I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of

getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two

of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my

case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself

to my necessity.

"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I

could send you something every month----" I cut her off absolutely.

"I'd rather try Cecelia Brune's plan first," I assured her.

"Not while you have me;" she was firm with me. "Besides, you don't

really know that Cecelia----"

"Didn't buy her diamond sunburst on thirty-five a week!" I told her all

that Griffin had said. Sarah looked worried.

"I'll tell you about the diamonds. About a year ago, while you were with

the Hardings, she got into trouble. Oh, she loved him as much as she was

able! He gave her the diamonds; but Cecelia cared. And then when the

trouble came, he deserted her. That's what Cecelia couldn't understand.

She had never given anything before, and she didn't realize that that

had been her chief advantage. It gave her a scare."

But in spite of Sarah's confidence in Cecelia's bitter experience

keeping her straight, I could see that she had taken what Griffin had

told me to heart. A day or two later she referred to the matter again.

"If she goes over the line once, and doesn't have to pay for it, she is

lost." She was standing at my window looking out over the roofs and

chimneys cased in ice, and she might, for all the mark her profession

has left on her, been looking across the pasture bars. I was irritated

at her detachment, and her interest, in the face of my own problem, in

an affair so unrelated as Cecelia Brune's.

"Why do you care so much?"

"You'd care too, if you had seen as much of her; it's like watching a

drowning man: you don't stop to ask if he's worth it before you plunge

in!"

"I can't swim myself," I protested.

I didn't want to be dragged in, rescuing Cecelia; I had myself to save

and wasn't sure I could do it. It was after this talk, however, that

Griff, who still hung about the Varieté from habit, told me that Sarah

had fallen into the way of stopping to pick up Cecelia on her way home

from her own theatre. He thought it a futile performance.

"Nothing can stop that kind; they don't always know it, but that's what

draws them to the stage in the first place. It's a kind of

what-do-you-call-it, going back to the thing they were a long time ago."

"Atavism," I supplied; I thought it very likely. All the centuries of

bringing women up to be toys must have had its fruit somehow. Cecelia

was made to be played with; she wasn't serviceable for anything else.

And what was more, I didn't care to be identified with her even in the

Christian attitude of a rescuer. I said as much to Sarah one evening

about a week later, when I had gone with Jerry to give my opinion of

some changes in the cast, preparatory to going on the road with his

play, and in the overflow of his satisfaction at the way the audience

rose to them, he had asked me to go to supper with him. Then as Sarah

joined us and the spirit of the crowd caught him, pouring along the

street, bright almost as by day and with the added brightness of evening

garments, Jerry, always open to the infection of the holiday mood,

proposed that for once we stretch a point by going to supper at

Reeves's. Sarah and I demurred as women will at such a proposal from a

man whose family exigencies are known to them, but Sarah found a

prohibitory objection in a promise she professed to have made, to go

around for Cecelia on her way home, which Jerry promptly quashed by

including her in the invitation. I protested.

"Supper at Reeves's is quite enough of an adventure for one time.

Cecelia paints."

"Not really," Sarah protested. "It's only that she uses so little

make-up that she doesn't think it necessary to take it off."

"All the better," insisted Jerry. "I never did take supper at Reeves's

with a painted lady, and I'm told it is quite one of the things to do."

I let it pass rather than spoil his high mood. It was not more than

three blocks to the Varieté, and at the stage door Sarah insisted on

getting out herself.

"Why did you let her?" I protested to Jerry.

"Because it will please her, and Miss Brune will be gone; Sarah doesn't

realize how late we are." I could see her returning through the fogged

glass of the stage door.

"Cecelia's gone! The man said she was going to Reeves's too; we can pick

her up there."

"Oh," I objected, "I can stand Cecelia, but I draw the line at her

gentleman friends. She didn't go there alone, I fancy."

"We'll have a look at him, anyway, before we give him the glad hand,"

Jerry temporized.

The cab discharged us into the press of black-coated men and

bright-gowned women that at that hour poured steadily into the anteroom

of Reeves's, which was level with the pavement, divided from it by a

screen of plate glass and palms. Beyond that and raised by a few steps,

was the palm room, flanked on either side by dressing rooms; and opening

out back, the great revolving doors, muffled with crimson curtains, that

received the guests and sorted them like a hopper, according to the

degree of their resistance to the particular allurements of Reeves's.

There was a sleek, satin-suited attendant who swung the leaves of the

door at just the right angle that inducted you to the public café, or to

the corridor that led to private rooms, and was famed never to have made

a mistake. Jerry dared us hilariously as we went up the steps, to put

his discrimination to the test.

"You and I alone then; Olivia's black dress would give us away," Sarah

insisted.

"I want you to stay here and watch for Cecelia," she whispered to me; "I

must see her; I _must_."

Her going on with Jerry would give her an opportunity to look through

the café; if Cecelia hadn't already arrived, I would be sure to see her

come in with the crowd that broke against the bank of palms into two

streams of bright and dark, proceeding to the dressing rooms, and

returning by twos and threes to be swallowed up by the hopper turning

half unseen behind its velvet curtains. I slipped behind a group of

bright-gowned women waiting for their escorts under the palms. I was

hypnotized by the movement and the glitter; I believe I forgot what I

was looking for; and all at once she was before me.

The theatrical quality of Cecelia's prettiness and the length of her

plumes would have picked her out anywhere even without the blackened rim

of the eyelids and the air she had always of having just stepped into

the spot light.

She had stationed herself, with her professional instinct for effect,

just under the Australian fern tree, waiting for her escort, and in the

moment it took me to gather myself together he joined her. I had come up

behind Cecelia and was brought face to face with him; it wasn't until he

had wheeled into step with her that he saw me and his face went mottled

all at once and settled to a slow purple. Cecelia was magnificent.

"Oh, you here! How de do!" She slipped her hand under her escort's arm

and sailed out with him. I caught the glint of the brass-bound door

under the curtains. I don't know how long I stood staring before I

started after her, to be met by the leaves of the revolving door which,

reversing its motion, projected Sarah and Jerry into the palm room

beside me.

"I have been all over the café----" Sarah began.

"Didn't you meet her?"

"In the café? I was just telling you ..."

"No, no. In the corridor, just now; they went through."

"But they couldn't," urged Sarah. "I was standing at the door of the

café with Jerry ..." The truth of the situation began to dawn on her.

"There's such a crowd, of course you missed her." Jerry began to build

up a probability by which we could sustain Sarah through the supper

which followed. We all of us talked a great deal as people will when

they are anxious not to talk of a particular thing. When we were in the

dressing room again, putting on our wraps, Sarah turned on me.

"She wasn't in the café at all," she declared.

"I never said she was. I said she went through into the corridor." In

the silence I could feel Cecelia dropping into the pit.

"Did you know the man?"

I nodded. "It was Henry Mills!"

CHAPTER VI

Before I had an opportunity to talk the incident over with Sarah, she

had seen Cecelia.

"She is perfectly furious with you," she reported. "She hasn't heard

from Mr. Mills since, and she thinks it is on your account; that you

have taken steps for breaking it off."

"Well, if she admits there was something to break off ... I tell you,

Sarah, you are fretting yourself to no purpose, the girl had been there

before."

"I'm afraid so." Sarah's taking it so much to heart was a credit to her,

but I was more curious than commiserating.

"Tell me, what is in the mind of a girl when she does things like that?

What does she get out of it?"

"Excitement, of course; the sense of being in the stir, and the feeling

of being protected. She says Mr. Mills has been kind to her. It is odd,

but she seems to think it is all right so long as it is going on; it is

only when it is broken off she can't bear it. That is why she is so

angry at you."

"There might be something in that," I conceded. "When it is broken off

she is able to realize how cheap and temporary it has been; while it is

going on she can justify it on the ground that it is going on forever.

That _would_ justify it, I suppose." I did not know how I knew this, but

lately I had discovered in myself capacities for understanding a great

many things of which I had had no experience. What concerned me was not

Cecelia's relation to the incident.

"Whatever am I going to do about going there again, to Pauline's, I

mean?"

"You can't tell!"

"And I can't go there and not tell. I've got to choose between deceiving

Pauline and condoning Henry, and I've no disposition to do either."

Sarah thought it over.

"There is only one thing you can do. You'll simply have to go to New

York."

"For a great many reasons besides. You needn't tell me that. But how?

How?"

"You know what I offered----"

"What I refused. It is out of the question. Don't speak of it."

"I suppose after this you couldn't ask the Millses?"

"Sarah ... I did ask."

"Well?" All her interest hung upon the interrogation.

"They told me it was good for my spiritual development to suffer these

things." We faced one another in deep, unsmiling irony. "Sarah, what do

you suppose it costs a man for supper and a private room at Reeves's?"

"Don't!" she begged. "It's only a step from that to Cecelia."

"Yes; I remember she said that men never afforded protection to women

except for value received."

"You must go to New York," Sarah reiterated. "You must!"

The truth was I had never told Sarah exactly how poor I was.

In the end I let her go away without telling; at the worst I thought I

might borrow from Jerry, who had given up the notion of going to St.

Louis, largely no doubt because I had failed to back him up in it

completely, and then just at the end changed his mind and went anyway. I

knew nothing about it until Jerry wrote me from Springfield, for I had

grown shy of going there where all Mrs. McDermott's conversation was set

like a trap to catch me in something that would convict Jerry of

misdemeanour. Jerry asked me to visit her in his absence, but I put it

off as long as possible. I had to settle first about going to Pauline's.

