A Woman of Genius Part 11

Whatever att.i.tude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands, the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me ...

words, looks ... sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the general att.i.tude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.

"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as far as that."

It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on, and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.

"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs.

Bettersworth--Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."

Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning, afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was that it left too much over.

"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.

I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible att.i.tudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.

"You dear, ridiculous child," she hovered over the point with indulgent patronage, "what will you think of next?"

Pauline herself was going through a phase at the time. They had moved out to a detached house at Evanston on account of its being better for the baby, and there was a visible diminution of her earlier effect of housewifely efficiency, in view of Henry's growing prosperity. You could see all Pauline's surfaces like a tulip bed in February, budding toward a new estimate of her preciousness in terms of her husband's income.

When she took me by the shoulders, holding me off from her to give play to the pose of amused, affectionate bewilderment, I could see just where the consciousness of a more acceptable femininity as evinced by her being provided with a cook and a housemaid, prompted her to this gracious glozing of my not being in quite so fortunate a case. I was to be the Wonder, the sport on the feminine bush, dear and extenuated, made adorably not to feel my excluding variation; an att.i.tude not uncommon in wives of well-to-do husbands toward women who work. It was an att.i.tude successfully kept up by Pauline Mills for as long as I provided her the occasion. Just at first I suspect I rather contributed to it by my own feeling of its being such a tremendous adventure for me, Olivia Lattimore, with Taylorville, Hadley's pasture and the McGee children behind me, to be going on the stage. How I exulted in it all, the hall bedroom where I finally settled across from Sarah Croyden, the worry of rehearsals, the baked smell of the streets bored through by the raw lake winds, the beckoning night lights--the vestibule of doors opening on the solemn splendour of the world.

At the rehearsals I met Cecelia Brune, if anything prettier than before, and quite perceptibly harder, and Jimmy Vantine, still in love with her, still with his bald crown not quite clean and the same objectionable habit of sidling about, fingering one's dress, laying hands on one as he talked. I met Manager O'Farrell, not a whit altered, and Miss Laurine Dean. I liked and I didn't like her. She drew by a certain warm charm of personality that repelled in closer quarters by its odours of sickliness. There was a quality in her beauty as of a flower kept too long in its gla.s.s, not so much withered as ready to fall apart. She had small appealing hands, such as moved one to take them up and handle them, and served somehow to mitigate a subtle impression of impropriety conveyed by her slight sidewise smile. She was probably good-natured by temperament and peevish through excessive use of cigarettes. She made a point of always speaking well of everybody, but it was a long time before I learned that no sort of blame was so deadly as her commendation. "Such a beautiful woman Miss Croyden is," she would say, "isn't it a pity about her nose," and though I had never thought of Sarah's nose as mitigating against her perfection, I found myself after that thinking of it. You could see that magnanimity, which was her chosen att.i.tude, was often a strain to her. I do not think she had any gift at all, but she had a perception of it that had enabled her to produce a very tolerable imitation of acting and kept her, in a covert way, inordinately jealous of the gift in others. She was jealous of mine.

It was not all at once I discovered it. In the beginning, because I never detected her in any of the obvious s.n.a.t.c.hings of lines and positions that went on at rehearsals, but even making a stand for me against incursions into my part which I was too unaccustomed to forestall, I thought of her as being of rather better strain than most of the company. I was probably the only member of it unaware of her deliberate measures not to permit me such a footing as might lead to my supplanting her with Manager O'Farrell, toward whom I began to find myself in what, for me, was an interesting and charming relation. It was a relation I should have been glad to maintain with any member of the company, but it was only O'Farrell who found himself equal to it. I was full and effervescing with the joy of creation; night by night as I felt the working of the living organism we should have been, transmitting supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very communicating act became a part of us, I felt myself also warming toward my fellow players. I was so charged I should have struck a spark from any one of them when we met, but for the fact that by degrees I discovered that they presented to me the negative pole.

I was aware of such communicating fluid between particular pairs of them. I saw it spark from eye to eye, heard it break in voices; it flashed like sheet lightning about our horizons on occasions of great triumph; but I was distinctly alive to the fact that the medium by which it was accomplished was turned from me. At times I was brushed by the wing of a suspicion that among the men, there was something almost predetermined in their denial of what was for me, the sympathetic, creative impulse. I was a little ashamed for them of the gaucherie of withholding what seemed so important to our common success, and yet I seemed always to be surprising all of them at it, except Jimmy Vantine and the manager. I couldn't of course, on account of his propensity for laying hands on one, take it from Jimmy, but between Mr. O'Farrell and me it ran with a pleasant, profitable warmth. I was conscious always of acting better the scenes I had with him. The thrill of them was never quite broken in off-the-stage hours. I felt myself sustained by it. For one thing the man had genuine talent, and I think besides Sarah Croyden and Jimmy Vantine, no one else in the company had very much. Jimmy had a gift, besmeared and discredited by his own cheapness, but O'Farrell had a real flowing genius and a degree of personal vitality that sketched him out as by fire from the flat Taylorville types I had known. We used to talk together about my own possibilities and I had many helpful hints from him, but in spite of this friendliness I never made any way with him against Miss Dean. Not that I tried, but by degrees I found that suggestions made and favours asked, were granted or accepted on the basis of their non-interference with our leading lady. I was not without intimations, which I usually disregarded because I found their conclusions impossible to maintain, that she even triumphed over me in little matters too inconsiderable to have been taken into account except on the understanding that we were pitted in a deliberate rivalry. I was hurt and amazed at times to discover that we presented this aspect to the rest of the company. I felt that I was being judged by my conduct of a business in which I was not engaged.

