garden of one of the hotels, dissolved and reorganized about us as the
centre. There was laughter and garbled greetings and handshaking.
Presently Helmeth began to introduce me. They were a party of
Californians, all more or less acquainted and importunate; we were swept
back by them to the table and tea. There were two married couples and
one unmarried woman of about my age, and a boy of sixteen. I could see
by the way she appropriated him, that his acquaintance with Miss Stanley
had been of the degree that might have ripened into marriage, and that
Miss Stanley had not wholly made up her mind that it wouldn't. She was
one of those unmarried women who contrive by a multiplicity and vivacity
of interests to deny what is explicitly advertised by their anxiety to
have you understand that they consider themselves much better off just
as they are. I could see her taking in all the details of my appearance,
to find the key to what Mr. Garrett might presumably like in me, and
striking out in her manner to him a quick sketch of me, bettered in the
direction of what she believed it most to be. The other women, if they
had been brought up in Taylorville, would have resembled Pauline Mills;
that they didn't I could see was difference of geography. They were all
full of gay talk and reminiscence of a mutual life in the West, on a
footing that left me rather more than room to play the part, which I had
cast for myself with celerity, of being a casual acquaintance of his,
picked up at a hotel. He had introduced me to them as Mrs. Bettersworth,
and whether they would have known me or not by my stage name, I took
care they shouldn't have the opportunity.
Nothing would do but he must stay to dinner; I guessed that there was
that degree of acquaintance between them which would have made it
unfriendly of him to refuse. I could see Miss Stanley prick up at his
manner of leaving the decision to me, and realized that whatever we
might have agreed upon, there would be no keeping our relation from
being at least a matter of curiosity to the women, the elder of whom had
promptly included me in the invitation.
I invented a mythical travelling companion across the lake whom I must
join, and managed to make my being in Mr. Garrett's company appear so
casual that I came near to overdoing it by exciting his concern.
"What's the matter; don't you like them?" He wished to know as he saw me
to the landing.
"Ever so," I insisted promptly, "but they wouldn't like me after a
while. You behave as if we had been married five years."
"Oh, well, haven't we?" He looked back and his brow gathered a little.
"For two cents I'd tell them." But after all there was nothing he could
do but see me comfortably off and go back to them. He told me afterward
that Mr. Harwood, the elder of the two gentlemen, had been useful to him
in business.
It must have been close on to midnight when he waked me, sitting on the
edge of my bed. He must have gone to his own room very softly, meaning
not to disturb me; now I heard him calling my name in a whisper and his
hand seeking for my face.
I reached up and drew his down to me.
"Oh, my dear----" I was startled at what I found there. "Beloved, why
are you crying?" I could feel him shake with sudden uncontrollable
emotion. I kept his head on my breast and comforted him.
"When did you come in?"
"An hour ago--you were asleep." The commonplace question seemed to quiet
him.
"Was it something went wrong at the dinner?"
"Wrong, yes ... but not there, not there. It's all wrong, it has been
wrong from the beginning."
"Dear heart, tell me."
"Olive, marry me; say you'll marry me!" There was urgency in his
whisper, there was pain in it. "Say it; say it!"
"I'll marry you. I've been waiting for you to ask."
"Oh, my dear, when I have begged you so...."
"Tell me," I urged....
"There isn't anything to tell, only ... we walked along the parapet and
were very happy together. They're a good sort. I've known them for
years. And we found a peasant woman selling lace, good lace, the women
said, and cheap ... Harwood bought some for his wife ... and Stanley
bought his sister some. Harwood went back, pretending he'd forgotten
something, and bought a piece his wife wanted and thought she couldn't
afford. And I couldn't buy you any ... not openly. I wanted Miss Stanley
to select some handkerchiefs that I said were for the girls and she said
girls shouldn't wear that kind. Oh, Olive, don't you understand?"
"I understand; you shall go back to-morrow and buy me some."
"But it won't be the same ... and afterward ... after dinner we sat in
the garden and Harwood sat with his arm round his wife's chair. And you
were over here ... _hiding_! Oh, Olive, I want my wife, I want her ...
in the light, before everybody. I want her." I was crying now.
"It's all wrong," he insisted, "it's been wrong from the beginning. We
belong together, before everybody." He kept repeating that phrase over
and over. "All the years that we've been apart ... and now just to have
it in a hole in a corner!"
"No, no, my dear!" I protested. "Before God ... it's been before God!"
We sobbed together. By and by Love came and comforted us.
* * * * *
I suppose if it had been possible to go out and be married immediately
we should have married the next morning; but in Italy there are
observances--it would have taken three weeks at least and hardly less in
Switzerland. In two weeks our vacation came to an end. Helmeth set out
by the shortest route for Mexico and I interposed a week's shopping
between me and Mrs. Franklin Shane to whom I had pledged myself for a
week at her country house. In November I was to meet Helmeth Garrett in
New York, "and settle things" he had stipulated. Somehow I could not
bring myself to think of my relation to him as involving cataclysmal
changes. I wouldn't say to myself that I intended to marry him, and I
couldn't say that I wouldn't.
CHAPTER V
Within a week after my return, Polatkin came to see me about a project
of a theatre of my own, which had been on the horizon since the year
before. Polatkin himself was to furnish the money, which, considering
what he had made out of me under our earlier contract, he was not in the
least loath to do. He couldn't understand why I hesitated.
"Is it that you think you are getting along without Polatkin? Well, you
can try." I hastened to reassure him. "Well then--are you getting cold
feet about that Ravenscroft woman? Understand me, she can't act at all.
It's something scandalous the way she tries to act like you do, and she
can't. If I was her manager I would introduce a tight rope into the
third act and have her walk it, but what I would have something that
wasn't copied from somebody else."
"I wasn't thinking of Miss Ravenscroft," I confessed. "I'm thinking of
getting married."
"Married! Married! And leave the stage? My God--it is a sin----!" He
clutched the air and shook handfuls of it in my face. "What do you want
to get married for?" he demanded. "Ain't you getting on like anything?
Ain't you popular? Ain't you making money?"
"All of those," I admitted.
"Well, then?" His wrath which had frothed white for a moment, cooled
down into a fluid sort of bewilderment which seemed about to set and
harden in a smile of disbelief.
"The man I am going to marry lives in Mexico."
"Mexico! Mexico!" he bubbled again. "I ask you is that any sort of a
place for a man to live what marries the greatest tragic actress ever
was going to be?
"Ach, my Gott," in moments of great excitement he reverted to the trick
of the tongue to which he was born. "All these years I have waited for
this, I have said Miss Lattimore is a great actress, she has talent, she
has brains, and when she will have passion--Pouff!" He blew out his
loose lips and made a balloon with his hands to express the rate at
which I would rise in the scale of tragic actresses. "And now that it
has happened, she wants to live in Mexico." He deflated himself
suddenly, folded his hands over what he believed to be his bosom, and
looked at me reproachfully. This being the first time he had studied my
face directly since I came home, I suppose he must have seen there my
doubt and indecision.
"Understand me," he said soberly, "I have known a lot of actresses, and
I want to tell you that this marrying business don't pay. They got to
come back to the stage; they got to. You ain't going to be any
different down there in Mexico to what you are in New York, understand
me. _Yah!_ Mexico!" The word seemed to inflame him. But he had the sense
to let me alone for a while.
A few days later I saw in the paper that he had taken the lease of the
theatre he had mentioned to me, and I knew that he wasn't counting on my
going to Mexico.
I suppose if I had had the courage to look into my own mind to find out
what I wished to do, I might have surmised what was going on there from
the fact that I didn't mention the idea of marriage to Sarah. I have
tried--all this book has had no other purpose in fact, than to try to
tell how I came to be in the relation I was to Helmeth Garrett, came
into it as to a room long prepared for me, without any struggles or
tormenting, and without thinking much about the effect that his presence
in my life would have upon my work. I suppose that in as much as I had a
man's attitude toward work, I had come unconsciously to the man's habit
of keeping love and my career, in two watertight compartments. I found I
was not able to think of them as having much to do with one another.
Still less had I the traditional shames of my situation.
I remember the first time I went to rehearsal, groping about in my
consciousness for the source of what I felt suddenly divide me from the
rest of my company, and finding it in the knowledge of myself as a
woman acquainted with passion, with a secret, delicious life. And far
from identifying me with the cheapness and betrayal which until now I
had supposed inseparable from the uncertified union, it set me apart in
the aloofness of the exclusive, the distinguishing experience. It
remained for Sarah to pierce me, in spite of all I intrinsically felt my
relation to Helmeth Garrett to be, with the knowledge of where I stood
in the world which I still believed had the last word about human
conduct.
It was not altogether the intent to deceive, that kept me from opening
the matter to her in the beginning, but a feeling that the less advice I
had about it the better. And if I did tell her, I wished first to
arrange that I need not feel any constraint upon me of our habit of
living together. I was anxious to have Helmeth find me when he came,
free to be all to him that our love demanded, and in view of all the
years in which Sarah and I had lived together, I did not know how to go
about it. I began to think that I should have to tell her after all,
when the Powers, who must have known very well what was going on, took
that into account also.
Sarah's season began a week before mine, and I remember her saying that
she would be glad when we could come home together, as she had had an
uneasy sensation for the last night or two, of some one following her.
Sarah had any number of admirers, but the sort of men who were attracted
to her still splendour, were not the kind to follow her home at night.
"Turn them over to the police," I suggested. I had had to try that once
or twice.
"Oh, I couldn't!" She turned scarlet. Even after all those years I had
not realized how all her life was timed to catch the slightest
approaching footfall of what, to her simple faith, must inevitably come.
I found her waiting for me at the stage door on my first night--no
matter how many of them you have, first nights are always in the
balance--and we were so taken up with discussing how I had got on with
it, that it wasn't until I was fitting the key in the lock that I was
recalled to the occasion of her annoyance. Just below us there seemed to
be a man dodging in and out of the blocks of shadow made by the
high-railed stairways that led up to the first floor of the row of flats
in which our rooms were located. Something in the figure, or in our
standing there before the shadowed door with the dull light of the
transom over us, brushed me with a light wing of memory; I seemed to
recall some such conjunction before, but it was gone before I could
connote the suggestion with time or place. All I said to Sarah was that
if we saw anything more of that we would certainly speak to the police.
The next night we went to supper with friends, and it was after midnight
when my cab--Sarah didn't afford cabs for herself--drew up at the door.
The approach to it was by way of a handsome pair of stairs with an
ornamental iron railing of so close a pattern that any one sitting on
the steps in the dark, would be pretty well concealed by it. That there
was some one so sitting, dropped there in a stupour of fatigue or
drunkenness, we did not discover until we stumbled fairly on to him.
The exclamation we raised, awoke him; it arrested the attention of the
cab driver just turning from the curb, he raised his lamp and sent the
rays of it streaming over us. The man I could see, was shabby, ill and
embarrassed, he ducked his head from the light, but his hat had fallen
off on the step and as he threw up his arm to protect himself from
recognition I knew him by the gesture.
"Griff," I cried. "Griffin! You!" I caught him by the arm. He let it
fall at his side and stood looking at us pitifully, like a trapped
animal.