I arranged to spend the afternoon there, meaning to come away before

dinner and so by leaving Henry to discover my attitude in the

circumstance of my having been there without destroying his home, open

the way to my meeting him again without embarrassment. To do that I

should have left the house before the persuasive smell of the dinner

began to creep up the stairs into the warm, softly lighted rooms, but

from the beginning of my visit, Pauline, in order that I might not feel

her failure to put her affection more cogently, had wound me about as

with a cocoon of feminine devices, from which I hadn't been able to

extricate myself earlier. I am not blaming her, I am not sure, indeed,

seeing how completely she justified herself to Henry Mills by what she

had to offer, that I had any right to expect her to understand how

completely her playful and charming affectionateness failed of any

possible use to me. But I felt myself so far helpless in the presence of

it, that I stayed on until the smell of the roast unloosened all the

joints of my resolution. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I

found myself at a point where what Henry might think of me became

inconsiderable before the possibility of my being put out of the house

before dinner was served.

At the same time I could have wept at the indignity of wanting food so

much. I remember to this day the wasteful heaping of the children's

plates, and my struggle with the oblique desire to smuggle portions of

my helping home to Griff, who looked even more of a stranger than I to

soup and fish and roast, to say nothing of dessert.

It wasn't until we had got as far as the salad that I had leisure to

observe Henry grow rather red about the gills as he fed, and speculate

as to how far it was due to his consciousness that I could bring down

the pillars of his home with a word, and didn't intend to.

There was nothing said during dinner about my prospects or the stage in

general, but when Henry took me out to the car about nine o'clock, he

cleared his throat several times as though to drag the subject up from

the pit of his stomach, where it must have lain very uneasily.

"You know," he began, "I've been thinking about that scheme of yours of

going to New York. I am inclined to think there is something in it."

"I haven't thought about it for a long time," I told him, which was only

true in so far as I thought of it as a possibility.

"It would freshen you up a whole lot," Henry insisted. "Everybody needs

freshening. I have been taking a little stir about myself." So that was

the way he wished me to think of his relation to Cecelia!

"I've given it up," I insisted.

We were standing under the swinging arc light in a bare patch the wind

had cleared of the fine, white February grit. Little trails of it blew

up under foot and were lost among the wind-shaken shadows. I could see

Henry's purpose bearing down on me like the far spark of the approaching

trolley.

"I wouldn't do that," he advised. "It looks like pretty good business to

me. You'd have to stay there some time to learn the ropes and if a few

hundred dollars----"

"I've given it up," I said again. The car came alongside and Henry

helped me on to it.

"If you were at any time to reconsider it, I hope you will let me

know----" The roar of the trolley cut him off.

I knew I was a fool not to have accepted the sop to my discretion; I

don't know for what the Powers had delivered Henry Mills into my hands,

if it wasn't to get out of his folly what his sober sense refused me.

Without doubt there are some forms of integrity that, persisted in,

cease to be a virtue and become merely a habit; I could no more have

taken Henry Mills's money than I could have gone to New York without it.

I went home shivering to my fireless little room. I put on my nightgown

over my underwear and my dressing gown over that, and cried myself to

sleep.

It was a day or two later that I recalled that Jerry had asked me to go

out and see his wife, and I thought if I must ask Jerry for help, it

would be no more than prudent for me to do so, but I wasn't in the least

prepared as I went up the path, from which the snow of the week before

had never been cleared, to find the house shut and barred, and no smoke

issuing from it. I made my way around to the kitchen door to try to

discover some sign which would give me a clue to the length of time it

had been deserted, if not the reason for it.

While I was puzzling about among the empty milk bottles and garbage

cans, a neighbour woman put her head out of a nearby window and

announced the obvious fact that Mrs. McDermott wasn't in.

"But in her condition----" I protested as though my informant had been

in some way responsible for it.

"Well, if her own mother's isn't the best place for a woman in her

condition!... Three days ago," she answered to my second question. Mrs.

McDermott's mother lived in Peoria, and I knew that when Jerry left

there had been no such understanding, but as lingering there ankle deep

in the dry snow didn't seem to clear the affair, I undertook to rid

myself of a sense of blame by writing all that I knew of it to Jerry

within the hour. It was the third day after that he came storming in on

me like a man demented. He had been to Peoria immediately on receipt of

my letter and his wife had refused to see him. It hardly seemed a time

for indirection.

"Jerry, what have you done?" I demanded.

"Nothing--not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the

St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was

married."

"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.

"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.

"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always

proud of you."

"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over.

They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my

table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and

by my sensibilities got the better of me.

"Would it do any good if I were to write?"

"You? Oh, they think you're in it ... a kind of general conspiracy. You

know you said that--that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an

artist was the source of his inspiration."

"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I

had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written

little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I

was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion

by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production.

"Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."

"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.

"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but

for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss

Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and

having children take that out of a woman."

"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."

I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after

all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I

kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram.

Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn

away the young life that nestled there.

Jerry wrote me later that the baby had breathed and died and that his

wife was likely to be ill a long time. In view of the extra expense

incurred, I didn't feel that I ought to ask him for the loan I was now

so desperately in need of.

It was about this time that Griffin and I began to avoid one another

about meal time. I have read how wild animals in sickness turn their

backs on one another; one must in unrelievable misery ... we dodged in

and out of our hall rooms like rabbits in a warren. And then suddenly we

would meet and walk along the streets together, mostly at night when the

alternate flare of the lamps and the darkness and the hurrying half-seen

forms, numb the sense like the flicker of light on a hypnotist's screen,

and we moved in a strange, incommunicable world out of which no help

reached us. We saw women go by with the price of our redemption flashing

at their breasts or in their hair. We saw men hurried, overburdened with

work, and there was no work for us. In our own land we were exiled from

the community of labour and we sighed for it more than the meanest

Siberian prisoner for home. And then suddenly communication seemed to

be reëstablished. Effie for no reason sent me half of the rent money. "I

don't need it here, and I think maybe I shall get more out of it by

investing it in you," she wrote. She had always such a way of making the

thing she did seem the choice of her soul. I bought meat and vegetables

and invited Griff to dinner. He took me that night to that sort of

dreary entertainment known as musical comedy. He could often get tickets

and it was a way of spending the evening that saved fuel. As we tramped

back through the chill, trying for an effect of jocularity in his voice,

so that he might seem to have made a joke in case I shouldn't like,

Griff said to me.

"I suppose you wouldn't go with a musical comedy?"

"My dear Griff," I answered him in the same tone, "I'd go with a flying

trapeze if only it paid enough."

"I'm acquainted with Lowe, the tenor. I've been thinking I'd ask

him----" We were as shy of speaking of an engagement as though it were

wild game to be scared away by the mere mention of it.

There was no reason why Griffin shouldn't have succeeded in musical

comedy, he had a fairish voice and had turned his gift as many times as

the minister's wife in Higgleston used to turn her black silk. It was

not more than two days or three after that, as I was coming back to my

cold room in the twilight--I had spent the day in the public library on

account of the heat--and as I was fumbling at the lock as I had been

that first evening he had spoken to me, I heard Leon Griffin come up the

stair three steps at a time, and I knew before I heard it in his voice,

that the times had turned for him. I struck out fiercely against a

sudden blankness that seemed to swim up to the eyes and throat of me.

He was trembling too as he came into the room.

"Olive," he cried, "Olive, I've turned the trick. I'm going with the

'Flim-Flams.'" That was the wretched piece we had seen together. He had

never called me by my name before, and I had no mind to correct him. In

the dusk he ran on about his engagement; they would go on the road

presently and settle for the summer in some city. I heard him speak far

from me. I was down, down in the pit of the cold room with the shabby

furniture and the bleak light that disdained it from the one high

window.

"Don't take off your things," I heard him say. "I came to get you. We'll

have a blow-out somewhere. Olive, Olive!" His quick sympathy came out,

and the excusing charm. "Oh, my dear, you're crying!"

"Griff, you're leaving me." It was as if I had accused him. I sank down

in a chair; I was dabbling at my eyes and trying to get my veil off with

cold fingers.

"Not if you feel that way about it." He came and put his arms about me

and constrained me until I leaned against his body. I knew what he was,

what a man of that stamp must be feeling and thinking, and, knowing, I

permitted it. I was crying still, I think ... his hands came fumbling

under my veil ... presently he kissed me.

"Olivia?"

"Well, Griff!"

"You know--it is for you to say if I shall leave you."

"You mean that you will give up ... but how can you, Griff; it is the

only thing that's been offered." We were sitting still on the low cot in

my room and there was no light but the dull glow of the stove and the

last trace of the day that came in at the window. We had not been out to

dinner yet, and Griffin's arm was around me. I could feel it slack a

little now as if he definitely forebore to constrain me.

"I mean, Lowe could get you a place in the chorus."

"But, Griff, I can't sing."

"You can sing enough for that, and Lowe would get you the place if--if

you belonged to me." I knew exactly what this implied, but no start

responded to it. The nerve of propriety was ached out.

"Of course I know I'm not in your class," Griff was going on. "I

wouldn't do such a thing as ask you to marry me. But I'm awfully fond

of you ... and you're up against it."

"Yes, Griff, I'm up against it."

"Your fine friends ... what would they do for you?"