The situation, however, had not developed to such a pitch by the time we played in Kincade, that it could affect my pleasure in the visit Tommy paid me there; I was overjoyed to have the arms of my own man about me again; I was proud of his pride in my success as _Polly Eccles_, and pleased to have him and Sarah pleased with one another. I thought then that if I could only have Tommy and my work I should ask no more of destiny; I do not now see why I couldn't, but I like best to think of him as he seemed to me then, wholesome and good, raised by his joy of our reunion almost to my excited plane, generous in his sharing of my triumphs. It seemed for the moment to put my feet quite on solid ground.

I knew at last where I was.

It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate, convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her s.e.x attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow, commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels, irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at Louisville.

I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T, with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T.

Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a casual errand as my own.

But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home from the theatre more than an hour!

I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort.

Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It was part of the admitted business of the men of my cla.s.s to keep their women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman--with his mistress.

I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs; other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the dark circles under my eyes.

"What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted it out.

"Mr. O'Farrell ... I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room ... at a quarter of one. He was ... oh, Sarah ... he was!..." I relapsed again into the horror of it.

"Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently under the covers and got into bed beside me.

"Didn't you know?" she questioned.

"Did you?"

"No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to suggest it to you."

"Do the others know?"

"As much as we do. It has been going on a long time."

"And you put up with it--you go about with them?" I was astonished at the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it.

"My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many people do such things."

"I know--_wicked_ people. I never thought of its being done by anybody you liked."

"Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah Croyden.

"You mustn't think Mr. O'Farrell such a bad man. He is probably fond of her. In some respects he is a very good man. When I was--left, without a penny, he might have made terms with me. Some managers would. But he gave me a living salary and left me to myself. He has been very kind to me."

"But she----" I choked back my sick resentment to get at what had been tearing its way through my consciousness for the last three hours. "She must have thought that _that_ was what I wanted of him...."

"Well, it is natural she should be anxious, with other women about. She is in love with him."

"Did you think so? About me, I mean?"

"No," said Sarah. "No, I didn't think so."

It was light enough now to show the outline of the drifts along the sills and the fine gritty powder which the wind dashed intermittently against the panes; the filter of day under the scant blinds brought out in the affair streaks of vulgarity as evident as the pattern of the paper on the wall. It seemed to borrow cheapness from the broken castor of the bureau, as from my recollection of the eaten face of the clock and the leaning chandelier. I sat up in the bed and laid hold of Sarah in my eagerness to get clear of what by my mere knowledge of it, seemed an unbearable complicity.

"I had a feeling for him," I admitted. "I could act better with him; but it was different from that--you know it was different."

"Yes," said Sarah, "I know. I know because I am that way myself; it is _like_ that, but it isn't that." I was still, holding my breath while she considered; we were very close upon the twined roots of s.e.x and art.

"There's a feeling that goes with acting, with other sorts of things, painting and music, maybe, a feeling of your wanting to get _through_ to something and lay hold of it, and your not being able to leaves you ...

aching somehow, and you think if there's a particular person ... I think O'Farrell would understand ... it is being able to act makes you know the difference I suppose. He really can act you know, and you can, but Dean wouldn't understand, nor the others. My--Mr. Lawrence didn't understand!" It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me.

"Sometimes I think they might have felt the difference just at first, but n.o.body told them and they got used to thinking it is ... the other thing." She drew me down into the bed again and covered me. "You mustn't take it to hard ... we all go through it once ... and you are safe so long as you know."

"But I can't go on with it." I was positive on that point. "Sarah, Sarah, don't say I have to go on with it."

"I know you can't. But you just have to."

"I should never be able to face either of them again without showing that I know."

"And then the others will know and they will think ..."

I threw out my arms, seeing how I was trapped. I wanted to cry out on them; to despise the woman openly. "And they will think that I am jealous ... that I wanted it myself...."

I rolled in the bed and bit my hands with shame and anger. Sarah caught me in her arms and held me until the paroxysm pa.s.sed. I was quieted at last from exhaustion.