"I wasn't doing any harm," he mumbled. The cab driver seeing that we
knew him, let down his lights and clattered away. I thought quickly; he
must have been in want, he had looked for me and at the last was ashamed
to claim me.
"But, Griffin," I insisted, "you don't know how glad I am to see
you--you must come in." He wasn't looking at me; he hadn't heard me.
"Look out," he said, "she's going to faint!" He brushed past me to
Sarah. She leaned limp against the railing; he steadied her as a man
might a sacred vessel in jeopardy. But Sarah didn't faint so easily as
that, she gathered herself away from his hand.
"Come upstairs," she commanded. It was only one flight up. I don't know
how we managed to get a light and to find ourselves in its pale flare,
confronting one another. I could see then that my first surmise had been
correct about Griffin, to the extent that he looked ill and in want. He
was holding his hat, which he had picked up from the stairs, and fumbled
it steadily in his hands. His hair, which wanted trimming more even than
when I had last seen him, had still its romantic curl; he looked
steadily out from under it at Sarah. I had an idea, though I think it
must have been derived from my own dizziness at what rushed in upon me,
that Sarah was floating in air, that she hung there swaying with the
breeze from the open window, as a spirit. She was spirit white and her
voice seemed to come from far.
"Leon! Leon!" How he knew what she demanded of him only the God who
makes men and women to love one another, knows.
"She died," he said to the unspoken question. "She died two years ago.
I've been all this time finding you." Suddenly a quick flame burst over
Sarah.
"You came--you came to me!" I could see that she moved toward him, all
her magnificent body alight, her arms, her bosom. I turned quickly
through the door into the room beyond. I couldn't stay to see that. I
went on into my bedroom and knelt down, hiding my face in the
bedclothes. I think I meant to pray, but no words came. I rose presently
and went into the kitchen. The maid did not sleep in the flat but came
every morning at nine; on the table there was a tray as she left it
always, with everything laid out in case we should be hungry coming late
from the theatre. I moved about softly and made chocolate and sandwiches
and arranged them on the tray; I knew Sarah would understand. About half
an hour after I had gone to my room again, I heard her go out to find
it.
From time to time I could catch a faint murmur from the front room. I
put the pillow over my head and cried softly. I remembered how Griffin
had looked at her that time in Chicago when I had taken him to "The
Futurist," and how I had been ashamed ever to introduce him. I wondered
whether his real name were Lawrence or Griffin. I had fallen asleep at
last, and I was awakened by Sarah standing beside me in her white gown.
"May I sleep with you, Olivia? I've put ... Mr. Lawrence ... in my
room." I drew her under the cover with me; she was cold and now and then
a shudder passed through her from head to foot.
"You guessed, didn't you?" she whispered. "He said you knew him in
Chicago. His ... Mrs. Lawrence is dead ... you heard him say that?" I
understood she meant by that to extenuate his coming back to her. It was
right for him to come if no other woman stood in the way; what there was
in himself that stood in the way didn't seem to matter.
"He's been ill," she said. "I hope you didn't mind my keeping him in the
house, Olive.... We can be married to-morrow."
I sat straight up in bed in my amazement.
"Sarah! You don't mean that you are going to marry him!"
"Why, what else is there to do?"
"But, Sarah ..." I lay down again. After all what else was there to do?
"You know, Olivia, you have never really loved anybody." I had no answer
to that; suddenly she broke out shaking the bed with her sobs. "Oh, my
dear, my dear, it is true that he loved me. It is true. He came back to
me as soon as he was free. Oh, Olive, if you had known what it is all
these years not to know if it was _true_! If he hadn't only taken me
just as a stop-gap ... a fancy ... how was I to know?"
I didn't think very much of the proof that he loved her now. Sarah,
beautiful, prosperous, was a goal for any man to strive toward, even
without the necessity which was written in every line of Leon Griffin
Lawrence.
"Sarah," I questioned gently, "do you mean to say you've loved him all
this time, that you love him now?" She left off sobbing to answer me
with that steady, patient truth with which she met any issue of life.
"I loved him ... all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now,
of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you
can't take it back again."
"But he--he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?"
"I am married to him."
"But, Sarah ... look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved.
I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something
about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no
self-respecting woman should go into."
"Love," said Sarah, "is a thing that once you've gone into, binds you by
something that grows out of it that is stronger than love itself.
Olivia, I am bound ... if you want to know, I'd rather be bound to--to
Leon Lawrence by that tie than to the dearest love without it. Oh,
Olivia, can't you see, can't you understand that I have to do
_right_ ... that the way I see things there's a law ... not a civil law
but a law of loving that goes on by itself; and being faithful to it is
better to me than loving. You must see that, Olivia."
"I see that this is the happiest thing for you and I'll not put anything
in your way, Sarah." I kissed her. What, after all, does one soul know
of another.
It came to me as an extenuating circumstance when I looked him over the
next morning, that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't live long enough to do her any
particular harm. He had been so little of a man always to me, so much
less so now, eaten through as he was by poverty and sickness, that I
could never understand how he happened to be the vehicle of that
appealing charm which even as I looked, drew me over to his side in
something like a sympathetic frame.
I could see that he regarded me anxiously, and I thought it to his
credit to be able to realize that there might be somebody not absolutely
delighted at his marrying Sarah. But it wasn't, as I learned later, any
sense of his shortcomings that waked in his eye toward me.
He was lying on the sofa in our little parlour, for the shock of the
encounter had been too much for the abused and broken thing he was.
Sarah had gone out, to consult Jerry, I believed about their
marriage;--she wouldn't have asked me knowing how I felt about it.
Griffin looked up at me with the old formless demand on my
consideration.
"You've never told her, have you?"
"Told what?" On my part it was genuine amazement.
"About us, you know ... there in Chicago." He dropped his eyes;
something almost like a blush of shame overcame him. I stared.
"Good heavens, Griff, I'd forgotten it."
"Oh, well, I didn't know--some women----" He stopped, embarrassed by my
sheer credulity of its having anything to do with his relation to Sarah.
"I told you I was a bad lot," he protested, "but I swear that since my
wife died and I could come back to her, I've been straight. You believe
that, don't you?"
"Oh, I'll believe it if it's any comfort to you." When I talked it over
with Jerry afterward I could see the queer, twisted kind of moral
standard by which he made it appear that any irregularity of his during
his wife's life, was unfaithfulness to her, and not Sarah.
She had come back with Jerry and I was walking with him to the City Hall
for the license; he had begun by protesting just as I had, and had
surrendered to his conviction that nothing less would satisfy Sarah.
"After all," I said, "it shows that there is some sort of harmony
between them, that he should realize that the only reparation he could
make would be to come back to her."
"Cur!" Jerry kicked at the pavement, "to pollute the life of a woman
like Sarah with his wretched existence."
"That's how you feel," I reminded him, "but remember how all these
years Sarah has felt polluted by the thought that she wasn't married to
him."
"Oh, _damn_!"
"Sarah thinks, and I'm beginning to think so too, that there is
something to marriage that binds besides the ceremony."
"I know." Jerry's wife had left him that summer and though he knew it
was the best thing for both of them, he was trying to get her back
again: "It binds of itself. If only they would tell us that in the
beginning instead of putting up all this stuff about its being the law
and religion. We think we can get out of it just by getting out of the
law, and none of us know better until it is too late."
"People like Sarah know. They know just the way swallows know to go
south in winter. You'll see; she will be happier married, not because it
is pleasant but because it is right."
They were married that afternoon in our apartment, and it was not until
I was settled in the hotel where I had elected to stay until I could
find suitable quarters, that I realized that the chance of this marriage
had accomplished for me the freedom that I had not known how to obtain
for myself.
I lay awake a long time after I came from the theatre, and the mere
circumstance of my being alone and in a hotel, as well as the events
that led up to it, brought back to me the sense of my lover, of his
being just in the next room and presently to come in to me. I felt near
and warm toward him. And then I thought of Sarah and Griffin and how
almost I had become the stop-gap to his affections that she dreaded most
to find herself to have been. It didn't seem very real in retrospect. I
shuddered away from it. Then I began to think how I had first been
kindly disposed toward him, and that brought up an image of the dim
corridor of the hotel where I had come to my first knowledge of such
relations, and my abhorrence and terror of it. I thought of O'Farrell
and of Miss Dean, and that suspicion of sickliness which her personality
had for me, and saw how it must have arisen from her consciousness of
what she had done to Griffin rather than her relation to Manager
O'Farrell. Then I thought of Helmeth Garrett and one night in Sienna
when the moonlight poured white over the cathedral ... and a linden tree
in bloom outside the window ... and a nightingale singing in it ...
Suddenly it was mixed up in my mind with the slanting chandelier and the
tin-faced clock, and slowly a sense of unutterable stain and shame began
to percolate through and through me.
CHAPTER VI
It is a great mistake to suppose that assertiveness is the only mannish
trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine
mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know,
but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male
propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it
was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right
to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by
the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I
was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my
luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in
particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods,
my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.
How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I
never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my
resistences serve to push me on to the assured position of a theatre and
a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so
much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and
completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, space and
opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth
Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except
surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the
extraordinary florescence of my art.
Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware
of all forms and passions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one
another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him
with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.
"You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine." That
was his opinion of my support. "And to think you could have a theatre of
your own, and what you like----"
"A theatre like me--_Me_ spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried
out to the least detail?"
"You shall have it even in the box office!" he responded magnificently.
"How soon?"
"I will bring the plans this afternoon; I got 'em ready in case you came
around." But he was much too intelligent to undertake to bind me to them
at that juncture.
Things went on like this until the last week in November, then I had a
telegram from Helmeth saying that he would be detained still longer.
Every pulse of me had so been set to his coming on the twenty-seventh
that I thought I should not be able to go on after that, I should go out
like a light when the current is stopped. I had so little of him, not
even a photograph, nothing but my ring and a few trinkets he had bought
me in Italy. If I could have had a garment he had worn, a chair in which
he had sat ... I went round and looked at the Astor House, because he
told me that he had stopped there once, years ago.
I stood that for three days and then I went down to New Rochelle where
he had written me earlier, his girls were at school; not on my own
account, you understand, but as a possible patron of the school on
behalf of my niece, who was, if the truth must be told, less than two
years old. While I was being shown about, I had Helmeth's children
pointed out to me. They looked, as I had surmised, like their mother. If
they had in the least resembled their father I should have snatched them
to me. Everything might have turned out quite differently. They were,
the principal said, nice girls and studious, but they did not look in
the least like their father.
It was one of those dark, gusty days that come at the end of November,
damp without rain, and of a penetrating cold. There had been a great
storm at sea lately and you could hear the wash of its disturbances all
along the Sound. There was no steady wind, but now and then the damp air
gave a flap like an idle wing. It was like the stir in me of a
formless, cold desire, not equal to the demand Life was about to make on
it. As I turned into the station road after a formal inspection of the
premises, I met the girls coming back from their afternoon walk with the
teachers, two and two. The Garrett girls were next to the last, they
were very near of an age; I waited half hidden by a tree to watch them
as they passed.