"Nothing whatever."

"Well, then ... you needn't go under your own name, and this is a

chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to

strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?"

"No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking

inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was

neither angry nor insulted.

"And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself ...

honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't

you?"

I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the

situation. It was too desperate for that.

"I guess I ought to tell you ... I'm a bad sort ... bad with women.

After I knew that my--that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what

became of me. There was a woman in the company ... she liked me, and I

thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was

about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her.

But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps

that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to

like a person to live with them ... and, anyway, I'm not asking you to

marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a

superior abnegation.

"You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me.

"I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that

anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be

able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity.

I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against

mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just

as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting

himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not

shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of

the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of

trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the

persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by

loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not

drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I

couldn't stand for _Flim-Flam_. I think just at first, though, I made

myself believe I was considering it.

I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected

anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood

opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a

chance.

"I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her.

"Oh, but my dear--surely not with that!"

"I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses."

"Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!"

Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all

that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for

long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"

"I'll get my board and clothes out of it," I told her bluntly. "And

whether I like it or not, it is the only thing offered."

"And you are just taking it on trust? I suppose that is the right way;

you can never tell how things will be brought about." I don't know how

much of this was honest, and how much derived from the capacity for

self-deception which grows on women whose sole business in life is

getting on with a man. At any rate, having shaken my situation around to

the shape of a moral attitude, as a robin does a worm, nothing would

have prevented her from swallowing it whole.

Faint as I was I refused her invitation to dinner. With what I had in

mind to do I didn't care to meet Henry Mills again. I was fiercer in my

detestation of him and Cecelia than I had been before I had thought of

being in the same case myself. I resented them as a ribald commentary on

my necessity.

As I rode home on the car, all my outer self was in a tumult, dazed and

buzzing like a hive. I was dimly aware of moving, sitting upright, of

paying my fare, and of great staring red posters that flashed upon me

from the billboards. I remember that it occurred to me several times

that if I could only understand what I read on them, it might be greatly

to my profit. Somewhere deep under my confusion I was aware of being

plucked by the fringes of my consciousness. Something was trying to get

through to me.

I refused to see Griffin at all that evening, and got into bed early,

staring into the dark and seeing nothing but fragments of red letters

that seemed about to shape themselves into the saving word, and then

dissolved and left me blank. I tried to pray and realized that I had no

connecting wires over which help might come.

Belief in the God I had been brought up to, had been beaten out of me at

Higgleston, very largely by the conviction of those who professed to

know Him best, that He couldn't in any case be the God of my Gift. And

I hadn't been thinking since then of the Something Without Us to which I

acted, as Deity. Now it occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that if

the God of the Church had cast me off, there must still be something

which artists everywhere prayed to, a Distributer of Gifts who might be

concerned about the conduct of His worshippers.

I reached out for Him--and I did not know His name. I must pray though,

I must pray to something which stood for Help. Slowly, as I cast back in

my mind to find the name for it, I remembered Eversley. Eversley was

everything which any player might wish to be, and Eversley had been

kind. I would pray to Eversley. All at once there flashed across the

blank of my mind, his name in letters of red. That was it! That was the

name on the billboards! Eversley was in town. I recalled that Griff had

spoken of it. I hadn't been able to spare a penny for a paper for a long

time, or I should have known it. I would see Eversley. I got up and

groped around in the cupboard for a piece of dry bread and ate it. Then

I went back to bed and dropped asleep suddenly with the release of

tension. To-morrow I would see Eversley.

Griffin failed to understand my change of mood in the morning.

"You aren't afraid that I shall try to hold you?"

"No I'm not afraid."

"Or that anybody will find it out?"

"I shouldn't care if they did," I told him. "I'm going to see Eversley.

I suppose it's fair to tell you, you'll be the last resort, Griff."

"I'll be the foundation of your fortune, if Eversley will let me, but he

won't." I think there was regret in his voice, but it was never in

anything he said to me.

"I know you're not mean, Griff; that's why I told you."

"Oh, I'll tell you, too. I was mean once; I didn't mean to be, but it

turned out that way." He was on the point of admitting something to me

that I felt if I was to depend upon him I shouldn't hear.

I got out as early as possible and walked until I found a billboard.

Eversley was at the Playhouse; he had been playing here for three days.

I walked past it several times considering the possibility of getting

his address from the stage doorman, though I knew I couldn't.

It was clear and bright, few people moved in the street. I walked

between the alleyways and a row of ash-cans waiting for the belated

carts of the cleaners. "Eversley, Eversley!" I called over and over as

if it had been a charm. Suddenly in the still cold brightness, a torn

fragment of newspaper flapped in the ash-can, it lifted and made a

clumsy flight like a half-fledged bird and dropped beside me. Its one

torn wing flapped gently as I passed it, and showed me part of a

pictured face. I said to myself that I was in a pretty state when even

a torn face in a paper looked like Eversley. I had gone on three steps,

and suddenly I stopped. It was Eversley, of course; his picture would be

in the papers. I went back and lifted the printed scrap. It was part of

an interview with the great tragedian, three days old, and it told me

the address of his hotel.

It was nearly eleven when I arrived there. The foyer was crowded with

people among whom I fancied I recognized several of my profession. They

had the same desperate air that I knew must stand out on me. I thought

the clerk recognized it.

"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too,

not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he

was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to

one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do

not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious.

Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others

stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too

late of course to catch them.

"Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy.

"First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the

fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should

suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left

corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large

woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking

at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I

was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I

should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a

suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of

the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had

seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious

air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by

my evident wish to speak to her.

"Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband;

I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open

countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went

to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her.

"My husband never sees visitors in the morning."

"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an

appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her

relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.

He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask

after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.

"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."

"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell

me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with

a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions

were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back

again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.

"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "_You_ wouldn't wish that.

What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there

is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"

"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something--something pressing to be

done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to

describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."

"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"

"I shall believe you," I said.

He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and

rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was

good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate

carving in his face of nobility and gentleness. There were men like that

then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a shibboleth

of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me,

groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he

was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay

face downward on the table.

"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get

my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage.

Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the

story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I

felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter

in Chicago rose up in the part of _Magda_ to protest against the

judgment of Taylorville.

I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I

said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way

with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I

was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.

"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been

very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley

could do for me.

"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"

"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not

let myself down like that.... Was that why you asked me to do the part?"

I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without

taking any note of my standing.

"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"

I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.

"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the

whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."

Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day

before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to

see him the next day, and if he liked me--by the tone in which Mark

Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone--he would take me on to

New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.

So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself

toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked

about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had

nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast,

I turned into the first attractive café and paid out almost my last cent

for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought

food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and

endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the assurance of

Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come

a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled with

_Magda_, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I

had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched

on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing

noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.

As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of

conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all

that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how

far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my

mind as one seen from the farther shore. I considered a little and then

I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and

walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I

stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking

almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the

dusk didn't conceal from me that embarrassment was on him. He looked

checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss

Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable assumption. Whatever Dean

had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He

knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of

Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had.

He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a

resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he

couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.

It was about eleven of the next day that I had a note from Eversley to

come to his rooms to meet Mr. Polatkin. I went in a kind of haze of

excitement, numb as to my feet and finger-tips, moving about by reflexes

merely and with a vague doubt as each new point of the way presented

itself, the car I took, the hotel stair, the length of the corridor, if

I should be equal to any one of them, so far was my consciousness

removed from the means of communication.

Eversley shook hands with me out of a cloud, moving in an orbit miles

outside of my own, and when he left me, saying that Polatkin would come

up the next moment, it was as if he had withdrawn into the vastness of

outer space. In the interval before I heard Mr. Polatkin's knock I

rehearsed a great many ways of meeting him, none of which were from the

right cue.

I do not know why I hadn't been prepared by the name for his being a

Jew, nor for the sudden shifting of the ground of our meeting which that

fact made for me. So far as I had thought of him at all, it was in a

kind of nebulosity of the high disinterestedness that was responsible

for Mark Eversley's interest in me. It had been, his generous succour,

all of a piece of that traditional protectiveness, the expectation of

which is so drilled into women that it rose promptly in advance of any

occasion for it. The mere supposition that he was to provide for me,

had tinged my mind, unaware, with the natural response of a docility

made ridiculous by the figure of Polatkin edging himself in through a

door that an arrangement of furniture made impossible completely to

open. His height did not bring him above the level of my eyes, and as

much of him as was visible above his theatrical-looking, furred coat,

was chiefly nose and pallid forehead disdained by tight, black, curly

hair, and extraordinarily black eyes which seemed to have retreated

under the brows for the purpose of taking council with the intelligence

that informed them.

I had put on my best to meet him, and though my husband had been dead

more than two years, my best was still tinged with widowhood, for the

chief reason that once having got into black I had not been able to

afford to put it off for anything more suitable. I had put a good deal

of white about the neck trying for an effect which I knew, as Polatkin's

eyes travelled over me, had been feminine rather than professional. Now

as I realized how I had unconsciously responded to the suggestion of

preciousness in the fact of his coming to take care of me, I felt myself

grow from head to foot one deep suffusing red. It comes out for me in

retrospect how near I was to the situation which had intrigued Cecelia

Brune and her kind, put at disadvantage, not by a monetary obligation so

much as by the inevitable feminine reaction toward the source of care

and protection. At the time, however, I was concerned to keep the

stodgy little Jew, who stood hat in hand taking stock of me, from

discovering that I had come to this meeting with a degree of personal

expectation which I should have resented in him. I hoped indeed that my

blush might pass with him for a denial of the very thing it confessed,

or at least for mere shyness and gaucherie. I was helped from my

confusion by the realization that Mr. Polatkin was not so much looking

at me or speaking to me, as projecting me into the future and gauging me

against a background of his own creation.

