procedure of living. I believe
I felt myself rather of a better stripe, to find it so in the domestic
proceeding, though I do not really know that my necessity was any whit
superior to Miss Filette's, except in offering the minimum possibility
of making anybody unhappy by it. But because I knew my friends would
think it ridiculous that I could lay hold of power again by so
inconsiderable a handle as Leon Griffin, I suffered a corroding
resentment. Griffin was getting up a new act for himself, and evenings
as I helped him with it, I felt a faint stirring of creative power. When
he had finished, I would take the shade off the lamp and render scenes
for him from my favourite Elizabethan drama; and in the face of his
unqualified admiration for me, I could almost act.
Toward the end of the week as the cold abated, Mr. Griffin asked me to
see a play in which some of his friends were playing; and Jerry being
prodigal of favours, I responded with an invitation to "The Futurist." I
hadn't mentioned Griff to Sarah, I never more than mentioned him to any
of my friends, but I saw no reason why I should not speak of them to
him, especially when they were so much upon the public tongue as Sarah
was just then.
"Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be
puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name."
"In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah
came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The
Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied
myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my
escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act.
"Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled
by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner
of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from
him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily
perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were
able to see it--there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I
could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I
couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a
man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve;
it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me.
Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's
affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell.
"I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before
Miss--Miss----"
"Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't
have told you except that you seem to know."
"I was expecting another name. Wasn't she--wasn't she married once? A
fellow by the name of Lawrence."
"Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."
"You can't tell me anything about him worse than I know myself." From
the earnestness of his tone I judged that he had suffered something at
the hands of Lawrence. "But I'll say this for him, he didn't stay with
the other woman; she followed him and found him, but he wouldn't stay
with her."
"I don't see that that proves anything except that he was the greater
scoundrel. The other woman was his wife."
"It proves that he loved Miss Croyden best--that he couldn't bear the
other woman after her." I thought it was no use matching ethical ideals
with him and I let the matter drop. It came back to me next day that if
he had been with O'Farrell in Lawrence's time, he might have known
something of the other Shamrocks. I meant to ask him about it in the
morning, but put it off as I observed that the recollection of it seemed
to have stirred him past the point of being able to sleep. He was pale
in the morning, and the rings under his eyes stood out plainly; he had
the whipped look of a man who has been so long accused of misdemeanour
that he comes at last to believe he has done it. I could see the impulse
to confess hovering over him, and the hope that I might find in his
misbehaviours the excusing clue which he was vaguely aware must be
there, but couldn't himself lay hands on. I suppose souls in the Pit
must have movements like that--seeking in one another the extenuations
they can't admit to themselves.
We didn't, however, strike the note of confidence until it was evening.
Griffin kept up the form of looking for an engagement, which occupied
his morning hours, and in the afternoon Jerry came in to see how I had
come through the cold spell, and to win my interest with his wife to
consent to his going as far as St. Louis with "The Futurist." I forget
what reasons he had for thinking it advisable, except that they were all
more or less complicated with Miss Filette.
"But, heavens, Jerry, haven't you ever heard of the freemasonry of
women? How can you think my sympathies wouldn't be with your wife?
Especially in her condition."
"It's only for a week; and, you know, except for her fussing, she is
perfectly well. And look here, Olivia, you know exactly why I have to
have--other things; why I can't just settle down to being--the plain
head of the family." His tone was accusing.
"I know why you _think_ you have to. Honest, Jerry, is it so imperative
as all that?"
"Honest to God, Olivia, unless I'm ... interested ... I can't write a
word." His glance travelling over my dull little room and makeshift
furniture, the cheap kerosene lamp, the broken hinge of the stove. "You
ought to know," he drove it home to me. I felt myself involved by my
toleration of Griffin in a queer kind of complicity.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be
there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview,
and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if
I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon,
when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for
herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be
with the play, meant advertising.
I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my
tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs
huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the
lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me
think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's
vagaries.
"I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about
it," I protested. Griffin shook his head.
"It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats
into you."
I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's
leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She
looked gnawed upon!"
"Miss Dean, you mean?"
"I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he
came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no
cause. How well did you know her?"
"I ... she ... I was married to her." His face was mottled with
embarrassment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for
his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me
right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to
go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have
afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I
knew she couldn't act.... I can't myself, but I know it when I see it.
Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I
thought I could pull her along."
"She _has_ got on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth.
"Yes, she had something almost as good as acting ... she could get hold
of people."
"She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?"
"Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own
interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I--I got out of her
way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which
wanted trimming, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being
ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and
shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about
him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave
his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing
to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an
incurable strain.
"Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound
up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"
"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."
"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature
to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought
you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal
instance.
"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't
thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like
living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking
they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear
you'll lose them altogether."
"I understand."
The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without
illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light,
and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.
"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really
been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only
think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is
just ... Personality ... whatever there is that we act to."
"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."
"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now."
So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the
unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it
would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but
there was nobody to open the gates for me.