They were well covered up from the weather in large blue coats with
capes, and blue felt hats with butterfly bows to match at the ends of
their flaxen braids. They looked like their mother ... I couldn't see
them growing up to anything that would fit with Sarah and Jerry and
Polatkin. The wing of the wind shook out some gathered drops of moisture
as they passed, the branches of the trees clashed softly together, and
as they turned into the grounds I noticed that the older one had
something in her walk that reminded me of her father.
I was pierced through with a formless jealousy of the woman who had
borne them in her body. I was moved, but not with the impulse to draw
them to my bosom. I felt back in the place where my boy had been, for
the connecting link of motherliness and failed to find it. I had had it
once, that knowledge of what is good to be done for small children and
the wish to do it, but it was gone from me. It was as though I might
have had a hand or a claw, any prehensile organ by which such things are
apprehended, and when I reached it out after Helmeth's children it was
withered.
What I found in myself was the familiar attitude of the stage. I could
have acted what swept through me then, I could have brought you to tears
by it, but there was nothing I could do about it _but_ act. I wrote
Helmeth that night that I had seen the children and then I burned the
letter.
He came at last. He was greatly concerned about his enterprise which was
not yet established on that footing which he would like to have for it,
and I think it was a relief to him to have me without the conventions
and readjustments of marriage. It was tacitly understood between us that
things were better as they were until that business was settled. I think
he could not have had a great deal of money at the time; all that racing
to and fro between London and Mexico must have cost something. His
anxiety about the girls, which occasioned his sending them to the most
expensive schools, and his affection for them, which led to their being
carted about by their aunt to meet him occasionally at far-called
places, was an additional drain.
We were very happy; there is nothing whatever to tell about it. We met
in brief intervals snatched from our work and did as other lovers do.
Sometimes he would come for me at the theatre--the freshness of my
acting never palled on him. Other times I would find him waiting for me
in the little flat I had expressly chosen and furnished to be loved in.
The pricking warmth of his presence would meet me as I came up the
stair. Not long ago I found myself unexpectedly in a part of the city
where we used to walk because we were certain not to meet any of our
friends there. There was a tiny café where we used often to dine, and
the memory of it swept over me terrifyingly fresh and strong.
With all this, it was plain that we got on best when we were most alone.
It was not that I did not every way like and was interested in the
friends he introduced to me, outdoor men most of them, and their
large-minded, capable wives. I got on with them tremendously, and found
them as good for me as green food in the spring, sated as I was on the
combined product of professionalism and temperament. It was chiefly that
the simplicity and openness of their lives brought out for him the
duplicity that lay at the bottom of ours. For it was plain that they
wouldn't have understood, wouldn't have thought it necessary. They could
have faced, those women, strange lands and untoward happenings, had many
of them faced sterner things for the sake of their husbands, with the
same courage and selflessness with which they would in my circumstances,
have faced renunciation.
It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and
known, that checked and harassed Helmeth; he wished to be at one with
them, to be felicitated on my success and my charm, to include me if
only by implication, in that community of adventure with which these
mining and engineering folk had ringed the earth. And the necessity of
holding our relation down to the outward forms of friendship established
on the supposition of our having grown up together, fretted him.
"It isn't honest," he broke out once after he had tried to persuade me
to let him tell his friends that we were engaged. "It's all right
between us; you are my wife in the sight of whatever gods there are, but
that isn't what other people would call you."
"Somehow, Helmeth, so long as it is with you, I don't care much what
they call me."
"Well, I care; I care a lot. You don't seem to remember you are going to
be my girls' mother--sons' too, I hope. We ought to have some more
children; Sanderson's got four." Sanderson had been our host at luncheon
that day.
Helmeth was knocking out the ashes of his pipe on my hearthstone; he
paused in the occupation of refilling it to look down at me in a moody
kind of impatience that was the worst I knew of him. There was the
suggestion of a cleft in his strong, square chin which came out whenever
he bit hard on a difficult proposition. The play of it now was like the
tiny shadow of disaster.
"I was down in old Brownlow's office the other day," he went on,
"talking this Mexican scheme to him, and he had to break off in the
middle of it to telephone to some chorus girl he had a date with. God!
it made me hot to think of it!"
"Because I'm in the same----" He cut me off with a sound of vexation.
"Don't say it; don't even think of it! How long does this contract of
yours last?"
"To the end of the season," I told him.
"Well, you chuck it just as soon as you can. I'll put this thing through
somehow. We'll clear out of here." He had his pipe alight by now and
began puffing more contentedly. "I don't think much of this burg
anyway," he laughed as he settled himself in one of my chairs. "A man
doesn't have a chance to get his feet on the ground."
There were times when he almost made me share in his distaste for it.
That was when I had drawn him into the circle of my professional
acquaintances which somehow shrivelled at his touch like spiders in the
heat. Understand that I hold by my art, that I have poured myself a
libation on that altar, that I value it above all other means of
expressing the drama of man's relation to the Invisible, and that I do
not think you do enough for it, prize it enough, or use it rightly. But
I suppose there is a yellow streak in me, or I wouldn't sicken so as I
do at what it brings to pass in the personalities by which it is most
forwarded. For since it must be that art cannot be served to the world,
except by a cup emptied of much that is most desirable in the
recipients, it ill becomes them as long as they fatten their souls at
it, to take exception to the vessel from which it is drunk. Nevertheless
I used to find myself, when Helmeth was with me, sniffing at the
spiritual garments of my friends for the smell of burning. I resented
Mr. Lawrence the most; it was not altogether for the incongruity of his
possessing Sarah, her fine smudgeless personality and her lovely body,
delicate and shapely as a pearl, but for the incontestable evidence he
offered me of how low I had stooped. From the peak of my present
prosperity, my troubles in Chicago, showed the merest accident, and the
distance I had sprung away from them seemed somehow expressive of the
strength with which I had sprung from all that Lawrence represented. Not
all the care Sarah bestowed on him--and I think the best he could do for
her was to provide her in his impaired health with an occasion for
mothering--could quite distract the attention from the ineradicable mark
of his cheapness.
He was as much out of key with the society in which Sarah's success and
mine had placed him, as he was flattered to find himself there. It had
brought out in him in the way privation had not, that touch of
theatricality which intrigued Sarah's unsophisticated fancy in the first
place. He let his hair grow into curls and made a mysterious and
incurable pain of his broken health. And though he offered it as the
best he had to offer, with humility, he suffered an accession of that
devoted manner which had won his way among women of his own class, but
which among the sort he met at my rooms was ridiculous. Jerry too, with
his married life in dissolution, for what looked to Helmeth, and in the
light of his strong sense, was beginning to look to me like an aimless
folly; out of all these blew a wind witheringly on the fine bloom of my
happiness. We did best when we shut it out in a profound, exalted
intimacy of passion.
What leads me to think that Polatkin must have watched me rather closely
all this time, is the fact that he waited until Mr. Garrett was gone to
London again in the latter part of February, to put it to me that if I
really meant to leave the stage permanently, and it was a contingency
which, in speaking to me of it, he had the wit to speak seriously, I
could do no better for myself than to take flight from it from the roof
of my own theatre. He put it to me in his own dialect, mixed of the
green room and Jewry, that I had torn a large hole in the surrounding
professional atmosphere by the vitality of my acting that winter, and
that it would be a great shame to go out into the obscurity of marriage
without this final pyrotechnic burst.
I could have, by his calculation, a short season to open with, and a
whole year of brilliant success before--well before anything happened. I
think by this time I must have known subconsciously that nothing would
happen. It must be because no man naturally can imagine any more
compelling business for a woman than being interested in him, that
Helmeth failed to understand that he could as well have torn himself
from the enterprise for which he had starved and sweated, as separate me
from the final banquet of success. I had paid for it and I must eat.
We opened in May, not the best time of year for such an adventure; but I
suppose Polatkin was afraid to trust me to the distractions of another
vacation. It occurs to me now, though at the time I didn't suspect him,
that we couldn't have opened even then if he had not been much more
forward with the plan than at any time he had permitted me to guess. At
the last I came near, in his estimation, to jeopardizing the whole
business by opening with "The Winter's Tale" with Sarah in the part of
_Hermione_ and myself as _Perdita_. Jerry was writing me a new play, but
in the process of breaking off a marriage that ought never to have been
begun, he had found no time to complete it; but why, urged Polatkin, if
we must fall back on Shakespeare, choose a part that did not introduce
me to the audience until the play was half done? He stood out at least
for _Juliet_ or _Cleopatra_. "Why, indeed," I retorted, "have a theatre
of my own if it is not to do as I please in it?" I knew however that
what I could put into _Perdita_ of Willesden Lake and the woods aflame,
would have sustained even a more inconsiderable part.
Effie and her husband came on to my opening night. I want to say here,
if I have not explicitly said it, that my sister is a wonderful, an
indispensable woman. When I think of her, the mystery of how she came
out of Taylorville, full-fledged to her time, is greater than the
mystery of how I came to be at all. For Effie is absolutely
contemporaneous. She lives squarely not only in her century, but in the
particular quarter of it now going. No clutch of tradition topples her
toward the generation of women past. Most women of my acquaintance are
either sodden with left-over conventions, or blowsy with racing after
the to-be, but Effie is compacted, tucked in, detached from but
distinctly related to her background of Montecito. She was president of
the Woman's Club, chairman of the book committee of the circulating
library, and though she had a letter every morning and a telegram every
night from the woman with whom she had left her two babies, it didn't
prevent her in the week she spent with me, from getting into touch with
more Forward Movements than I was aware were in operation in New York.
"But, good heavens, Effie, how can you find time for them? It's as much
as I can do to attend to my own job."
"Oh, you! You're a forward movement yourself. All I am doing is herding
the others up to keep step with you. You know, Olivia, I've wondered if
you didn't feel lonely at times, so far ahead that you don't find
anybody to line up _with_. Every time I see a woman step out of the
ranks in some achievement of her own, I think, 'Now, Olivia will have
company.'"
"But, heavens!" I said again. "I'm not thinking of the others at all. I
don't even know that there are others, or at least who they are. I'm a
squirrel in a cage. I go round because I must. I don't know what comes
of it."
"I'll tell you what comes--women everywhere getting courage to live
lives of their own. Do you remember what you went through in Higgleston?
Well, the more women there are like you, the less there will be of that
for any of them. It is the conscious movement of us all toward liberty
that's going round with you." I was dashed by the breadth and brightness
of her view.
"Effie," I said, "is this a new kind of toy to dangle before your
intelligence to keep it from realizing it isn't getting anywhere?"
"Like the love affairs of your friends?" she came back at me promptly.
"No, it isn't; it's--well, I guess it's a religion."
I believed as I dressed at the theatre that night, that it was the
contagion of Effie's enthusiasm that keyed me up to a pitch that I
thought I shouldn't have reached without Helmeth. I had counted so on
his being there for the first night, but he was still in London, and for
a week I hadn't heard from him.