I was standing still, after we had got through some perfunctory

civilities, for I thought he would want me to act for him--but I found

afterward that he had trusted Mr. Eversley for my capacity--and I had a

feeling of being able to meet the situation better on my feet. I caught

him looking at me with an irritating impersonality.

"Jalowaski shall make your corsets," he affirmed; "he makes 'em for

Eames and Gadski--a little more off there, a little longer here ...

so...." He did not touch me, he was not even within touching distance,

but he followed the outline of my figure with his thumb, flourishing out

the alterations which made it more to his mind. "Jalowaski would fix you

so you wouldn't believe it was you," he concluded.

He appeared so well satisfied with his inspection that he expanded

graciously. "And there is one thing you have which there is lots of

actresses would give half they got for it. You have got imagination in

the way you dress your hair. It is a wonder how some of them can act and

yet ain't got no imagination at all about the way they look, only so it

is stylish. For an actress it is all right for her to look stylish on

the street, but there are times when she has to look otherways on the

stage; y'understand me."

I slid somehow into a chair; I don't know exactly what I expected, but

it certainly hadn't been this appraisement, which I had the sense to see

was favourable and yet resented.

"The first thing we will see to yet, is some clothes; for you will

excuse me, Miss Lattimore, but what you are wearing don't show you off

at all. You don't need to wear black. Of course I know you are a widow,

Mr. Eversley was telling me, but there are some actresses what make out

like they was, because they think it becomes them, y' understand, but

there is no need for you to wear it, for Mr. Eversley is telling me that

your husband is dead more than two years already." He had loosened his

coat to display an appropriate amount of gold fob dependent over a small

balloon in the process of being inflated; now from somewhere in his

inner recess he produced a folded paper.

"It is better we have a contract from the start. Though of course it is

all right if Mr. Eversley recommends you, but it is better we don't

have misunderstandings." He spread the paper out and weighted it with

one of his pudgy hands.

"So you are going to take me ... you haven't seen me act yet."

"Eversley has."

"Well ... if you want to take his judgment ... but he hasn't told me

anything about _you_ yet. What do you want of me; what are you going to

do for me?"

If Eversley had told him how desperate my situation was, it wasn't a

good move to try to hold out against him now, it might have given him

the idea that I was ungrateful, but I couldn't stand for being handed

about this way like a female chattel. That Eversley had told him, I saw

by the expression of astonishment on his face which slowly changed to

one of amusement.

"I'm going to save you from starving to death," he began, and then as

the sense of my courage in the face of such an alternative grew upon

him, "I'm going to make you one of the leading tragic actresses of

America."

"And what am I to do?"

"Whatever I tell you. Eversley thinks you could study a while with Mrs.

Delamater. She is wonderful, wonderful!" He described with his arms a

circle scarcely larger than the arc of his cherubic contour, to show how

wonderful she was.

"I should like some dancing lessons, too," I submitted.

"Do you dance? Ah, no, it is too much to expect; but if I could find me

a dancer, Miss Lattimore, a born dancer!" He brought his arms into play

again to describe a felicity which transcended expression. "But they are

not so easy to find," he sighed audibly. "We must do what we can

already."

Eversley told me afterward that Polatkin had the soul of an actor, but

the only part which he had ever been able to play without being

ridiculous, was Fagin, and now he was too fat even for that, so that he

took it out vicariously in the success of those whose opportunity he

made. It was the dream of his life to find a real genius, a dancer or a

prima donna; I believe I was the nearest he ever came to it; and I owe

it to him to say that I couldn't have arrived at more than the faintest

approach to it without him.

It was that contract I signed with him there in Eversley's room which

brought him in the end about three hundred per cent. on the money he

advanced me, but I never begrudged it. He gave me a check then and

there, and an address of a hotel in New York where I was to meet him

within five days. He looked me well over as he shook hands with me.

"You would be better if you would weigh about ten pounds more," he

assured me, and I was mixed between resentment at his personality and

thankfulness to have even that sort of interest taken in me. I had

lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Eversley afterward; there was not time for half

the things I wished to hear from him, but this sticks in my memory. I

had put it to him that the meagreness of my personal experiences had, so

far, tended to the skimping of my art.

"There's no question as to that," he told me, "but it is nothing

compared to the effect that your art will have on your experience. It's

a mistake to let it set up in you an appetite for particular kinds of

it. There's the experience of having done without experience, you can

put that into your acting as well as the other, and you'll find it is

often the most valuable." I was later to find the worth of that, but

like most advice, it only proved itself in the event of my not taking

it.

There was not much to be done about my leaving Chicago; I had rooted

there shallowly. I went out that afternoon to tell Pauline good-bye, for

I wished to avoid Henry. It seemed a great step, my going away. There

was a kind of finality about it. The casual character of my relation to

the stage had disappeared; I was about to be married to it. Pauline

cried a little; in spite of there being so much in my life that I

couldn't tell her, I remembered how long we had been friends and that we

were very fond of one another. She couldn't, of course, quite abandon

her favourite moral attitude.

"You have a great work, Olivia, a great responsibility. You must

remember that you are the trustee of a rare gift."

"I'll take as good care of it," I assured her, "as those who sent it

take of me." At the time I believe I felt that the Powers _had_ taken

notice of me at last.

I got away as soon as possible; it seemed kinder to Griffin. We had been

divided as by a sword; he knew now there was nothing between us and he

was abashed at the memory of having touched me. All that time we had

lurked behind the pressure of packing and settling my affairs; we never

came out squarely and faced one another. I think some latent manhood

that had risen to my need of him, slunk back with the certainty that I

could do very well without him.

"You'll be sure and hunt me up if you come to New York?" I urged; I

wasn't going to be accused of disloyalty because of the rise in my

fortunes. He shook his head.

"You'll be up among the nobs then." He looked at me for a moment

wistfully, "You'll remember that I said I wouldn't try to hold you?" I

let him get what comfort he could out of the generosity he imagined in

himself at that. Seen against the shining background which Polatkin's

money had made for me, he looked almost weazened. "Good-bye," I said,

with another handshake, and I set my face steadily toward New York.

BOOK IV

CHAPTER I

The third season in New York found me in a very gratifying situation. I

had made a public for myself, and friends, not only new friends but old

ones drawn there by good fortune of their own. I had worked out my

obligation to Polatkin, though I was still on such terms with him as

allowed him to give me a good deal of advice, and for me to call him

Poly in his more human moments. I used even to go out to his house at

One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street to spend an hour with Mrs.

Polatkin and the several little replicas of himself, of whom, in spite

of their tendency to run mostly to nose and forehead, he was exceedingly

proud. The help he had afforded me had uncovered new layers of capacity,

to fill out satisfyingly the opportunities he created. I was a

successful actress, there was no doubt whatever that I was a success; I

would have been able to prove it by the figure of my salary. And often

when the house rocked with applause, and I was called time after time

before the curtain, I would question the high, half-lighted void. I

would look and ache and cry out inwardly. For what? Well, I suppose I

knew pretty well what I was looking for by the end of that year, though

it wasn't a thing I could say much about, even to Sarah.

Sarah and I had a flat together on Thirty-first Street. The second

winter we had played together, in a comedy Jerry had written for us,

with so much success that it was impossible that we should remain

together long. To have kept together two players of such distinguished

and equal quality would have been to miss the lustre of achievement

which they might each shed on a lesser group, wholly without any other

excuse for coherence. Our managers, too, contrived to get us not a

little advertisement out of the circumstance of our being friends and

undivided by success. There was, however, one fact known to us both,

though without any conscious communication, which we would not for

worlds have made known to an unsuspecting public; and that was that

while I was still on the hither side of my full power, Sarah had come to

the level of hers.

Sarah was always wonderful in what I call static parts, parts all of one

mood and consistency. She was notable as Portia; as Hermione, absolute.

Perhaps the greatest favourite with her public was Galatea, which,

besides being well within the average taste, allowed the greatest

display of her bodily perfection. Yet with all this, Sarah knew that she

was nearing the end of her contribution; knew it perhaps with that

prescience of the Gift itself, folding up its wings for withdrawal. I

have never been able to make up my mind whether she abandoned her

talent because she had no more use for it, or if it left her because its

time was served.

I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night,

that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she

had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but

I--I came hungry--_always_! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of

interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the

course; when I would continue acting in my room, going over my part,

recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until

Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be

interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled

and aching with incompletion.

I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had

come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing

something; not less in sheer bodily well-being, leisure, beautiful

clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of

home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's

house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours

and adjustments were in tune with my temperament, as nothing I had had

before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal

preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in

myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour

and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality

called charm.

And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get

anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that

certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise

of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to

say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the

dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded.

I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living

crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their

first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I

wanted.

"It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is

called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by

your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute."

That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted

against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world,

wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some

aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a

feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to

condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It

was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading

woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her

limbered up."

