A Woman of Genius Part 13

"You remember that Garrett boy that was visiting at his uncle's? He called that night; the night you were engaged to Tommy."

"Yes, I remember. You sent him away?"

"He wasn't suitable at all ... smoking, and driving about on Sunday that way...." Her tone was defensive. "He left a letter that night----"

"Mother! You didn't tell me!"

"I was thinking it over ... I had a right ... you were too young!"

"Mother ... did you read it?"

"I ... looked at it. You hadn't met him but once and I had a right to know; and that night you were engaged. I took it for a sign."

"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable loss.

"I sent it back ... and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully, despairingly wrong.

"I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian, Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that distinction and I laughed.

"Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers."

"Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that.

"Tell me what became of him--of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?"

"He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West, Olivia."

I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt so, pa.s.sionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that a.s.surance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen.

"Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any more children?"

"Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first one. We didn't think it advisable."

"Well, if you can manage it that way ..." There was a trace in her tone of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to rea.s.sure her.

"When I was in the hospital the doctor told me ..." I could see the deep flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take up her thought again.

"I used to think those things weren't right, Olivia, but I don't know.

Sometimes I think it isn't right, either, to bring them into the world when there is no welcome for them." She struggled with the admission.

"You and I, Olivia, we never got on together."

"But that's all past now, mother." She clung to me for a while for rea.s.surance.

"I hope so, I hope so; but still there are things I've always wanted to tell you. When you wrote me about going on the stage ... there are wild things in you, Olivia, things I never looked for in a daughter of mine, things I can't understand nor account for unless--unless it was I turned you against life ... my kind of life ... before you were born. Many's the time I've seen you hating it and I've been harsh with you; but I wanted you should know I was being harsh with myself ..."

"Mother, dear, is it good for you to talk so?"

"Yes, yes, I've wanted to. You see it was after your father came home from the war and we were all broken up. Forester was sickly, and there was the one that died. So when I knew you were coming, I--hated you, Olivia. I wanted things different. I hated you ... until I heard you cry. You cried all the time when you were little, Olivia, and it was I that was crying in you. I've expected some punishment would come of it."

"Oh, hush, hush mother! I shouldn't have liked it either in your place.

Besides, they say--the scientists--that it isn't so that things before you are born can affect you as much as that." She moved her head feebly on the pillows in deep-rooted denial.

"They can say that, but we've never got on. There's things in you that aren't natural for any daughter of mine. They can say that, Olivia, but we--we know."

"Yes, mother, we know."

I took her hands again and nursed them against my cheek; after a time tears began to drip down her flaccid cheeks and I wiped them away for her.

"Don't, mother, don't! We get along now, anyway! And as for the things in me which are different, do you know, mother, I'm getting to know that they are the best things in me."

I honestly thought so; and after all these years I think so now.

I wheeled her into the bedroom presently, where she fell into the light slumber of the feeble, and seemed afterward hardly to remember, but I was glad then to have talked it all out with her, for though she lived nearly two years after, before I saw her again another stroke had deprived her of articulateness.

CHAPTER VIII

I went home to my husband after it began to seem certain that my mother's condition would not change for some time, but I knew in the going that neither Tommy nor Higgleston could ever present themselves to me again in the aspect of an absolute destiny. By the incidents of the past few weeks I had been pulled free from the obsession of inevitableness with which my life had clothed itself until now; I stood outside of it and questioned it in the light of what it might have been, what it might yet become. Suppose I had received Helmeth Garrett's letter; suppose my interest in Mr. O'Farrell had wavered a hair's breadth out of the community of work into that more personal and particular pa.s.sion----?

I quaked in the cold blasts which blew on me out of unsuspected doors opening on my life.

And still I went back to Higgleston. There seemed nothing else to do. I think I deceived myself with the notion that there was something in Tommy's resistance to a more acceptable destiny, that could be resolved and dissipated by the proper stimulus. But I knew, in fact, that he and Higgleston suited one another admirably. To my husband, that he should keep a clothing store in a town of five thousand inhabitants was part of the great natural causation. The single change to which our condition was liable was that the business might take a turn which would enable us to move out of the store into a house of our own. It had not occurred to Tommy to take a turn himself. The Men's Tailors and Outfitters lay like most business in Higgleston, in the back water, rocking at times in the wake of the world traffic, but never moving with it. There was a vague notion of progress abroad which resulted in our going through the motions of the main current. The Live Business Men organized a Board of Trade and rented a room to hold meetings in, but I do not remember that when they had met, anything came of it. The great tides of trade went about the world and our little fleet rocked up and down. If I had ever had any hope that Tommy and I might out of our common stock, somehow hoist sail and make a way out of it, in that spring and summer I completely lost it.

