A Woman of Genius Part 35

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 circ.u.mstances, have faced renunciation.

It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and known, that checked and hara.s.sed 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 G.o.ds 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. G.o.d!

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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion.

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 un.o.bserved 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 att.i.tude 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 ash.o.r.e 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 ash.o.r.e 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 circ.u.mstance 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 G.o.d, 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 ash.o.r.e? 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