"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any

minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable

situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to

me the probable outcome of such a relation.

"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go

looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall

never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that

with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are

helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then

Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.

It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the

cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be

warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against

trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane and open passion

as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife,

noble, extenuating, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able

to conceive such a relation and to discriminate it so readily from the

ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to

miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny.

Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.

The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the

road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in

consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry

had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that

intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs.

Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children,

though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather

for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling

infrequently.

No one could be on a footing of any intimacy with Mrs. Jerry without

being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy which

gnawed upon the bosom that nursed them. Connubial misery was a kind of

drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any

drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous

infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection

was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set

in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I

merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion

of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate

myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is

the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.

It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children,

who were nice children except for the way in which they continually

reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness

of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her

generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the

long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the

pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.

I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go

with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing

the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back

from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the

town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using

them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it

was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season

for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use

Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.

Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light

that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural

aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to

which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through

layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played

upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and

affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work

became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built

to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such

an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of

white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which

brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore

parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour

of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its

little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement,

especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he

looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the

entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good

enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt

Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under

his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was

able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while

and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains

I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a

hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.

"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to

happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can

feel news of it coming up through the stems."

"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me.

"There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."

"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"

"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to

bring on a crisis."

"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss

Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a

spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry

was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't,

however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown

out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a

year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the----not

heart----let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes--of Mineola

Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare

of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the

relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the

mentor of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's

philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in

mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I

ventured on a word of caution.

"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your

marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."

"You think I'd do that?"

"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to

the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would

make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live

with her."

"I could live with you," he affirmed.

"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look

here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any

one ... like Miss Doran, I mean ... do you mean that you wouldn't write

plays at all?"

"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell?

This thing _is_. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back

from it."

"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"

"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the

roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to

do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking

point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would

be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away

immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola

affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better

clear out before it.

I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah,

who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast,

but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me.

It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a

party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with

the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a

married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that

with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper

before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve

and apprise him that I was there. What deterred me was the reflection

that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled head to make a case of

his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in

the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's

private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders

that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be

unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself

for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of

sundry vagrant impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain

above the din of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter.

The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance at

Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led

me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his

situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.

He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's

wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.

"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the

back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."

"For where?"

"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical

season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment.

"Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."

"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how

should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of

Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained

most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that

what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements

with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers,

and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.

Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.

"I don't blame you for going."

"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of

sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of

consternation passed in his face between his divided interest and a

suspicion of the reason for my desertion.

"Look here, Olivia--oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was

going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his

good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a

detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway

as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have

often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the

Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.

I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him

to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did

not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might

contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as

soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my

journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would

find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer

ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A

letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she

would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre

closed for the season I sailed for London.

CHAPTER II

For a week, perhaps, I was content merely with being there, simply happy

and human. I had brought letters and addresses which I neglected. In

spite of the excuse I had made to Jerry about it, I did not even go to

the theatres. I turned aside from the traditional goals, to ride on the

top of omnibuses and walk miles down the Strand and Piccadilly, touching

shoulders with the crowd. The thing that I had striven for in my art,

what men paint and write and act for, was upon me. Answers to all the

questions about it that I had not the skill to put to myself, lurked for

me behind the next one of the Greek marbles and the next. The pictures

were luminous with it. In the soft spring nights it took the streets and

turned the voices happy. It danced with the maids in the alleyways to

the tune of the barrel organs. Then all at once I had a scare.

That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me seemed about to take flight. I would be

smiling at it secretly. I would catch myself in the motion of saluting

it, and suddenly it would be gone. Mornings I would wake up in Chicago

to the old struggle and depression; I would have to go out in the

streets and court back my joy; it fled from me and concealed itself in

the crowd. I followed it by the trail of the first name I lighted on in

my address-book. It happened to be Mrs. Franklin Shane; I wrote her a

note and then walked out in Hyde Park to see the last of the

rhododendrons, and regretted it. Mrs. Franklin Shane was Pauline Mills

raised to the _n_th power, which I did not fail to perceive was due to

Franklin Shane being Henry multiplied by a million. The acute sense of

values, which had established Pauline at the centre of Evanston, had

landed Mrs. Shane at the outer rim of English exclusiveness. What she

would do with her time and energy when she had penetrated to its royal

core, interested me immensely.

I had been entertained at her house the previous winter when I had been

studying a play that made me perfectly willing to be exploited by Mrs.

Franklin Shane, for the sake of what I got out of it to fatten my part.

There in London she called for me in her car the afternoon of the day

that brought her my note. I don't remember that anything was expressly

said about it, but it was in the air that Mrs. Franklin Shane had

arrived, in her study of Exclusiveness, at knowing that the younger

members of it were addicted to the society of ladies of my profession,

and meant to make the most of me. I thought it might be amusing to see

what, supposing with me as a tolerable bait, she could catch a younger

son, she would do with him. She was clever enough not to put the use she

was to make of me, too obviously. I was invited to an informal

reception the next afternoon in which she found herself involved by her

husband's business exigencies; I gathered from her way of speaking of it

that the guests were chiefly Americans and that she had made the best of

the situation, extracting from it for herself a kernel of credit by not

turning down her compatriots, now that she was assured of having the

English aristocracy to play with.

The house in front of which a hansom deposited me the next day, was

notable; one could guess that the Franklin Shanes had been made to pay a

pretty penny for the privilege of occupying it. It was stuffed full of

the treasures of four hundred years of the selective instinct.

"You must really see the Velasquez," my hostess had confided to me as

soon as I had shaken hands with her, and I judged from the fact of her

not mentioning my name to any other of her guests, that she was saving

me for a special introduction.

The Velasquez was very wonderful; there was also an early Holbein and a

Titian so black with time that there was only one point in the room from

which you could make out what it was about. I was slowly making my way

to that point. I had been in the house half an hour and had met but one

or two people whom I slightly knew, when I was aware of my hostess

piloting toward me through the press, a black-coated male in whom I

suspected one of the pegs upon which her social venture hung. It

occurred to me that she had sent me to look at the pictures so that she

might know where to find me. The room was packed with Americans,

satisfying in the only way open to them, a natural curiosity as to the

shell in which the only kind of society which wasn't open to them,

lived, and the man blocking out a passage through it with his shoulders,

was so tall that it brought my eyes on a level with his necktie. There

was an odd freedom about it that set me at once to correct my impression

of him by his face, and the moment I raised my eyes to him I knew him.

I could hear Mrs. Franklin Shane mumbling the phrases of introduction,

rendered unimportant by the radiant recognition that for the moment

enveloped us, that burst around us as a flame in which our hostess

seemed to shrivel and go out in a thin haze of silk and chiffon. I

remember looking around for her presently, and wondering how she had got

away from us. We began again at the point where we had left off.

"So you did go on the stage then, in spite of Taylorville?"

"And you," I pressed my foot into the velvet pile of the carpet to make

sure that I stood. "You are an engineer, I suppose?"

"In spite of my uncle!"

Somewhere in the next room some one began to sing. I did not hear the

song nor see the Titian. I was back in Willesden pasture and the soft

rain of dying leaves was on my face. I was conscious of nothing but his

hand which he had laid upon my arm to steady me against the pressure of

the crowd which swayed and turned upon itself to let Mrs. Shane through,

to drag me to be presented to the singer who was even more of a

notability than I was.

There was an interval then in which I appeared to be going through the

forms of society, and going through them under an intolerable sense of

injustice in the fact that having found Helmeth Garrett at last, now I

had lost him. It was one of those occasions when the inward monitor is

so bent on its own affairs that the habit of living goes on

automatically, or does not go on at all. It went on so with me for half

an hour. By degrees, what seemed an immense unbearable throbbing of the

universe, resolved itself at the renewal of that electrifying touch on

my arm, to the thrum of an orchestra in the refreshment room. I felt

myself carried along by the pressure of the crowd in that direction, but

just at the turn of the stair that went down to it I was drawn

peremptorily aside.

"Come," Mr. Garrett insisted, "come out of this. I want to talk to you."

There was the old imperiousness in his manner, exclusive of all other

considerations. He seemed to know the house. We took a turn through the

hall came out presently at the _porte cochère_ where a line of carriages

waited, supported by a line of skirt-coated figures like little wooden

Noahs before an ark. I let him put me into a closed carriage without a

word of protest. I had not taken leave of my hostess; I had not so much

as thought of her. I suppose he had been arranging this in the interval

in which I had not seen him. The moment the door of the carriage was

shut, we clasped hands and laughed shamelessly.

"You had three little freckles high up on your cheek, what became of

them?" he demanded. All at once his mood changed again. "All the years

I've been without you!... I saw a picture of you in a magazine three

years ago in Alaska. I came near writing."

"You should have. What were you doing there?"

"Promoting Engineer, Alaska, Russia, Mexico." He began a gesture to

include the whole round of the mining world, but left off to take my

hand again. "The world _is_ round," he declared, as though he had

somewhat doubted it. "It brings us back again to the old starting

points."

"They're always the same, I suppose, the places we set out from; but

we ... we are never the same."

"Is that a warning?" He looked at me, checked for a moment.

"Only a platitude." I had thrown it out instinctively against his

engulfing manner, against everything that rose up in me to assure me

that nothing whatever had changed, that it would never change. The life

of the London streets streamed around us; crossing Piccadilly Circus we

were held up with the traffic; the roar of the city islanded us like a

sea.

