A Woman of Genius Part 33

"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 G.o.d ... it's been before G.o.d!"

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 rea.s.sure 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 G.o.d--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 pa.s.sion--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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sion, 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 embarra.s.sed, 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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.