I believe Tommy thought we were perfectly happy. Considering how things turned out, I am glad to have it so; but the fact is, there was not between us so much as a common taste in furniture. In the five years of married life, our home had filled up with articles which by colour and line and unfitness jarred on every sense. Tommy had what he was pleased to call an ear for music, and if the warring discords of our furnishings could have been translated into sound he would have gone distracted with it; being as it was he bought me a fire screen for my birthday.

Miss Rathbone hand-painted it for the Baptist bazaar, and Tommy had bought it at three times what we could have afforded for a suitable ornament. It was his notion of our relations that we and the Rathbones should do things like that by one another. I suppose you can find the like of that fire screen at some county fair still in Ohianna, but you will find nothing more atrocious. Tommy liked to have it sitting well out in the room where he could admire it. He would remark upon it sometimes with complacency, evenings after the store was shut up, before he sat down in his old coat and slippers to read the paper. Occasionally I read to him out of a magazine or a play I had picked up, in the intervals of which I used to catch him furtively keeping up with his newspaper out of the tail of his eye.

Now and then we went out to a sociable or to the Rathbones for supper.

Less frequently we had them to a meal with us. It was characteristic of business partnerships in Higgleston that they involved you in obligations of chicken salad and banana cake and the best tablecloth.

Tommy enjoyed these occasions, and if he had allowed himself to criticise me at all, it would have been for my inept.i.tude at the happy social usage. Things went on so with us month after month.

And if you ask me why I didn't take the chance life offers to women to justify themselves to the race, I will say that though the hope of a child presents itself sentimentally as opportunity, it figures primarily in the calculation of the majority, as a question of expense. The hard times foreseen by Burton Brothers hung black-winged in the air. We had not, in fact, been able to do more than keep up the interest on what was still due on the stock and fixtures. Nor had I even quite recovered the bodily equilibrium disturbed by my first encounter with the rending powers of life. There was a time when the spring came on in a fulness, when the procreant impulse stirred awake. I saw myself adequately employed shaping men for it ... maybe ... but the immediate deterring fact was the payment to be made in August.

I went on living in Higgleston where human intercourse was organized on the basis that whatever a woman has of intelligence and worth, over and above the sum of such capacity in man, is to be excised as a superfluous growth, a monstrosity. Does anybody remember what the woman's world was like in small towns before the days of woman's clubs? There was a world of cooking and making over; there was a world of church-going and missionary societies and ministerial cooperation, half grudged and half a.s.sumed as a virtue which, since it was the only thing that lay outside themselves, was not without extenuation. And there was another world which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers, heretical but persistent, of methods of circ.u.mventing it, of a secret practice of things openly condemned. It was a world that went half the time in faint-hearted or unwilling or rebellious antic.i.p.ation, and half on the broken springs of what as the subject of the endless, objectionable discussions, went by the name of "female complaints."

In all this there was no room for Olivia. Somehow the ordering of our four rooms over the store didn't appeal to me as a justification of existence, and I didn't care to undertake again matching the adventures of my neighbours in the field of domestic economy with mine in the department of self-expression. Let any one who disbelieves it try if he can a.s.sure the acceptance of his art on its merit as work, free of the implication of egotism. You may talk about a new frosting for cake, or an aeroplane you have invented, but you must not speak of a new verse form or a plastic effect.

All this time, in spite of my recent revulsion from it, I was consumed with the desire of acting. My new-found faculty ached for use. It woke me in the night and wasted me; I had wild thoughts such as men have in the grip of an unjustifiable pa.s.sion. All my imaginings at that time were of events, untoward, fantastic, which should somehow throw me back upon the stage without the necessity on my part, of a moral conclusion.

Sarah Croyden, to whom I wrote voluminously, could not understand why I resisted it; there was after all no actual opposition except what lay inherent in my traditions. Sarah had such a way of accepting life; she used it and her gift. Mine used me. I saw that it might even abuse me.

She went, by nature, undefended and unharmed from the two-edged sword that keeps the gates of Creative Art, but me it pierced even to the dividing of soul and spirit. My husband stood always curiously outside the consideration. I think he was scarcely aware of what went on in me; if any news of my tormented state reached him, he would have seen, except as it was mollified by affection, what all Higgleston saw in it, the restlessness of vanity, a craving for excitement, for praise, and a vague taint of irregularity. He was sympathetic to the point of admitting that Higgleston was dull; he thought we might join the Chatauqua Society.

"Or you might get up a cla.s.s," he suggested hopefully; "it would give you something to think about."

"Teach," I cried; "TEACH! when I'm just aching to learn!"

"Well, then," he achieved a triumph of reasonableness, "if you don't know enough to teach in Higgleston, how are you going to succeed on the stage?"