"I suppose you know where we are going?" I suggested in one of the

checked intervals.

"To your hotel; Mrs. Shane gave me the address. I told her we were old

friends. You mustn't be surprised if you find she expects us to have

gone to school together. I wanted to get away where we could talk." I

gave him an assenting smile. Still neither of us showed any disposition

to begin. He took off his hat in the carriage and ran his fingers

through his hair. About the temples it had gone gray a little. Now and

then he gave a short contented laugh as a man will, put suddenly at

ease.

"I'm glad you kept the old name, Olivia Lattimore ... Olivia. I

shouldn't have found you without."

"You knew I had lost my husband."

"I read that in the magazine. There's where I have the advantage of

you." He dropped his light banter for a soberer tone. "My wife died two

years ago." We were silent after that until the fact had been put behind

us by a space of time.

I don't know why London seems a more homey place than New York. It has

been going on so long, perhaps, is so steeped in the essential essence

of human living, and the buildings there are smaller, more personal, the

mind is able to grasp them to the uttermost. I remember as we stopped at

my hotel, being taken suddenly with a tremendous awareness of it all,

the noble river flowing by, the human stream, miles on miles of homes,

and the green countryside. I was aware of a city set in an island and an

island in the sea, the wide immortal sea going around and around it, the

coursing waves--I checked myself in an upward gesture of the arms, as

though I had pulsed and surged with it. I caught in my companion's smile

a delighted recognition.

"Sh--" he said, "what'll Flora Haines think of you!"

"Flora! Oh, Flora wouldn't even _think_ about a play-actor. What would

your uncle----"

"He's dead now." He stopped me.

"They are all dead," I told him, "all those that mattered to us."

We had another mood when we came to my rooms. I perceived suddenly what

there was in him more than I had known. It was in his manner that he had

commanded men. I was pierced through with a sense of his virility, the

quality that goes to make a male. I was glad of an excuse to put away my

hat and wrap, to escape for a moment from the effect he produced on

me ... from inordinate pride in him that he could so produce it. The room

was full of the tumult we created for one another.

"Will you sit here?" I said at last. I believe I pushed a chair toward

him.

"No, you." He must have turned it back toward me, otherwise I do not

know how I came to be so near him.

"You know," I said, ... "I never got your letter."

"I guessed as much when it came back to me. I should have come to you

the next day, but I quarrelled with my uncle. I walked all the way to

the railway station before I remembered. But what had I to offer you?"

"It was so long ago ..."

"No, no, yesterday." His arms were around me. "Olivia ... yesterday and

to-day!"

I think I moved a little to be the more completely engulfed by him, to

lay against his the ache of my empty breast; all these years I had not

known how empty. We kissed at last and Joy came upon us. We loved; we

kissed again between laughter. I remember little snatches of explanation

in the intervals of kissing.

"All this time, Helmeth, I have wanted you so."

"I was on my way to you. All last winter in Alaska ... in the long

night, Olivia. I should have come soon."

"Oh," I cried, "I have been drawn across the sea to you. All the way I

felt you calling!"

"We had to meet again; had to!"

After a time I insisted that he should sit down. "You haven't had any

tea." I tried to get control of myself. I was crossing the room to ring

when he swept me up again.

"Look here, Olivia, I don't want any tea. I want you. God!" he said, "do

you know how I want you?" All at once I was crying on his breast.

"Oh, Helmeth, Helmeth, do you know you have only seen me twice in your

life."

"And both times," he insisted, "I've wanted to marry you."

* * * * *

It was two or three days before we spoke of marriage again. I believe I

scarcely thought of it; we had all the past to account for, and the

present. We had moments of strangeness, and then we would kiss, and all

the years would seem to each of us as full of the other as the very

hour.

"Where were you, Helmeth, the second summer after we met?" I had told

him of my visit to Chicago and the dream of him I had had there.

"Out in Arizona, carrying a surveyor's chain, dreaming of _you_! Often

when the moonlight was all over that country like a lake, I would walk

and walk. I had long talks with you; they were the only improving

conversation I had."

"For years," I said, "that dream of you was the only thing that kept my

Gift awake. Times I would lose it, and then I would dream again and it

would come back. I know now when I lost it completely, it was about a

year before I saw you that time in Chicago." I had told him of that,

too.

"That year I married." I could see that there was something in the

recollection always that weighed upon him.

"I didn't," he said, "until after my aunt had told me about you. I went

back there when she died; she was always good to me. You know, don't

you, Olive, that in spite of everything ... everything ... there is only

you."

"Let us not talk of it." I do not know how it is proper to feel on such

occasions, but I supposed that he must have had as I had, stinging tears

to think of the dead and how their love was overmatched by this present

wonder. I would have had, somehow, Tommy and my boy to share in it.

I went rather tardily to make my apologies to Mrs. Franklin Shane. I

hope they sounded natural.

"My _dear_! you needn't expect me to be surprised at _anything_ Helmeth

Garrett does." She talked habitually in italics. "My husband says that

it is only because he so generally does right, that it is at all

possible to get along with him." I snapped up crumbs like this with

avidity.

"His wife, too, you must have known her." I hinted. This was at the end

of a rather complete account of Helmeth's business relations with Mr.

Shane.

"Oh, well," I could see Christian charity struggling with Mrs. Shane's

profound conviction of the rectitude of her own way of life. "She was a

_good_ woman, but no--imagination." She was so pleased to have hit upon

a word which carried no intrinsic condemnation that she repeated it.

"No imagination whatever. One feels," she modified the edge of her

judgment still further, "that so much might have been made out of Mr.

Garrett. These self-made men are so difficult."

"Are you difficult?" I demanded when I had retailed the conversation to

him that evening.

"I suppose so; anyway I am self-made. She is right so far; I dare say it

is badly done. You'll have to take a few tucks in me."

"Not a tuck. I like you the way you are. Oh, I like you ... I like you

_so_!" There was an interval after this before we could go on again.

"Tell me how you made yourself, Helmeth. Don't leave anything out, not a

single thing."

"By mistakes mostly. Every time I had made one I knew it was a mistake

and I didn't do it again. I don't know that I'm much of a success

anyway, but I've got a large assortment of things not to do."

"That was the way I learned how to act; filling in behind!"

"I thought that came by instinct. What counts with a man, is not so much

getting to know how to do it, but getting a chance to prove to other

people that he knows how."

"I've been through that too," I told him, but he was bent on making

himself clear.

"I suppose I ought to tell you, Olivia, I'm only a sort of scab

engineer. I haven't any papers."

"But if you can do the work? Mrs. Shane said----"

"Oh, Shane will trust me; he's learned. What hurts is to have worked up

a scheme to the point where it is necessary to have outside capital, and

then have one of the outsiders stick out for a certificated engineer.

That's what comes of my uncle's notion that a man should 'pick up' his

professional training." There was the core of that old bitterness

rankling in him still; he could not yield himself quite to consolation.

"But you have got on, Helmeth, you got _here_." What "here" meant to me

exactly, was more than my lover, more than the pleasant room behind us,

the obsequious servitors, more even than the sleek, silvered river and

the towered banks that took on shapes of romance under the London gray.

There was something in the word to me of fulfilment, the knowledge of

things done, the certainty of an unassailed capacity for doing. We were

sitting with the broad window flung open, the top of a lime tree tapping

the sill of it with soft shouldering touches, as of some wild creature

against its mate, creaking a little in somnolent content. I put out my

hand to touch his knee--oh, as I might have done it if the "here" had

been the point toward which we had travelled together all these years.

He laughed then as he often did when I touched him, a man's short full

laugh of repletion. He thrust out his knee quite frankly till it

touched mine, and closed his hand over my fingers; he returned to what

had been in the air the previous moment with an effort. The suspicion

that it was an effort, was all I had to prepare me for what was about to

leap upon me.

"Oh, I've pulled through, I've pulled through. But I'm not where I might

have been. And I'm not rich, Olivia. Not what is called rich."

"Is being called rich one of the things that goes with--what was it you

called yourself--a promoting engineer?"

"It goes with it if you are any good at it. Not that I care about money

except for what it stands for ... and then there are the girls."

"You have--girls." It struck me as absurd that I hadn't thought of it

until that moment.

"I thought Mrs. Shane would have told you. I have two. It isn't going to

make any difference with you, Olivia?"

"Ah, what difference should it make!" I was apprised within me by the

haste I made to cover my consternation, that there was more difference

in it than my words allowed. "Children of yours?" I said. "So much more

of you for me to love." The apprehension was whelmed in the possessing

movement with which he drew me to his breast.

CHAPTER III

We Had to go back to the subject of course, it couldn't be left hanging

in the air like that. It was a day or two later at Hampton Court, where

we had gone for no reason really, except that it seemed a more

commensurate background for what was going on in us, the identification

in each by the other, of the springs of immortal passion. We had roved

through all the rooms, recharged for us with the exceptional experience,

and come out at last on the river bank where there was quite a holiday

air among the houseboats.