I needed something then to account, as I proceeded with my part, for the
extraordinary richness of power, the delicacy and precision with which I
put it over line by line to my audience. I played, oh, I played! I felt
the audience breathing in the pauses like the silent wood; the lights
went gold and crimson and the young dreams were singing. So vivid was
the mood that, when from time to time I was swept out on billows of
applause before the curtain, I fancied I saw him there, leaning to me,
now from a balcony, or standing unobserved in a box behind the
Sandersons' and some friends of his who had pleased, on his
introduction, to take a great interest in me. It was a wonderful night,
flooded with the certainty of success as by a full moon; we danced under
it in spirit--I believe that Polatkin kissed me; two of my young men I
saw with their hands on one another's shoulders, capering in the wings
as I was being drawn before the curtain again and again to bob and smile
like a cuckoo out of a clock, striking the perfect hour. And through it
all was the sense of my beloved, the leaf-light touch of his kiss on my
cheek, the pressure of his arm, so poignant that as I came out of the
theatre late with Effie and her husband, I thought I could not bear it
to go back to my room and find it empty.
"Willis," I said to my brother-in-law, "you must lend me my sister
to-night." I was sitting between them in the carriage, each of them
holding a hand. I do not know what they were able to get of my acting,
but nothing could have kept from them the knowledge of my tremendous
success. I could see though, that in his excited state it wasn't going
to be easy for him to spare his young wife, and that made it easier for
me as we drew up in front of my door to change my mind suddenly and send
her back with him. What really influenced me was the certainty that I
could not bear even for Effie to disturb the sense of my lover's
presence which I seemed to feel brooding over the room. I went up the
steps warm with it.
I had a moment of thinking as I opened the door and found the lights
turned on, that my maid had left them so in anticipation of my return,
and then I saw him. He was sitting by the dying fire; he had not heard
me come up the stair, for his head was in his hands. He turned then at
my exclamation, and I had time, before we crossed the width of the room
to one another, to think that the attitude in which I had found him and
the new writing of anxiety in his face, as he turned it to me, had its
source in his finding me in what looked like a permanent relation to a
theatre of my own. For a moment I thought that, and then my apprehension
was buried on his breast.
"Oh, my love, my love!" He held me off from him to let his eyes rove
tenderly over my face, my breast, my hair. I do not know if he
remembered the words he had spoken to me so long ago, or if they came
spontaneously to the command of the old desire: "Oh, you beauty--you
wonder...."
Presently we moved to sit down, and stumbled over his bag upon the floor
beside his chair. It brought me back to the miracle of his being there
and to the certainty that he must have come to me direct from the
steamer.
"On the _Cunarder_," he admitted, "six days and a half. O Lord!" His
gesture was expressive of the extreme weariness of impatience. "I came
ashore with the quarantine officers. I couldn't cable. I left at two
hours' notice."
It occurred to me that he must have at least come ashore before sunset,
and in that case he couldn't have come straight to me. I began to feel
something ominous in the presence there of his bag. His overcoat, though
the evening was so warm, lay beyond him on another chair. It flashed
over me in a wild way that he had come to some sudden determination--he
had been at the theatre that night--he had taken my being there in that
circumstance as final--perhaps he meant to abandon me to my art, to
surrender me at least to its more importunate claim. He followed my
thought dully from far off.
"I was at the theatre in time for your part," he said. "There wasn't a
seat, but they knew me at the box office and let me in."
"Then it _was_ you that I saw in the balcony, and in Sanderson's box? I
thought it was a vision."
"I had business with Sanderson." He turned back to what was beginning to
make itself felt through his profound preoccupation, the charm of my
presence. "There was that in your acting to-night that would have evoked
visions," he smiled. "I had them myself." I knelt down on the floor
beside his knees.
"Helmeth, tell me," I begged. He began to stroke my face with his hand.
"It doesn't seem so bad as it did a few moments ago, and yet it is bad
enough. I must leave for Mexico in an hour."
"Leave me?" I was still, in my mind, occupied with what now began to
seem a monstrous disloyalty to him, my obligation to Polatkin. There had
been a great deal about our new venture on the programme, even if he
hadn't seen the papers, he must have learned it as soon as he came into
the theatre.
"Unless you can go with me in an hour ... yes, my dear, I know it is
impossible...." He was silent a while, clasping and unclasping my hand
on his knee, knitting his brows and staring into the fire with the
expression of a man so long occupied with anxiety that his mind, in any
moment of release, goes back to it automatically. I stirred presently
when I saw that his perplexity had nothing to do with me. "I had a
cable in London," he said. "Heaven only knows how long they were getting
it down to the coast where they could send it; they have struck water in
the mines." I failed to get the force of the announcement except that
from the manner of his telling it, it was a great disaster. "I must
leave on the twelve twenty-three," he warned me. I did understand that.
"Oh, no, _no_! Helmeth!" I cried out. "Not now ... not so soon!" I clung
to him crying. "Stay with me to-night ... just for to-night!" We rocked
in one another's arms. I remember little broken snatches of explanation.
"I've worked _so_, Olivia ... I've worked and sweated ... and now...."
Presently he broke out again. "To have worked, and know that your work
is sound, and to be played a trick, to lose by a ghastly trick! If there
is a God, Olivia, why does He play tricks on a man like that?"
"Hush, my dear! Oh, my dear ..."
"Do you know what I've been doing since I came ashore? I've been buying
pumps, Olivia, pumps, and machinery to work them. Think of the delay;
and I'll have to ask Shane for more money ... more ... and I meant to be
paying dividends." He held me off from him fiercely with both hands.
"Olivia, suppose to-night instead of applause you had heard hisses,
and people going out, turning their backs on you in your best
lines ... oh ..." He broke off and covered his face with his hands.
I crept up to him.
"If they had, I should have come back to you, beloved. And I shouldn't
have remembered it. Oh, beloved, what are all things worth except that
they give us this?" I was on his knee now, and my hair was still in its
maiden snood as it had been in the play. I drew it softly about his
face.
"Oh, my dear, to be _this_ to me, what does it matter about the mines?
They will come straight again in a little time. But this ... this is
_now_." I could feel the yielding in his frame. He was my man and I did
what I would with him.
CHAPTER VII
Among all the devices with which we confound the Powers forever fumbling
at our lives, none must puzzle them more than the set of obligations and
interactions that go by the name of business. Unless, indeed, there is a
god of business, which I doubt.
Past all misguiding of our youth, past all time and distance and
unlikelihood, the god who would be worshipped most by the welding of
spirit into spirit, had brought us two together only to be rived apart
by the necessity which tied us each, not only to our own, but to other
people's means of making a living. The two or three hours following on
Helmeth's announcement of the accident which had, who knows but at the
instance of the Powers which was bent upon uniting us, shattered the
point of his attachment to the Mexican scheme, we spent in that drowning
realization of the source of being and delight for each in the other,
which is the process and the end of loving. And then the withdrawing of
whole electric constellations from the city skyline and the clatter of
the morning traffic in the street, and the dispersing blueness, let in
with them the considerations which whipped us apart.
If there is a god of business he is of a superior subtlety, for even
then we proposed to one another that the best way of being quit of the
obligation was to serve our time to it; and it was in pursuance of some
such idea that I found myself, toward the latter part of June, going out
to Los Angeles to meet Mr. Garrett who would by that time, have come up
the coast from Mazatplan to make purchases of supplies. I should have
gone much farther than that merely to have touch with him, the warm
pressure of his hand, his voice at my ear; all my dreams even, were
tinged by the loss out of my life of his bodily presence. It was a
singular flame-touched circumstance that the assured success of my new
venture set up in me a fiercer need.
There had not been time for much in his letters but accounts of his
struggle with conditions at the mine and his slow conquest of the water
that flooded all the lower levels, of disheartening, incompetent labour
and the multiplied difficulty of distance from any base of supplies. But
that little was all timed to our meeting again. "I will explain all that
when I see you," "We will talk of that later," were phrases that cropped
out in his letters many times. I did not know, even in the act of going
there, just what he expected to bring to pass in our affairs by my being
in Los Angeles. I only know that I wanted desperately to see him.
One thing I gathered from his letters, that in the preoccupation and
haste of his stay in New York he had wholly missed the significance of
my new entanglement with Morris Polatkin. I have to suppose, to account
for his never having any other conception of what my work was to me,
that he had never known a professional woman or one who worked at
anything except as a stop-gap between the inconsequence of youth and
marriage. He felt himself, humbly, rather a poor substitute for the
colour, the excitement and gayety of my career--why should so many
people suppose that an actress's life is gay--but he balanced that with
what he meant to purchase for me by his own achievement. He had, without
thinking it necessary to account for it, the idea that is so generally
and unexcusedly entertained that I am sometimes hypnotized into thinking
it must be the right one, that a woman in becoming a man's wife ceases
to be her own and becomes somehow mysteriously and inevitably his. It
was not that in all our talk about it, he had any conclusions about the
stage as an unsuitable profession for women, but that he was inherently
unable to think of it as possible for his wife. We were saved from
dispute by the proof I had had in Italy that his inability to think of
me as having a life apart, arose chiefly in his need of me, which had in
it something of the absolute quality of a child's need of its mother. I
am glad now, in view of all that came of it, that I was spared the
bitterness of not seeing, in his inability to accept the finality of my
relation to my work, anything nobler than an insufferable male egotism.
I have thought since, that we might have made more of our love, if we
had but seen somewhere in the world the process of its being so made; if
we could have moved for a time in a footing of intimacy among other
pairs who had produced out of as unlikely material, a competent and
satisfying frame of life. We did not know any but theatrical people
among whom the wife had interests apart from her husband. That is where
Taylorville betrayed us. And now you know what I meant when I said in
the beginning that the social ideal, in which I was bred, is the villain
of my plot; for we wished sincerely for the best, and the best that we
knew was cast only in one mould. I have begun to think indeed, that
this, more than anything else, accounts for the personal disaster which
waits so often on the heels of genius, that we assume it to be the
inalienable condition. For genius tends to spring from that stratum of
society for which, when it has come to its full flower, it is most
unfit, and it comes up slanting and aside like a blade of grass under a
potsherd of the broken mould of unrelated ideals. Somewhere there must
have been men and women working out our situation and working it out
successfully, but the only example life afforded us was not of the
acceptable pattern. Still my agreement with Mr. Garrett, that it was
after all _the_ pattern, saved us from mutual accusation and
recrimination.
Concerned as I was to make the most and the best of him, I kept looking
out all the way after the train struck into the southwest, for every
intimation of the life there which would have helped me to get at the
springs of his behaviour, and was by turns shocked away from its
bleakness and drawn with a rush of sympathy toward what a man must
endure to live in it. If I saw myself as he had sometimes sketched me,
filling its bleak and unprofitable reaches with my gift as with flame
and flower, I was as many times shudderingly brought face to face with
the question as to where, in the wilderness, I was to find wherewithal
to go on burning. At Los Angeles, a town of which I had heard him speak
as a place with a spirit with which he was in sympathy, I had nothing to
look at for a week but a great deal of rather formless, wooden
architecture expressing nothing so much as the attempt to reconcile
Taylorvillian tastes and perceptions with a subtropical opportunity.
I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at
the time it was notable for a disposition to take the amplitude of its
pretension for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had
dwindled to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any
community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had
been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making
myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans.
I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by
degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a
large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained prettiness and dared to
dispense with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set
my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the
moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal had its way with us, I
saw that the land had set its mark on him.
