A Woman of Genius Part 23

"Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name."

"In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act.

"Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were able to see it--there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve; it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me.

Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell.

"I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before Miss--Miss----"

"Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't have told you except that you seem to know."

"I was expecting another name. Wasn't she--wasn't she married once? A fellow by the name of Lawrence."

"Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."

"You can't tell me anything about him worse than I know myself." From the earnestness of his tone I judged that he had suffered something at the hands of Lawrence. "But I'll say this for him, he didn't stay with the other woman; she followed him and found him, but he wouldn't stay with her."

"I don't see that that proves anything except that he was the greater scoundrel. The other woman was his wife."

"It proves that he loved Miss Croyden best--that he couldn't bear the other woman after her." I thought it was no use matching ethical ideals with him and I let the matter drop. It came back to me next day that if he had been with O'Farrell in Lawrence's time, he might have known something of the other Shamrocks. I meant to ask him about it in the morning, but put it off as I observed that the recollection of it seemed to have stirred him past the point of being able to sleep. He was pale in the morning, and the rings under his eyes stood out plainly; he had the whipped look of a man who has been so long accused of misdemeanour that he comes at last to believe he has done it. I could see the impulse to confess hovering over him, and the hope that I might find in his misbehaviours the excusing clue which he was vaguely aware must be there, but couldn't himself lay hands on. I suppose souls in the Pit must have movements like that--seeking in one another the extenuations they can't admit to themselves.

We didn't, however, strike the note of confidence until it was evening.

Griffin kept up the form of looking for an engagement, which occupied his morning hours, and in the afternoon Jerry came in to see how I had come through the cold spell, and to win my interest with his wife to consent to his going as far as St. Louis with "The Futurist." I forget what reasons he had for thinking it advisable, except that they were all more or less complicated with Miss Filette.

"But, heavens, Jerry, haven't you ever heard of the freemasonry of women? How can you think my sympathies wouldn't be with your wife?

Especially in her condition."

"It's only for a week; and, you know, except for her fussing, she is perfectly well. And look here, Olivia, you know exactly why I have to have--other things; why I can't just settle down to being--the plain head of the family." His tone was accusing.

"I know why you _think_ you have to. Honest, Jerry, is it so imperative as all that?"

"Honest to G.o.d, Olivia, unless I'm ... interested ... I can't write a word." His glance travelling over my dull little room and makeshift furniture, the cheap kerosene lamp, the broken hinge of the stove. "You ought to know," he drove it home to me. I felt myself involved by my toleration of Griffin in a queer kind of complicity.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview, and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon, when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be with the play, meant advertising.

I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's vagaries.

"I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about it," I protested. Griffin shook his head.

"It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats into you."

I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She looked gnawed upon!"

"Miss Dean, you mean?"

"I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no cause. How well did you know her?"

"I ... she ... I was married to her." His face was mottled with embarra.s.sment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I knew she couldn't act.... I can't myself, but I know it when I see it.

Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I thought I could pull her along."

"She _has_ got on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth.

"Yes, she had something almost as good as acting ... she could get hold of people."

"She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?"

"Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I--I got out of her way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which wanted tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an incurable strain.

"Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"

"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."

"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal instance.

"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear you'll lose them altogether."

"I understand."

The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light, and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.

"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is just ... Personality ... whatever there is that we act to."

"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."

"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now."

So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but there was n.o.body to open the gates for me.

I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself to my necessity.

"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I could send you something every month----" I cut her off absolutely.

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

"Not while you have me;" she was firm with me. "Besides, you don't really know that Cecelia----"

"Didn't buy her diamond sunburst on thirty-five a week!" I told her all that Griffin had said. Sarah looked worried.

"I'll tell you about the diamonds. About a year ago, while you were with the Hardings, she got into trouble. Oh, she loved him as much as she was able! He gave her the diamonds; but Cecelia cared. And then when the trouble came, he deserted her. That's what Cecelia couldn't understand.

She had never given anything before, and she didn't realize that that had been her chief advantage. It gave her a scare."

But in spite of Sarah's confidence in Cecelia's bitter experience keeping her straight, I could see that she had taken what Griffin had told me to heart. A day or two later she referred to the matter again.

"If she goes over the line once, and doesn't have to pay for it, she is lost." She was standing at my window looking out over the roofs and chimneys cased in ice, and she might, for all the mark her profession has left on her, been looking across the pasture bars. I was irritated at her detachment, and her interest, in the face of my own problem, in an affair so unrelated as Cecelia Brune's.

"Why do you care so much?"