Behind us we could hear the soft slither of the fountain in the sunk

garden; the warm sun streaming on us through the filmy air, the flutter

of curtains in the houseboats above the little pots of geraniums, the

voices of young people laughing and calling across, began to steal

across my mind with a sense of the extraordinary richness of life. Here

was all the stuff of which I had built up my earliest dreams of the

Shining Destiny ... young people growing up about me ... room to stretch

my capacity to the uttermost ... the orderly social procedure. For the

moment I believed that I might turn back on that path my feet had failed

in, and find in it all that I had missed. I recalled that there were

always children in my dream. For the instant they were back ... little

heads and faces ... all the eyes on me ... soft curls, like wisps of

gossamer. I suppose there must be such little unclaimed souls forever

hovering and flitting, little winged things, to love's mighty candle.

What should there be in the touch of a man's hand on a woman's that they

should come crowding to it like homing doves?

There was a maid going by with her charge, one of those glowing

fair-haired English children who supply us with the images by which we

prefigure the angelic choirs. Helmeth held out his hand to the boy, and

with that swift spark that passes between the young and those by whom

they are beloved, he toddled forward and laid hold of the inviting

finger.

If I had had more experience of the pang that shot through me then, I

should have known it for jealousy. It drove me on toward what, until

now, I had avoided.

"Tell me about your girls, Helmeth." He felt in the pocket of his coat.

"If you would care to see them----" He was so pleased and shy, I suppose

he must have understood better than I how it was with me. "They are with

an aunt in Los Angeles; it was handier for me to see them when I ran up

from Mexico. They are rather decent kiddies. You'll see them when they

come to New York this winter."

"Shall you be in New York?" It struck coldly on me that he should speak

of plans that seemed to be going on regardless of the extraordinary

interruption of our love.

"Until I get this Mexican scheme on its feet I shall be going back and

forth."

"They look like their mother," I suggested. I was looking still at the

small, rather pale photographs he had handed me.

"Because they look so little like me?"

"You forget I saw her once, in Chicago."

"I remember. You know, I think I went there that time because I heard

you were playing there." He was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod

into the river. "There is something that manages these things. If I had

met you then we couldn't have been like this. And we might never have

met again."

When he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that

possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. I had to

go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the

blinding lightning of his eyes.

"_Are_ they like their mother?"

"I suppose so. I hope so--she was a good woman."

"I'm sure of that." He sat up with intention.

"Ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that.

She was thoroughly good. When I met her out in Idaho she was my chief's

daughter and the only nice girl in the place. She wasn't what you

are--no other woman is--but she was one of those plain, quiet women that

have a kind of a grip on rightness. There was nothing could make her let

go."

"My mother was like that. I think I can understand."

"Well, it was mighty good for me. I'm a bad lot, I suppose. I always

want things harder than most, and I think the wanting justifies me in

getting them, but she taught me better. She did things to me that made

me fit for you, and I don't want us to forget that."

"Oh, my dear, it is I who am not fit."

But I could see he did not believe that. He had come upon me that day in

the woods when happily the mood of Perdita had shut round the odd,

blundering Olivia like an enchanter's bubble, through which iridescent

surfaces he was always to see me; and by the mere act of loving he had

fixed me in my happiest moment. He was the only man I ever knew, whom I

could handle like an audience, perhaps he was the only man who never

knew me in any other character than the lady of romance.

We went that evening to see Beerbohm Tree in a Shakespearian piece,

always so much more worth while in London than anything the same people

can do on any other soil, as if the play had mellowed there by all the

rich life it tapped with its four-hundred-year roots. Borne up by my

mood and the beauty of the production, so much greater than anything we

could manage in New York at that time, I was chanting bits of it all the

way home, and when we came to my room again I moved before him in the

part of Egypt's queen.

"Who's born the day

When I forget to send to Antony

Shall die a beggar----"

"Oh, Helmeth, if you could just see me do it!" I was aching to lay up my

gift before him as on an altar.

"You shall do them all for me when we are out in the shack in Mexico."

"Mexico!" I was blank for the moment.

"We'll have to live there for a few years, until I get this scheme on

its legs. Look here, Olivia, you haven't said yet when you are going to

marry me."

"I've only known you four days!" I tried for the note of feminine

evasion.

"Four days and an afternoon, to be exact. What's that got to do with it,

when you are made for me?"

"Don't you like this, Helmeth?"

He caught me to him with that frank delight in the pressure of his arm

about my body, the feel of his cheek against mine that was as fresh to

me as water in a wilderness. "It's not this I'm objecting to, but the

trouble I shall have doing without you." He let me go at that, as

though he would not add the persuasion of his touch to what he had to

say.

"The truth is I've no business to ask a woman to marry me for the next

two years. I'm pledged to this Mexican proposition. I've staked all I

have on it, and I've asked other men to put their money in, and I can't

go back on it. I shall have to be back and forth between London and New

York and the mines, for at least a couple of years. If it wasn't for

wanting you so ... but now that I've found you again, I know there's no

going on without you!"

He turned his face toward me that I might see the lines of anxious

thought there, the buffetings and disappointings, and through it all,

the plain hunger of the man for his natural mate.

I saw that and I didn't flinch from it. I took his face between my hands

and drew it down to my breast.

"I'm under contract for the next year," I told him. "I signed just

before I left ... what does it all matter? Can't we be just ...

engaged."

"We'd be engaged to be married. And I couldn't take you to Mexico on an

engagement."

"I'm under contract," I told him again.

"You mean to say that you'd go on acting after we were married?"

It isn't worth while retailing what we said after that. It has been said

so many times. It was the same thing that Tommy said, better put, more

fully. He was ready, you understand, to make concession to my liking

for the stage, to feel himself sincerely a poor substitute for what I

had got for myself out of living, but there it was at the end, that he

couldn't make for his own work the concessions he demanded of mine.

"We would have to live in Mexico," he said at last. "That's

incontrovertible. And besides there are the kiddies to think of. Their

mother wouldn't want them brought up in the atmosphere of the stage." He

had me there. I thought of Miss Dean and Griffin, of the Cecelia Brunes

I had known, and Polatkin tracing the outline of my figure with his fat

forefinger.

"I wouldn't either," and my frank admission of it brought us out of the

atmosphere of controversy to the community of our love again.

"You understand, don't you, that I feel even more obligation to her

_now_." I nodded. I understood fully that obstinate trace of disloyalty

that came of his having given himself to what she wouldn't approve of,

to what he couldn't for decency's sake admit of giving her daughters.

"I know what people think of the life of the stage," I agreed; "and I

know what's worse, that most of it is true. Not that it need to be; but

it has got in the habit of being so."

"Well, then, if you feel that way----" The inference was plain that he

didn't know in that case why I held on to it.

"It has got into my blood, Helmeth. I can't explain, and I didn't

realize until we got to talking of it, but I don't believe I could live

away from it. It is with me as it is with you about your engineering."

If I had a momentary qualm lest that last should be not quite

disingenuous, it passed in the realization that the comparison hadn't

come home to him. I remembered how Forester would have accepted the

abnegation of my gift to his necessity of being important, and I didn't

hold it out against Helmeth that he failed to realize at all the place

that my work occupied, just as work, in the scheme of my existence.

We came back to it the next day and the next. It would have been

simpler, of course, if it hadn't been for the children, and for my being

at one with him in the opinion that the stage wasn't the proper

atmosphere for the rearing of young ladies. I was still of the opinion

which was exemplified in so far as I knew it, by Pauline and Mrs.

Franklin Shane, that the function of mothering could not go on except by

complete separateness from the business of making a living. All my

training and heredity had fostered an ideal of family life which

rendered obligatory a proper house and servants, in the neighbourhood of

good schools, and the exclusion from it of everybody but those who found

themselves in an identical situation. And if we had been able to imagine

a compromise, Helmeth and I would have been hindered by the defrauded

capacity for loving, from working it out logically. At the mere

suggestion of anything to drive us apart, the mating instinct set us

toward one another irresistibly. We would leave off any argument and

fall to kissing. We were pierced through and through with loving.

"Let us not think of it any more; something will work out for us. Let us

just be happy the way we are," I would protest.

"Oh, child, child, will you never understand that the way we are is what

is so hard to bear!" Then he would snatch me up until the suffusing fire

of his caress would steal through all my body and sing in me like

bacchic sap of vineyards in the spring.

"You oughtn't to marry me unless you can't help yourself," he would

laugh shamelessly. So we fell deeper in love and not out of our

difficulties.

Toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a

storm, brought us to one of those thunderous London days, full of a

stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the

greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river.

Inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every

quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.

Helmeth came over from Mr. Shane's office in London Wall; the need we

had of being together was oppressive like the day which, when we had

sought it in the Park, we could hear like some great monster bellowing

for its mate. We went out and walked about for a time under the trees,

fancying the relief of freshness in the green obscurity that under the

ranked trunks, thickened to blackness. No one was about but a few

belated nursery maids, scurrying in silhouette against the pale glow of

the light pinned down and imprisoned under the thick cloud of foliage.

We were on the Broad Walk, when suddenly a wind tore loose in the

firmament. It made a whirling chaos of the murk, it wrung the treetops,

but the air along the ground was stagnant as a cistern. Now and then a

few great drops spattered on the leaves of the limes. Over a quarter of

a mile from us, near the Alexandria gate, the tension of the day snapped

suddenly in flame, a bolt had shattered one of the great trees. Straight

across the grass toward us the bolt sped like a ball of light. It

skimmed the ground knee high, flame points on its edges, flickered

viciously as it drove at us.