He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed. There are times, no doubt,
when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it
wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I
had spread the crest of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable,
enchanting; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in
my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the
exigencies of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at
times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's
attitude was an additional harassment. And there was so little else I
could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a
wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his
meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient to the necessity of
keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet
illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me
that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living
together.
"At any rate," I said, consoling myself for his scant hours with me, "we
shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say----"
something curiously like embarrassment suffused him.
"I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena ... at the
Howards' ... the girls are there, you know." I didn't know, and the
circumstance of its having been kept from me smacked of offence. Why,
since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him
with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the
children; ... why not have at least included me in a community of
interest with them?
"I thought," he extenuated, "that the girls were the chief obstacle to
your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if
you didn't have them thrust too much upon you."
"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the
main issue. "It isn't the girls--it isn't anything of yours, it is
something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into
the family with me."
"It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being
the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me
about that?"
He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my
art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I
should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I
had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about
the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another
path to my recently awakened resentment.
"Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's
sister, isn't she?"
"They don't live together." He had answered my unspoken question, as
though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition
in his own before. "Miss Stanley and the young brother--you remember him
at Cadenabbia?--live at the old place. She has been a mother to him."
"Ah," I couldn't forbear to suggest, "and she's mothering your children
now."
"Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?"
"Yes, I am," I told him. "I'm jealous of every minute you spend away
from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk
with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear----" I put my hands up
to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about
me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there.
"Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married
to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to
urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or
two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our
feelings count for something."
"I couldn't," I protested, "you don't understand; there's Polatkin and
Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you
know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw."
"A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband--" he
broke out, "think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she
should or shouldn't do!" We went over that ground again until we ceased
from sheer exhaustion.
It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at
once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals
until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go
back to my work until he could claim me.
For a wild moment I yielded to the suggestion ... if I could have him
and my art ... but I hope I am not altogether a cad. I saw what all his
efforts could not keep me from seeing, that even to do that for me, to
get me into his place in Mexico and back again would be a tax on him,
and to ask him to do it with a reservation in my mind would be more than
I would stand for.
"It isn't fair, Helmeth, my letting you think that anything could pull
me away from the stage. It isn't that I don't agree with you about how a
husband and wife ought to be with one another, nor that I am not
entirely of the opinion that the atmosphere of the stage is not the
place to bring up children the way you want yours brought up; it is
because not even the kind of marriage you offer me would hold me."
"You mean that you'd leave me? That you'd go back to it?"
"Well, why not? I left my first husband. I know that wasn't the way it
seemed to me then, but that's what it amounted to ... and he fell in
love with the village dressmaker." I had never told him that part of my
life; I had never thought of it in the terms in which I had just stated
it, I saw him grow slowly white under the sun-brown of his skin.
"I see ... if your only idea in staying with me is that I might----Good
God, Olivia, do you know what you've said to me?"
"Nothing except what is right for you to know. Do you remember, Helmeth,
what I told you Mark Eversley called me?"
"A Woman of Genius; I remember." He was looking at me now as though the
phrase were a sort of acid test which brought out in me traits
unsuspected before.
"Well, then, I'm those two things, a woman and a genius, and the woman
was meant for you; don't think I don't know that and am not proud of it
with every fibre of my brain and body. I should have been glad once; if
it were possible I'd be glad now to have kept your house and borne your
children, and see to it that they brushed their teeth and had hair
ribbons to match their clothes."
"Their mother thought that was important." He snatched at this as at an
incontestable evidence of my being all that I was trying to show him
that I was not.
"It _is_ important.... I remember to this day the effect on me of my
hair ribbons----" He broke in eagerly.
"If you can see that ... if you understand what their mother wanted ...
things I missed out of my life through having no mother, that I've heard
you say you missed partly out of yours ... birthdays and Christmas and
good chances to marry when they grow up----"
"I do understand, Helmeth, but what I'm trying to tell you is that I
can't go through with it. Those are the things that belong to the woman,
that it takes all the woman's time to do the way their mother would have
them done, and for me the woman has been swamped in the genius. Oh, I
don't say that I'm not a better actress for having tried so long to be
merely a woman, for being able even now, to know all that you mean when
you say 'woman'; but there it is. I am an actress and I can't leave off
being one just by saying so."
"And I can't leave off being a proper father to my girls. I owe them
the things we've been talking about just as I owe them a living. I
suppose I should have married for their sakes, supposing I could get
anybody to have me, even if I hadn't found you. And I don't want finding
you to mean anything but the best to them." I had nothing to say to
that, and he went back to a thought that had often been between us. "We
ought to have married when we were young," he insisted as though somehow
that made a better case of it, "if you hadn't begun you wouldn't have
been called on to leave it off."
"The point is that it won't leave _me_. Genius--I don't know what it is
except that it is nothing to be conceited about because you can't help
it--isn't a thing you can pick up or lay down at your pleasure; it's a
possession."
I could see that he didn't altogether follow me, that he was not very
far removed, and that only by his admiration for me, from the
Taylorvillian idea that to speak of yourself as a genius was to pay
yourself an unwarrantable compliment, and that the most I could get him
to understand of the meaning of my work, was what grew out of his being
a most competent workman himself. He went back to the original
proposition.
"Does that mean, then, that you are not going to marry me?"
"It means that I'm not going to leave the stage to do it."
"It seems to me to mean that you don't love me as you have professed to.
Oh, I know how women love ... good women."
"Helmeth!"
"I beg your pardon, Olivia." We stood aghast at what we had brought upon
ourselves; across the breach of dissension we rushed together with
effacing passion. After all, I believe I should have gone with him if he
had had the wit to know that the point at which a woman is most prepared
for yielding is the next instant after she has just stated the
insuperable objection. Whether he knew or not, the whole of his outer
attention was taken up with the purchase of pump fittings.
Understand that I didn't for a moment suppose that I had lost him, that
I didn't believe anything but that I could go to him at any moment if
the whim seized me, that I couldn't in reason pull him back if the need
of him arose. I finished out my vacation at resorts up and down the
California coast, warm with the certainty that I should see him in New
York the next winter.
CHAPTER VIII
The next season was a brilliant one, made so by the strength of my
wanting him, and by the sense of completeness and finality which came to
me out of the faith that we had been ordained to be lovers from the
beginning. It began to seem, in the fashion in which we had been brought
together as boy and girl and then mated in ways which, creditable as
they had been, yet offered no obstacle to the freshness and vitality of
our passion, that we had been guided by that intelligence which in any
emergency of my gift, I felt rush to save it. That I had been prevented
from any absorbing interest until it had grown and flowered in me,
appeared now to have come about by direct manipulation of the Powers. I
had curious and interesting adventures that winter in the farthest
unexplored territory of the artistic consciousness, which tempt me at
every turn to put by my story for the purpose of making them plain to
you, and I am only deterred from it by the certainty that you couldn't
get it plain in any case.
A few days ago I picked up a copy of Dante and found myself convicted of
shallowness in never having taken his passion for the cold-blooded
Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in
the circle within circle of his hells and paradisos, the rhythm of aches
and exaltations. And if you couldn't get that from Dante, how much less
from anything I might have to say to you. After all these years I do not
know what is the relation of Art to Passion, but I have experienced it.
If I said anything it would be by way of persuading you that loving is
not an end in itself, but the pull upward to our native heaven, which is
no hymn-book heaven, but a world of the Spirit wherein things are made
and remade and called good.
What I made out of it at that time was the material of a satisfying
success, and though I got on without him much better than I could have
expected, the fact that after all, he did not get any nearer to me than
the Pacific coast, had its effect in the year's adventures.
That I missed my lover infinitely, that I was thinned in the body by the
sheer want of him, that I had moments of mad resolve, of passionate
self-abandoning cry to him, goes without saying. One need not in a
certain society, say more of love than that one has it, to be understood
as well as if one displayed a yellow ribbon in the company of Orangemen,
but since I couldn't say it, an opinion passed current among my friends
that I was working too hard and in need of a holiday. It came around at
last to Polatkin himself noticing it, though I believe with a better
understanding of the reason why I should be restless and sleepless
eyed. It was just after I had heard from Helmeth that he couldn't
possibly hope to be in New York for another year, that my manager
suggested that it might be good business policy for me to play a short
tour in three or four of the leading cities, a strictly limited season
which would be enough to whet the public appetite without satisfying it.
"What cities?"
I believe that I jumped at it in the hope somehow that it might be
stretched to include Los Angeles, where Helmeth was at that moment, and
where I felt sure he would come to me. When I learned, however, that
nothing was contemplated farther west than Chicago, I lost interest.
That very day I had a telegram:
"Will you marry me?
"Signed: GARRETT."
It was dated at Los Angeles, and as I could think of no reason for this
urgency, I concluded that it must be because the association there with
the idea of me, had been too much for him, and in that new yielding of
mine to the beguiling circumstance, I was disposed to interpret it as
evidence that he was coming round. I wired back:
"If you marry my work.
"OLIVIA."
and prepared myself for the renewal of that dear struggle which, if it
got us no further, at least involved us in coil upon coil of emotion,
making him by the very force he spent on it, more completely mine. I
expected him in every knock on the door, every foot on the stair, and
had he come to me then, would no doubt have provoked him to that
traditional conquest which, as it has its root in a situation made,
affected for the express purpose of provocation, is the worst possible
basis for a successful marriage.
On the day on which at the earliest, I could have expected him from Los
Angeles, I sent my maid away in order that, if I should find him there
in the old place waiting for me, there should be no constraint on the
drama of assault and surrender for which I found myself primed.
Then by degrees it began to grow plain to me that he did not mean to
come, that the question and my answer to it, had carried some sort of
finality to his mind that was not apparent to mine. By the time I had a
letter from him, written at the mine, with no reference in it to what
had passed so recently between us, I understood that he would not ask me
to marry him again. He had accepted the situation of being my lover
merely, and I was not any more to be vexed by the alternative. I said to
myself that it was better to have it resolved with so little pain, and
that it should be my part to see that what we were to one another was to
yield its proper fruit of happiness. I found myself at a loss, however,
in the application; for though you may have satisfied yourself of the
moral propriety of dispensing with the convention of publicity, you
cannot very well, with a week's journey between you, get forward in the
business of making a man happy. About this time Jerry began to be
anxious about what I couldn't prevent showing in my face, the wasting
evidence of love divided from its natural use of loving.
"You'll break down altogether," he expostulated, "and then where will I
be?" He was tremendously interested in his new play, which was by far
the best thing he had done, and in the process of getting it to the
public he had so identified it with my interpretation that he was no
longer able to think of the one without the other. There had come into
his manner a new solicitude very pleasing to me, born of his sense of
possession in me, in as much as I was the lovely lady of his play, and a
sort of awe of all that I put into it that transcended his own notion
and yet was so integral a part of it. It had brought him out of his old
acceptance of me as a foil and relief for the shallow iridescence that
other women produced in him. He had begun to have for me a little of
that calculating tenderness with which a man might regard the mother of
his nursing child. Night by night then as he came hovering about me he
could not fail to observe, though he could hardly have understood it,
the wearing hunger with which I came from my work, pushed on by it to
more and more desperate need of loving, and drawn back by its
unrelenting grip from the artistic ruin in which the satisfaction of
that hunger would involve me. Now at his very natural expression of
concern, I felt myself unaccountably irritated.
"Jerry," I demanded of him, "would it matter so much if we left off
altogether writing plays and playing them? _What_ would it matter?"
"You are in a bad way if you've begun to question that? What does living
matter? We are here and we have to go on."
"Yes, but when we go on at such pains? Is there any more behind us than
there is behind a ball when it is set rolling? Are we aimed at
anything?"
"Oh, Lord, Olivia, what has that got to do with it?" He was sitting in
my most commodious chair with his long knees crossed to prop up a
manuscript from which he was reading me the notes of a tragedy he was
about to undertake, and his quills were almost erect with the tweaking
he had given them in the process of arriving at his climax. It was a
curious fact that the breaking off of his marriage, which in the nature
of the case could not be broken off sharp but had writhed and frayed him
like the twisting of a green stick, by setting Jerry free for those
light adventures of the affections which had been so largely responsible
for the rupture of his domestic relations, instead of multiplying his
propensity by his opportunity, had landed him on a plane of
self-realization in which they were no longer needful. The poet in Jerry
would never be able to resist the attraction of youth and freshness, but
the man in him was forever and unassailably beyond their reach. I was
never more convinced of this than when he turned on this occasion from
the preoccupation of his creative mood, to offer whatever his point of
attachment life had provided him, to bridge across the chasm of my
spirit.
"I don't see why it is important that we should know what we are working
for; we might, in our confounded egotism, not approve of it, we might
even think we could improve on the pattern. I write plays and you act
them and a bee makes honey. I suppose there's a beekeeper about, but
that's none of our business."
"Ah, if we could only be sure of that--if He would only make himself
manifest; that's what I'm looking for, just a hint of what He's trying
to do with us."
"Well, I can tell you: He'll smoke you out of New York and into a
sanitarium, if you don't know enough to take a change and a rest."
"Poly wants me to go on the road for a while; sort of triumphal
progress. He thinks applause will cure me."
"You're getting that now. What would bring you around would be a good
frost."
"You wouldn't want that in Chicago?" Jerry disentangled his limbs and
sat up sniffing the wind of success.
"If I could have you to open with my play in Chicago," he averred
solemnly, "I'd be ready to sing the Lord Dismiss Us." He really thought
so. To go back to the scene of his early struggle with his laurels fresh
on him, to satisfy the predictions of his earliest friends and confound
his detractors, above all to be received in his own country with that
honour which is denied to prophets, seemed to him then almost as
desirable in prospect as it proved in fact not to be. I found another
advantage in the confusion and excitement of touring, in being able to
conceal from myself that I hadn't had a satisfactory letter from Helmeth
since the pair of telegrams that passed between us, and no letter at all
for a long time. It was always possible to pretend to myself that the
letters had been written but were delayed in forwarding.
It was a raw spring day when we came to Chicago, the promise of the
season in the sun, denied and flouted by the wind. It slanted the tails
of the labouring teams and cast over the clean furrow, handfuls of the
winter rubbish from the stubble yet unturned, and between field and
field it wrung the tops of the leafless wood. Now and then it parted
them on white painted spires without disturbing them or the rows of thin
white gravestones. It laid bare the roots of my life to the cold blasts
of memory, it rendered me again the pagan touch, the undivided part that
the earth had in me. My dead were in its sod, in me the sap of its
spiritual fervours and renunciations. What was I, what was my art but
the flower, the bright, exotic blossom borne upon its topmost bough, its
dying top; here in its abounding villages, in the deep-rutted county
roads was the root and trunk. Outside, the wind flicked the landscape
like the screen of the moving picture that the swift roll of the train
made of it, and I felt again the pressure of my small son upon my arm,
and the pleasant stir of domesticity and the return of my man. For the
last hour Jerry had come to sit in my compartment, opposite me, and
stare stonily out of the window; now and then his jaws relaxed and set
again as he bit hard upon the bitter end of experience. No one, I
suppose, can go through that country so teeming with the evidences of
the common life, the common labour, the common hope of immortality, and
not feel bereft in as much as the circumstances of his destiny divide
him from it. We passed Higgleston; beyond the roofs of it the elms that
marked the cemetery road, gathered green. The roofs of the town were
steeped in windy light. I had no impulse to stop there. I withdrew from
it as one does from a private affair upon which he has stumbled unaware.
Rather it was not I who withdrew, but Life as it was lived there, turned
its back upon me.
Getting in to Chicago through that smoky wooden wilderness, within which
the city obscures itself as a cuttlefish in its own inky cloud, I felt
again the wounding and affront, the cold shoulder lifted on my needs,
the eager hand stretched out to catch my contribution. Chicago received
me with its hat off, bowing to meet me, and when I remembered how nearly
it had let me fall into the pit prepared for me by Griffin and the
"Flim-Flams," I burned with resentment.
It was seven years now since I had seen the city or Pauline, the only
friend I had made there who could be supposed to take an interest in my
coming again. I meant of course to see Pauline; we had kept up a
correspondence which with the years had shown a disposition to confine
itself to a Christmas reminder, and an occasional marked copy of a
magazine, but I meant, of course, to see her. I had trusted to her
finding out through the newspapers that I would be there and on such a
date. It fell in quite naturally with my inclination, to have her card
sent up to me the next morning a little after eleven. I was needing to
be distracted. On my way up from breakfast I had met Jerry going down
with his suit case.
"Back to New York," he admitted to my question, "as quick as I can get
there."
"But with all this success ... why, they fairly stood on their feet last
night."
"I know, I know," he looked unendurably harassed. "I can't stand it,
Olivia, I can't stand it. This place is full of ghosts." I remembered
that both his children had been born there and that he had not seem them
for more than a year, and I did not press him.
"I'll keep your end up for a week if I can," I assured him as he wrung
my hand. He turned back when he was a step or two down the stair.
"Don't stay too long yourself," he admonished. "New York's the place."
I was feeling that when Pauline came to me. It wasn't until I saw her
that I realized what a distance there was--in spite of our common youth,
had always been--between us. It started out for us both in the first
glimpse we had of one another, in the witness in all the inconsiderable
elements of line and colour which go to make up a woman's appearance, of
growth and amplitude in me and fulfilment in hers. Pauline had been in
her girlhood, if not pretty, at least what is known as an attractive
girl, and though there was only a matter of months between us, it came
to me with a shock that she was now, not only not particularly
attractive, but middle-aged. It was not so much in the fulness under her
chin which apparently caused her no uneasiness, nor in the thickness of
her waist, of which I was sure she made a virtue, but in the certainty
that all that was ever to happen to her in the way of illuminating and
self-forgetting passion, had already happened.
She had reached, she must have reached about the time I was taking my
flight upward by the help of Morris Polatkin, the full level of her
capacity to experience. She was living still, as I saw by the card which
I still held in my hand, in Evanston, and she was living there because
it was no longer within the scope of her possibility to live anywhere
else. All this flashed through me in the moment in which Pauline,
checked by what she was able to guess of unfamiliar elements in me, was
crossing the room and taking me by the hands in the old womanly way,
keyed down to the certainty of not requiring it in her business any
more. It was so patent that Pauline was now in the position of having
done her duty toward life and Henry Mills, and was accepting all that
came to her from it as her due, that it almost seemed for a moment that
she had said something of the kind. What did pass between us besides a
kiss of greeting, were some commonplaces about my being there and how
pleased Henry and the children would be to see me. We sat down on a sofa
together and for a moment the old girlish confidence put forth a tender
sprig of renewal.
"So many years since we were at school together! You've gone a long way
since then, Olivia."
"A long way," I admitted, but she didn't catch the double meaning the
phrase had for me.
"Henry and I were talking about it this morning. And the times you had
here in Chicago, you poor dear; you had to make a good many starts
before you got on the right road at last."
"A great many."
"But you found out that it all came right in the end, didn't you? That
it was best just for you to trust ... you used to be bitter about it ...
but trusting is always best."
"Oh, if you think I've been trusting all these years ... I've been
working."
"Of course, _of_ course." Much of her old manner came back with the
occasion for moralizing. "But you were too amusing, you were quite
fierce with Henry because he wouldn't do anything about it." She laughed
reminiscently. "And now, you see...." Her look travelled about the
rose-coloured room, full of the evidence of prosperity.
"Pauline," I said, "if you are thinking that I could have gone to New
York and become the success I am, _without_ the help that you and Henry
might have given me, you are making a great mistake. What did happen was
that I had to accept it from a quarter where it wasn't so much to be
expected, and was not nearly so agreeable."
"That man Mark Eversley found for you, you mean. Well, I suppose you did
get on better for a little start."
"Start!" I cried. "Start! I had to have everything--food and clothes."
A sudden recollection flashed upon me of those first days in New York,
of myself become merely a dummy on which to hang a fat little Jew's
notions of acceptable contours; the offence of it; the greater offence
from which by the opportune appearance of the Jew I had so hardly
escaped.
"Have you any idea, Pauline, what it means to have a man invest money in
you?... a man like Polatkin. I was his property, a horse he had entered
for the race. He had a stake on me...."
Pauline looked aghast; vague recollections of the actress heroines of
fiction shaped her thought.
"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you--that you were----"
"His mistress," I finished for her bluntly. "Is that the only thing your
imagination takes offence at? Isn't it enough for me to tell you that he
orders my corsets for me?" That did reach her. I could see her struggle
with the habitual effort to put the unwelcome fact down, anywhere out of
sight and knowledge, under the cotton wool of a moral sentiment. Even
now if she could escape being implicated in my predicament by avoiding
the knowledge of it, she would not only do that but convict herself of
superiority as well. My gorge rose against it.
"But if I didn't sell myself to the Jew," I drove it home to her, "it
was chiefly because he was decenter to me than the circumstance gave me
a right to expect. I came near doing it for a cheaper man and for a
cheaper price, a man who had deserted one wife, and ... a bigamist in
fact. If you don't know that there were days when I would have sold
myself for something to eat, it was because you didn't take the pains
to."
"But you never said a word. Of course if you had told me the truth ..."
she floundered and saved herself on what she believed to be a just
resentment, but I had no notion of letting her off so easily. I did not
know exactly how we had got launched on the subject, it had not been in
my mind to do so when she came in, but all the events of the past year
seemed to lead up to it, to come somehow to the point of rupture against
her smooth acceptance of my success as being derived from the same
process as her own.
"I did tell you that I was in need of money to put me in the way of
earning a living," I insisted. "I did not ask you for charity; what I
offered you was the chance of a business investment, one that rendered
the investor its due return. The fact that you did not know enough about
the business to know how good it was"--I forestalled what I saw rising
to her lips--"had nothing to do with it. You were my friend and
professed to admire my talent; I had a right to have what I said about
it heard respectfully." I had got up from the pink and white sofa where
our talk had begun, and was trailing about the room in my breakfast
gown, and the suggestion of staginess in the way the folds of it
followed my movements, irritated me with the certainty that the effect
of it on Pauline would be to mitigate the sincerity of what I said.