There was no time for anything. Helmeth cried out to me once and I

stepped within the circle of his arms; we could hear the fire ball

sizzling as it cleared the grass; within a yard of us it went out in a

flare of gas and a crack like thunder. Suddenly buckets of rain were

precipitated on us, we could hear the slap of them on the pavement as we

ran.

I was crying hysterically by the time we came to my room in a cab. I

remember Helmeth trying to rid me of my wet things and my clinging to

him crying.

"Oh, my dear, my dear, it was so near, so near, I thought I was to lose

you before I had had you--before I had had you at all!"

"No, no ... not that, Olivia, not that!" His arms were around me and all

my life up to that moment was no more to me than a path which led up to

those arms. I remember that ... and the world dissolving in the wash of

the rain outside ... and the lift of his breast; and deep under all,

old, unimagined instincts reared their heads and bayed at the voice of

their master....

CHAPTER IV

After the evening of the storm we talked no more of marriage for a

while, and about a week later I went over to Paris ostensibly to shop,

and was joined there by Mr. Garrett on the way to Italy. I suppose that

Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of

all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of

it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must

be organized for the need of lovers. Nothing occurred there to break the

film of our enchanted bubble. For a month we kept to the hill towns and

to Venice, where we could go about in the conspicuous privacy of a

gondola, and all that time we met nobody we had ever known.

It was all so easily managed--we had to think of the girls, of

course--no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas

Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would

have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business

correspondence as though he were still in London, and nobody expected to

hear from me in any case.

It is strange how little history there is to happiness. We had come

together past incredible struggles, anxieties, triumphs, defeats; we

had been buffeted and stricken, and now suddenly we were stilled. If at

any time the ghosts of the uneasy past rose upon us, we kissed and they

were laid. So long as we kept in touch, there ran a river of fire

between our blessed isolation and the world. And for the first time we

looked upon the world free of the obligations of our being in it. We

looked, and exchanged our separate knowledges as precious treasure. My

exploration of life had been from within--I knew what Raphael was

thinking about when he painted that fine blue vein on his Madonna's

wrist. But Helmeth had looked on the movement of history; what he saw in

Italy was the path of armies, lines of aqueducts, old Roman roads to and

from mines. Everything began or ended for him in a mine, in Gaul or

Austria or Ophir; dynasties were marked for him by change in the

ownership of mines. So he drew me the white roads out of Italy as one

draws fibre from a palm, and strung on them the world's great

adventures. There were hours also when we let all this great fabric of

art and history float from us, sure that by the vitalizing thread of

understanding which ran between us like a new, live sense, we could pull

it back again ... but we loved ... we loved.

Nothing that happened to us there, came with a more revealing touch than

the attitude in which I caught myself, looking out for and being

surprised at not discovering in myself any qualms of conscience. All

that I had known of such relations in other people, had made itself

known by a subtle, penetrating, fetid savour, against which some

instinct, as sure as a hound, threw up its head and bayed the tainted

air.

But in my own affair, the first compulsion that irked me was the

necessity I was under of not telling anybody. I wasn't conscious at any

time of any feeling that wouldn't have gone suitably with the outward

form of marriage; there were times even when I failed to see why one

should take exception to the neglect of such form. I was remade every

pulse and fibre of me, my beloved's ... and so obviously, that the

necessity of tagging my estate with a ceremony struck me as an

impertinence. Marriage I think must be a fact, capable of going on

independently of the prayer book and the county clerk. Whatever _you_

may think, no god could have escaped the certainty of my being duly

married.

There were days though, just at first, when I suffered the need of

completing my condition by an outward bond. I knew very well where the

custom of wedding rings came from; I should have worn anklets and

armlets as well, if only they could have been taken as the advertisement

of my belonging wholly to my man. Depend upon it, the subjugation of

woman will be found finally to rest in the attempt visibly to

establish, what the woman herself concurs in, the inward conviction of

possession.

How much of what was in my own mind, was also in Helmeth's, I do not

know, but because I had brought upon myself the condition of not being

married, I failed to speak of what I found regrettable in it. What did

come out for me satisfyingly, was the man's sheer content in his mate,

the response, and our pride in it, of his blood and body to my presence,

and the new relish it created in him for the processes of living, for

his pipe and his meals, and his work. He had brought some estimates to

figure out; evenings at work on these, he would call me to him and sit

with his left arm thrown lightly about my chair, the pencil going as

though my presence were an added fillip to activity. He took on weight

in that holiday, and his mouth relaxed to a more youthful curve.

We spent the last three weeks of it at a quiet hotel on the point of

land that divides Lake Como from Lecco, opposite Cadenabbia. Times yet I

will wake out of dreaming, to find the pulse of the city transmuted into

the steady lisping of that silver fretted lake. We had come to a phase

like that in our relation, deep and full and shining. We spent hours

sitting on the parapet in the sun, looking at it. I would sit on the

stone ledge and Helmeth would stretch himself, with his pipe, along the

ground.

"Helmeth," I said on such a morning, "do you know this is the first time

I ever rested?" He gave a little gurgle of content; the sun turned on

the sails of the fishing-boats and flashed us sympathy. "I'm afraid," I

admitted, "I'm never going to want to do anything else."

"Oh, I'm going to want to. This is good enough, but it wouldn't be half

so good if I couldn't take it along with me and do things with it--great

things." He threw his arm across my knees with one of those quick,

intimate caresses, flooding me full of the delighted sense of how

completely I belonged to him. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been going

about with one arm or one hand, and now I've got a full set of them.

Wait until I show you!"

"When you talk of doing, Helmeth--that means leaving me."

"That's for you to say, Olive." That was as near as he had come yet to

reminding me that it was I who had chosen this instead of a relation

which would have implied my going with him wherever his work led him,

and that the choice was still open to me. The night after the storm he

had written me:

"There is nothing that troubles me about to-night except the fear

that you may regret it, that you might ever come to have a doubt of

how I feel about it. I want you to feel that whatever you choose is

right to me, and though I hope for nothing so much as to make you

my wife, I shall not urge you beyond what you feel that you can do

without urging."

It was a generous letter, and no doubt it had its weight in persuading

me to trust the situation, in the face of that instinct which saves

women, even from passions that seem their own justification. If he had

counted on the naturalness of love to set up its own public obligation,

he had not been far wrong with me. If it had been practicable, I should

have walked out with him any day those first weeks to be married. But

marriage is a very complicated business in Italy. In a measure I had

satisfied my fret for the visible tie, with a ring which he had bought

me in Florence, which, as the stones flashed in the sun, turned me back

on the thought I had when first he set it on my hand.

"Helmeth, do you suppose that we are pushed on to make laws and

observances about marriage because the bond that comes into being then

has a consistency and validity beyond what we feel about it?"

"Oh, beyond what we feel about it, yes." He sat up then a little away

from me, as he often did when he drew upon experiences lying beyond the

points at which his life had been touched by mine, and began skipping

little stones into the water. "Yes, I'm sure that what you feel about a

thing that happens to you is not always the test of what it does to you.

Sometimes I think feelings haven't much to do with our experiences

except to get us into them." He left off skipping stones and began to

pile them into a little heap. "I was thinking of Laura," he concluded.

It was not often that he spoke to me of his wife.

"I can't remember that I had a great deal of feeling about her; I was

too busy, I suppose, getting on with my engineering; but she had a grip

on me. She had a grip. Look here, my dear, I ought to tell you this,

you're the wonder of the earth for me, and I know very well that my

wife's world was a very little one; it was bounded by the church on one

side and by conventions on all the others. But somehow I don't want to

get too far away from it, and I don't want the girls to get too far." He

swung about to look squarely up at me. "This that you've given me, it's

heaven; it's a thing for a man to die for and die happy; but there's the

other too." He laughed a little awkwardly; he caught my feet in one of

his strong hands. "Have I made you understand?"

"I understand that kind of life. It's like a clean, scrubbed room. I

_know_. I was brought up in it. There have been times when I have been

desperate because I couldn't go back and live there. But I ought to tell

you, Helmeth, I can't find my way back."

"You! Why should you? You were made to live in Kings' houses. But I

wanted to be sure you weren't going to be disappointed if I haven't the

manners that always belong to palaces. I've been in camps where a

scrubbed room looked mighty good to me." He stretched himself and rolled

over on the ground, lying with his back to the sun, soaking in it in

simple, animal content. Little white flecks showed on the lake, the

sails of the fisher-boats tilted slowly and composed themselves anew

with the line of the shore and the flowing hills. Directly opposite, the

walls of Cadenabbia showed white amid the green, like a little streak of

Arcady.

"We've never been," I reminded him.

"I thought you wanted to leave it so you could always think of its being

as romantic as it looks, without making sure that it isn't." That was

the reason I had given him, but the truth was that Cadenabbia was on one

of those tourist routes where, supposing anybody we knew to be wandering

about Europe, we would be sure to run into them. This morning, however,

I was seized with an irresistible desire to visit it.

"But supposing it isn't as interesting as it looks," I submitted, "if I

go there with you I shall never know it. And think how disappointed I

should be if I should ever come there without you and find that it is

the one place we ought to have seen."

There was a little motor launch plying between the shores of the lake,

and an hour before tea time we crossed in it. We spent the hour in the

garden of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and then along the parapet we

strolled in search of tea. It was the height of the tourist season and

the gay groups moving in the streets between the quaint low houses, gave

it a holiday air. We heard them calling one to the other, exchanging

appreciations and information. All at once we heard them calling us.