"You'd known me long enough," I accused her, "to know that I wouldn't
have asked for money until I was in the last extremity, and then I
wouldn't have asked it for myself. I don't know that it would have
mattered if I had starved, but my Gift was worth saving."
"I didn't dream ..." she began. "I hadn't any idea ..."
"Well, why didn't you ask Henry, then? Henry knows what becomes of women
on the stage when they can't make a living." This was nearer to the mark
than I had meant to let myself go, but I could see that it carried no
illumination. She drew up her wrap and braced herself for one more
gallant effort.
"The things you've been through, my dear ... I don't wonder you feel
bitter. But when it has all come out right, why not forget it?"
"Oh, right! Right!"
The room was full of vases and floral tokens of the triumph of the night
before, and as I swung about with my arms out, disdaining her judgment
of rightness for me, I knocked over a great basket of roses and orchids
which had come from Cline and Erskine. I don't suppose Pauline had ever
knocked over anything in her life, and the violence of my gesture must
have stood for some unloosening of the bonds of convention, with an
implication which only now began to work through to her.
"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you ... that you are not ... not a
good woman?"
"Oh," I said again, "good ... good ... what does it all mean? I'm a
successful actress."
"Olivia!"
"Well, no, if you insist on knowing, I'm not what you would call a good
woman." I threw it at her as though it had been a peculiar kind of scorn
heaped up on her for being what I had just denied myself to be. I saw
myself for once with all my thwarted and misspent instincts toward the
proper destiny of women, enmeshed and crippled, not by any propensity
for sinning, but by the conditions of loving which women like Pauline
set up for me. "And if you want to know," I said, "why I'm not a good
woman, it is because women like you don't make it seem particularly
worth while."
"Oh," she gasped, "this is horrible ... horrible!" The word came out in
a whisper. I saw at last that she was done with me, that the only
thought that was left to her was to get away, to put as much space as
possible between us. I got around with my hand on the door to prevent
her.
"Pauline, Pauline!" I cried almost wildly, as if even at the last she
could have helped me from myself. "Can't you remember that we grew up
together, that we had the same training, the same ideals? Can't you
remember that when we began I thought that the life you had chosen for
yourself was the best, that I thought I had chosen it for myself too?
Only--for heaven's sake, Pauline, try to understand me--there is
something that chooses for us. Don't you know that I wouldn't have been
any different from what you are if I hadn't been forced? Haven't you
seen how I've been beaten back from all that I tried to be? All this"--I
threw out my arms, as I stood against the door, to include all that had
entered by implication in our conversation--"it had to come, and it came
wrong because you won't understand that a Gift has its own way with us."
I could see, though, that she wasn't understanding in the least, that
she was badly scared and even indignant at being forced to listen to a
justification of what, by her code, could have no justification. She was
standing not far from me, crushed against the wall, as though by the
weight of opprobriousness that I heaped upon her, and her whole
attention was centred on the door and the chance of getting out of it
and away from what, in the mere despair of reaching her intelligence
with it, I flung out from me now wildly.
"I suppose," I scoffed, "that it never occurs to you that a gifted woman
could be as delicate and feminine as anybody, if only you didn't make
her right to fostering care and protection conditional on her giving up
her gift altogether. You," I demanded, "who tie up all the moral values
of living to your own little set of behaviours, what right have you to
deny us the opportunity to be loved honestly because you can't at the
same time make us over into replicas of yourselves?"
I was sick with all the shames and struggles of the women I had known. I
forgot the door and went over to her.
"You," I said, "who fatten your moral superiority on the best of all we
produce, how do you suppose you are going to make us value the standards
you set up, when the price you despise us for paying, nine times out of
ten we pay to the men who belong to you? What right have you to judge
what we have done when you've neither help nor understanding to offer us
in the doing? What right ... what right?" For the moment I had turned
away in the vehemence of my indignation; I was pacing up and down. In
the instant when my attention was distracted from the door, Pauline made
a dart for it. I could hear her scurrying down the hall, but I went on
walking up and down in my room and talking aloud to her. I was beside
myself with the sum of all indignities. Was it not this set of
prejudices which for the moment had presented itself in the person of
Pauline Mills, which at every turn of my life had been erected against
the bourgeoning of my gift? Was it not in the process of combating the
tradition of the preciousness of women as inherent in particular
occupations, that I had lost the inestimable preciousness of myself? Was
it for what came out of Pauline's frame of life--I thought of Cecelia
Brune here--that I had sacrificed my public possession of the man I
loved. And what came out of it that was more to the world than what I
had to offer? Had I cut myself off from the comfort and stability of a
home, simply because in my situation as famous tragedienne I didn't see
my way to bring up Helmeth's children so as to make little Pauline
Millses of them? I was still raging formlessly in this fashion when Miss
Summers, our ingénue, came to tell me that the cab waited to take us to
the theatre for the matinée.
All through the performance, which I was told went remarkably well, I
was conscious of nothing but the seismic shudders and upheavals of my
world too long subjected to strain. It came back on me in intervals
through the evening performance; I was physically sick with it. But by
degrees through its subsidence, new worlds began to rise. By the time I
left the theatre that night I knew what I would do.
It had been a mistake, a natural but cruel mistake, for Helmeth and me
to suppose that a way of living could at any time be worth the very sap
and source of life. Love was the central fact around which all modes
and occupations should arrange themselves. Let us but love then, and
live as we may. In all the world there was no need like the need I had
for his breast, his arm.
Always the point of our conclusions had been that I agreed with him,
that I _had_ thought that failing to repeat the pattern of their mother
in his children, I had failed in all, that I didn't any more than he see
my way to keeping on with my work and meeting him at the door every
night when he came home, in the sort of garment that, in the ladies'
journals, went by the name of house gown. I laughed to think that we had
not seen before that it was ridiculous. I had no more doubt now, no more
trepidation. What burned in me was so clear a flame that he could not
but be illuminated. Only let me find him, let me go to him again. At the
hotel desk where I paused for my key I asked them to send up telegraph
blanks to my room. With them came letters forwarded from New York. I
started, as one does at an unexpected presence, to find an envelope
among them with his familiar superscription. For the first time I would
rather not have had a letter from him; it would be interposing a fresher
picture between me and my new resolution, to put him for the moment
farther from me.
I saw then that the letter in my hand had been posted at Los Angeles; it
was as though he had leaped suddenly all that distance nearer than his
Chilicojote, Mexico. I noticed that it was a very thin letter. A
thousand conjectures rushed upon me, not one of them with any relativity
to what I would find, for when I tore it open there floated out a
printed slip. It was a clipping from a Pasadena newspaper and announced
his engagement to Edith Stanley.
CHAPTER IX
There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had
written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had
done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to
invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would
not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came,
though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at
the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ...
sometimes even yet....
For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married
than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn't in me to
understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel
himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten
months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the
memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an
unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it.
There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to
see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who
might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with
her husband's declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and
by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie
was expecting another baby and wasn't to be thought of, so I turned at
last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all
America stood for that high identification of his work with the source
of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I
repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did
so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on
me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the
only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly
mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice
involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though
they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of
practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of
communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again,
practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to
apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I
found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of
Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above
the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in
him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very
need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was
the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an
outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a
man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is
loving that is the fructifying act.
That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the
shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark
it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every
woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of
love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of
manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was
not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had
taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss,
dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and
watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth
Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to
have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of
him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials
to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build.
I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of
loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else
has happened to me, I am at least a success.
I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and
some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit
into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It
was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some
sort of brokers' convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline
with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an
attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to
face with them.
They were walking in the lobby. Pauline was in what for her, was evening
dress, her manner a little daunted, not quite carrying it off with the
air of being established at the pivot of existence which she could
manage so well at Evanston. They were walking up and down, waiting, it
seemed, for friends to join them, and they wheeled under the great
chandelier just in time to come squarely across us. I could see Pauline
clutch at her husband's arm, and the catch in her breath with which she
jerked herself back from the impulse to nod, and looked deliberately
away from me. For her, the evidence of my misdoing hung about me like an
exhalation. She was afraid I should insist on speaking to her and some
of her friends would come up and see me doing it. I didn't, however,
offer to speak to her, I looked instead at Henry. I stood still in my
tracks and looked at him steadily and curiously. I wished very much to
know what he meant to do about it. He turned slowly as I looked, from
deep red to mottled purple, and very much against his will his head
bowed to me; his body, to which Pauline clung, dared not move lest she
detect it, but quite above and independent of his smooth-vested,
self-indulgent front, his head bowed to me. So went out of my life
thirty years of intimacy which never succeeded in being intimate.
But though one may excise thirty years of one's past without a tremor,
one may not do it without a scar. To allay the irritation of Pauline's
slight, I came near to being as abandoned as she believed, as I had
moments of believing myself. For the possibility that Helmeth Garrett
had found in our relation of setting it aside, made it at times of a
cheapness which seemed to extend to me who had entertained it. I should
have been happier, I thought, to have taken it lightly as he did. If so
many women who had begun as I had begun, had gone on repeating the
particular instance, wasn't it because they found that that was the
easiest, the only possible way to bear it? How else could one ease the
pain of loving except by being loved again? And if I was to lose the
Pauline Millses of the world by what had been entered upon so
sincerely, why, then, what more had I to risk on the light adventure?
All this time I was sick with the need of being confirmed in my faith in
myself as a person worthy to be loved, to feel sure that since my love
had missed its mark, it wasn't I at least that had fallen short of it.
It was that summer Jerry had been driven by some such need I imagined,
as I admitted in myself, to put his future in jeopardy by another
marriage which on the face of it, offered even a more immediate occasion
for shipwreck than the first, and I hadn't scrupled to put forth to save
him, the new capacity to charm which had come upon me with the
experience of not caring any more myself to be charmed. I knew; it would
have been a poor tribute to my skill as an actress if I hadn't by this
time known, the moves by which a man who is susceptible of being played
upon at all, can be drawn into a personal interest; and though I didn't
then, and do not now believe that a love serviceable for the uses of
living together, can be built up out of "made" love, I was willing for
the time to pit myself against the game that was played by Miss
Chichester for Jerry's peace of mind. I played it all the better for not
being, as the young lady was, personally involved in the stake. That I
thought afterward of doing anything for myself with what I had got, when
at last I had by this means brought Jerry down from Newport to my place
on the Hudson for a week end, was in part due to the extraordinary
charm that Jerry displayed under the stimulus of a male interest in me,
of whom for years he had thought of as being quite outside such
consideration. There was a kind of wistfulness about Jerry when he was a
little in love, that made him irresistible; no doubt I was also a little
warmed by the fire which I had blown up.
He was to come from Saturday to Monday, and the moment I saw him getting
down from the dog-cart I had sent to the station for him, I knew that I
had only to let that interest take its course, to find myself provided
with a lover, whether or no I could command my heart to loving. I do not
remember that I came to any conscious decision about it, but I know that
I yielded myself to the growing sense of intimacy, that I consciously
drew, as one draws perfume from a flower, all that came to me from him:
his new loverliness, touched still with the old solicitous sense of the
preciousness of my gift. I dramatized to the full the possibility of
what hung in the air between us, I dressed myself, I set the stage
accordingly.
It was Saturday evening after dinner that I sent him to the garden to
smoke, keeping the house long enough to fix his attention on my joining
him, by wondering what kept me, and so overdid my part by just so much
as I made myself conscious of the taint of theatricality. For as I went
down the veranda steps to meet him in the rose walk, the response of
the actress in me to the perfectness of the setting and my fitness for
the part of the great lady of romance, drew up out of my past a faint
reminder of myself going up another pair of stairs so many years ago in
the figure of an orphan child toiling through the world. Out of that
memory there distilled presently a cold dew over all my purpose.
It was a perfect night, warm emanations from the earth shut in the smell
of the garden, and light airs from the river stirred the full-leafed
trees. At the bottom of the lawn the soft, full rush, of the Hudson made
a stir like the hurrying pulse. Beyond the silver gleam of its waters,
lay the farther bank strewn with primrose-coloured lights, and above
that the moon, low and full-orbed and golden. Its diffusing light mixed
and mingled with the shadow of the moving boughs. I was wearing about my
shoulders a light scarf that from time to time blew out with the wind,
and as we paced in the garden strayed across Jerry's breast and was
caught back by me, but not before on its communicating thread, ran an
electric spark. It must have been a good two hours after moonrise before
we turned to go in, where the great hall lamp burned with a steady
rose-red glow.
At the foot of the veranda a breeze sprang up fresher than before, that
caught my scarf from me and wrapped us both in it as in a warm,
suffusing mood. We were so close that I had instinctively to put up my
hand as a barricade against what was about to come from him to me, and
as I did so I was aware of something that rose up from some subterranean
crypt in me ... that old romance of my mother's ... women like her,
worlds of patient, overworking, women who could do without happiness if
only they found themselves doing right. Somehow they had laid on me, the
necessity of being true to the best I had known, because it was the best
and had been founded in integrity and stayed on renunciations. I knew
what I had come into the garden to do. I had planned for it. I thought
myself prepared to take up, as many women of my profession did, the next
best in place of the best which life had denied me, but my past was too
strong for me. The unslumbering instinct that saves wild creatures
before they are well awake, had whipped me out of the soft entanglement,
and before Jerry could grasp the change of mood in me, I was halfway up
the stair.
"This wind," I said, "I think it will blow up a rain before morning." I
went on up before him. "You can see the river darkling below its
surface, it does that before a change." I went on drawing the chairs
back from the edge of the veranda, I called Elsa to fasten all the
windows. When at last we came into the glow of the hall lamp, I could
see his face white yet with what he had missed; he thought he had
blundered. He caught at my hand as I gave him his bedroom candle in an
effort to recapture what had just trembled in the air between us.
"Olivia! I say ... Olivia!"
"Your train leaves at nine-thirty," I reminded him. "I'll be up to pour
your coffee."
I went into my room and blew out my candle. The warm summer air came in
between the white curtains. I knelt down beside my bed; an old habit,
long discontinued. I was too much moved to pray, but I continued to
kneel there a long time listening to the soft shouldering of the maples
against the wall outside the window. Far within me there was something
which inarticulately knew that whatever the world might think of me, in
spite of what I had confessed to Pauline, I was a good woman; I had
loved Helmeth Garrett with the kind of love by which the world is saved.
Past all loss and forsaking, past loneliness and longing, there was
something which had stirred in me which would never waken to a lighter
occasion; and whether great love like that is the best thing that can
happen to us or the most unusual, it had placed me forever beyond the
reach of futility and cheapness.
* * * * *
All this was several years ago. Jerry and I are the best of friends and
I am far too busy a woman to miss out of my life anything Pauline Mills
could have contributed to it. Besides, I am very much taken up with my
nieces and nephews. Forester's oldest boy shows a creditable talent for
the stage, and I have him at school here where I can watch him. I shall
try him out on the road next summer. Effie's husband is in the
legislature now, and Effie looks to see him governor. I am very fond of
my sister; we grow together. I owe it to her to have found ways of
making things easier for women who must tread my path of work and
loneliness. It is partly at her suggestion that I have written this
book, for Effie is very much of the opinion that the world would like to
go right if somebody would only show it how. Sarah also added her word.
"It is the fact of your telling, whether they believe you or not, of
your not being ashamed to tell, that is going to help them," she
insists. "At any rate it will help other women to speak out what they
think, unashamed. Most women are not thinking at all what they are very
willing to be thought of as thinking."
I am the more disposed to take their word for it, since as they are both
happy, they cannot be supposed to have the fillip of discontent. Sarah
left the stage a year after Mr. Lawrence's death, to marry a banker from
Troy, and she has never regretted it. She calls her oldest girl Olivia.
It is the sane and sympathetic contact with the common destiny, which I
get at her house and my sister's that keeps me from the resort of
successive and inconsequent passions, such as fill the void in the
lives of too many women who are under the necessity of producing daily
the materials of fire. But you must not understand me to blame women for
taking that path when so many are closed to them. Haven't they been told
immemorially that loving is their proper function, their only one?
Last year I walked in a suffrage parade because Effie wrote me that it
was my duty, and the swing of it, the banners flying, the proud music,
set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience ... all the
paths that lead to the Shining Destiny ... why shouldn't women walk in
them? I should think some of them might lead less frequently to bramble
and morass.
* * * * *
"And after all," said Jerry, a day or two ago when I had read him some
pages of my book, "you have only told your own story, you haven't found
out why all the rest of us run so afoul of personal disaster. We, I
mean, who as you say, nourish the world toward the larger expectation."
"And after all," said I, "what is an artist but a specialist in human
experience, and how can we find out how the world is made except by
falling afoul of it?"
"If when we fall we didn't pull the others down with us! I'm willing to
learn, but why should others have to pay so heavily for my schooling?
Where's the justice in making us so that we can't do without loving and
then not let us be happy in it?"
"I don't believe it is the loving that is wrong; it is the other things
that are tied up with it and taken for granted must go with loving, that
we can get on with."
"Marriage, you mean?"
"Not exactly ... living in one place and by a particular pattern ...
thinking that _because_ you are married you have to leave off this and
take up that which you wouldn't think of doing for any other reason."
"You mean ... I know," he nodded; "my wife was always wanting me to do
this and that, on the ground that it was what married people ought, and
I couldn't see where it led or why it was important. But what if it
should turn out that the others are wrong and we are right about it?"
"Oh, I think we are _all_ wrong. People like us are after the truth of
life, and marriage is the one thing that society won't take the trouble
to learn the truth about. My baby, you know, I lost him because I didn't
know how to take care of him, and there was nobody at hand who knew much
more than I. But Effie's last baby came before its time and they saved
it by science, by knowing what and how. Why can't there be a right way
like that about marriage, and somebody to discover it?"
"Then where would we come in--after it was all found out--if we are the
experimentors?"
"Oh, there'd be other fields. Why shouldn't it be that when we have
found out our relation to the physical world--we are finding it, you
know, radioactivity and laws of falling bodies--go on finding out the
law of our relations to one another? And, when we've found that out,
then there's all the Heavenly Host. We'd have to find out how to get on
with Them."
"And in the meantime we are spoiling a lot of people's lives because we
can't get on with one another----" He broke off suddenly. "My wife is
married again. I don't know if I told you."
"Ah, then, you haven't quite spoiled her life; she has another chance.
And the children?" He had been very fond of them, I knew.
"I haven't done so much with my own life that I'd insist on controlling
theirs."
"You've done wonders," I assured him. "Jerry, honest, do you mind it so
much, not having a wife and family?"
"Oh, Lord, yes, Olivia; I need a wife the same as a man needs a watch,
to keep the time of life for me." He faced me with a swift, sharp
scrutiny. "Honest, do you mind?"
"Sometimes," I admitted, "when I think of what's coming ... when I can't
act any more."
"You'll be leading them all still when you are seventy. You do better
every season." He threw away his cigar and came and stood before me,
preening his raven's wing which now had a little streak of white in it.
"Olivia, what's the matter with you and me being married? We get on like
everything."
"There's more to it than that, Jerry."
"Being in love, you mean? Well, I don't know that I would stick at a
little thing like that." He was looking down at me with an effect of
humour which I was glad to see covered a real anxiety about my answer.
"I've been in love lots of times; I've been mad about several women. I
don't feel that way about you, and I don't know that I care to. But if
wanting you is loving, if worrying about you when you aren't quite up to
yourself, and being proud of you when you are, if liking to be with you
and wanting to read my manuscripts to you the minute I've written them,
if owing you more than I owe any other woman and being glad to owe it,
is loving you, why, I guess I love you enough for all practical
purposes."
"What would Tottie Lockwood say--or is it Dottie?" Miss Lockwood was
Jerry's latest interest at the Winter Garden.
"Oh, _she_? She isn't in a position to say anything. It's only vanity on
her part and the lack of anything to do on mine. There'd be no time for
Totties if you married me."
"Jerry ... since you've asked me ... I suppose you know that I ... that
I...." He put up an arresting hand.
"I've guessed. There isn't anything you need to tell me. And I haven't
an altogether clean record myself. But, I want you to know, Olivia, that
there was never anything in my case that you could take exception, to so
long as my wife was with me. I couldn't make her believe it but it's
true. Except, of course, that I was a fool. I hope I'm done with that."
"I'd want you to be a bit foolish about me, Jerry,--that is, if I make
up my mind to it." I had to defend myself against the encouragement he
got out of my admission. "But, Jerry, when did you begin to think
about--what you've just said?"
"About marrying you? Ever since that time I went down to your place ...
when that Chichester girl...."
"When I wouldn't take her place, a _pis aller_ merely. Well, suppose I
had; suppose I had been ... what the Chichester girl wouldn't ... would
you still have wanted to marry me?" I would not admit to myself why I
had asked that question.
"I don't know, Olivia ... men, don't you know, not often ... but I want
to marry you now. I want it greatly." I held him off still, trying to
get my own experience in shape where I could leave it behind me.
"Such affairs never turn out well, do they?"
"Hardly ever, I believe."
"Unless you turn them into marriage," I hazarded.
"You know," he conjectured, "I've a notion that the kind of loving that
goes to making such affairs, can't be turned into marriage very easily.
It's a kind of subconscious knowledge of their unfitness that keeps us
from turning them into marriage in the first place."
"I wonder."
He let me be for the moment revolving many things in my mind.
"It wouldn't be the vision and the dream, Jerry. You and I----"
"Well, what of it? It might be something better. Something neither of us
ever had, really. It would be company."
"No, I've never had it." I remembered how blank the issue of my work had
been to Helmeth Garrett.
"Well, then, ... we have years of work in us yet. I'll buy Polatkin out
of the theatre." He was going off at a tangent of what we might do
together, but I had thought of something more pertinent.
"We might solve the problem of how to keep our art and still be happy."
"We might." He was looking down on me with great content, but quite
soberly. "Tell me, Olivia, suppose we shouldn't, even with the
unhappiness, with all you have been through, would you rather be what
you are, or like the others?" We were silent as we thought back across
the years together; there was very little by this time that we did not
know of one another.
"No," I said at last, "if being different meant being like the others,
I'd not choose to have it any different."
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.