A Woman of Genius Part 38

Pauline looked aghast; vague recollections of the actress heroines of fiction shaped her thought.

"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you--that you were----"

"His mistress," I finished for her bluntly. "Is that the only thing your imagination takes offence at? Isn't it enough for me to tell you that he orders my corsets for me?" That did reach her. I could see her struggle with the habitual effort to put the unwelcome fact down, anywhere out of sight and knowledge, under the cotton wool of a moral sentiment. Even now if she could escape being implicated in my predicament by avoiding the knowledge of it, she would not only do that but convict herself of superiority as well. My gorge rose against it.

"But if I didn't sell myself to the Jew," I drove it home to her, "it was chiefly because he was decenter to me than the circ.u.mstance gave me a right to expect. I came near doing it for a cheaper man and for a cheaper price, a man who had deserted one wife, and ... a bigamist in fact. If you don't know that there were days when I would have sold myself for something to eat, it was because you didn't take the pains to."

"But you never said a word. Of course if you had told me the truth ..."

she floundered and saved herself on what she believed to be a just resentment, but I had no notion of letting her off so easily. I did not know exactly how we had got launched on the subject, it had not been in my mind to do so when she came in, but all the events of the past year seemed to lead up to it, to come somehow to the point of rupture against her smooth acceptance of my success as being derived from the same process as her own.

"I did tell you that I was in need of money to put me in the way of earning a living," I insisted. "I did not ask you for charity; what I offered you was the chance of a business investment, one that rendered the investor its due return. The fact that you did not know enough about the business to know how good it was"--I forestalled what I saw rising to her lips--"had nothing to do with it. You were my friend and professed to admire my talent; I had a right to have what I said about it heard respectfully." I had got up from the pink and white sofa where our talk had begun, and was trailing about the room in my breakfast gown, and the suggestion of staginess in the way the folds of it followed my movements, irritated me with the certainty that the effect of it on Pauline would be to mitigate the sincerity of what I said.

"You'd known me long enough," I accused her, "to know that I wouldn't have asked for money until I was in the last extremity, and then I wouldn't have asked it for myself. I don't know that it would have mattered if I had starved, but my Gift was worth saving."

"I didn't dream ..." she began. "I hadn't any idea ..."

"Well, why didn't you ask Henry, then? Henry knows what becomes of women on the stage when they can't make a living." This was nearer to the mark than I had meant to let myself go, but I could see that it carried no illumination. She drew up her wrap and braced herself for one more gallant effort.

"The things you've been through, my dear ... I don't wonder you feel bitter. But when it has all come out right, why not forget it?"

"Oh, right! Right!"

The room was full of vases and floral tokens of the triumph of the night before, and as I swung about with my arms out, disdaining her judgment of rightness for me, I knocked over a great basket of roses and orchids which had come from Cline and Erskine. I don't suppose Pauline had ever knocked over anything in her life, and the violence of my gesture must have stood for some unloosening of the bonds of convention, with an implication which only now began to work through to her.

"You don't mean to say, Olivia, that you ... that you are not ... not a good woman?"

"Oh," I said again, "good ... good ... what does it all mean? I'm a successful actress."

"Olivia!"

"Well, no, if you insist on knowing, I'm not what you would call a good woman." I threw it at her as though it had been a peculiar kind of scorn heaped up on her for being what I had just denied myself to be. I saw myself for once with all my thwarted and misspent instincts toward the proper destiny of women, enmeshed and crippled, not by any propensity for sinning, but by the conditions of loving which women like Pauline set up for me. "And if you want to know," I said, "why I'm not a good woman, it is because women like you don't make it seem particularly worth while."

"Oh," she gasped, "this is horrible ... horrible!" The word came out in a whisper. I saw at last that she was done with me, that the only thought that was left to her was to get away, to put as much s.p.a.ce as possible between us. I got around with my hand on the door to prevent her.

"Pauline, Pauline!" I cried almost wildly, as if even at the last she could have helped me from myself. "Can't you remember that we grew up together, that we had the same training, the same ideals? Can't you remember that when we began I thought that the life you had chosen for yourself was the best, that I thought I had chosen it for myself too?

Only--for heaven's sake, Pauline, try to understand me--there is something that chooses for us. Don't you know that I wouldn't have been any different from what you are if I hadn't been forced? Haven't you seen how I've been beaten back from all that I tried to be? All this"--I threw out my arms, as I stood against the door, to include all that had entered by implication in our conversation--"it had to come, and it came wrong because you won't understand that a Gift has its own way with us."

I could see, though, that she wasn't understanding in the least, that she was badly scared and even indignant at being forced to listen to a justification of what, by her code, could have no justification. She was standing not far from me, crushed against the wall, as though by the weight of opprobriousness that I heaped upon her, and her whole attention was centred on the door and the chance of getting out of it and away from what, in the mere despair of reaching her intelligence with it, I flung out from me now wildly.

"I suppose," I scoffed, "that it never occurs to you that a gifted woman could be as delicate and feminine as anybody, if only you didn't make her right to fostering care and protection conditional on her giving up her gift altogether. You," I demanded, "who tie up all the moral values of living to your own little set of behaviours, what right have you to deny us the opportunity to be loved honestly because you can't at the same time make us over into replicas of yourselves?"

I was sick with all the shames and struggles of the women I had known. I forgot the door and went over to her.

"You," I said, "who fatten your moral superiority on the best of all we produce, how do you suppose you are going to make us value the standards you set up, when the price you despise us for paying, nine times out of ten we pay to the men who belong to you? What right have you to judge what we have done when you've neither help nor understanding to offer us in the doing? What right ... what right?" For the moment I had turned away in the vehemence of my indignation; I was pacing up and down. In the instant when my attention was distracted from the door, Pauline made a dart for it. I could hear her scurrying down the hall, but I went on walking up and down in my room and talking aloud to her. I was beside myself with the sum of all indignities. Was it not this set of prejudices which for the moment had presented itself in the person of Pauline Mills, which at every turn of my life had been erected against the bourgeoning of my gift? Was it not in the process of combating the tradition of the preciousness of women as inherent in particular occupations, that I had lost the inestimable preciousness of myself? Was it for what came out of Pauline's frame of life--I thought of Cecelia Brune here--that I had sacrificed my public possession of the man I loved. And what came out of it that was more to the world than what I had to offer? Had I cut myself off from the comfort and stability of a home, simply because in my situation as famous tragedienne I didn't see my way to bring up Helmeth's children so as to make little Pauline Millses of them? I was still raging formlessly in this fas.h.i.+on when Miss Summers, our ingenue, came to tell me that the cab waited to take us to the theatre for the matinee.

All through the performance, which I was told went remarkably well, I was conscious of nothing but the seismic shudders and upheavals of my world too long subjected to strain. It came back on me in intervals through the evening performance; I was physically sick with it. But by degrees through its subsidence, new worlds began to rise. By the time I left the theatre that night I knew what I would do.

It had been a mistake, a natural but cruel mistake, for Helmeth and me to suppose that a way of living could at any time be worth the very sap and source of life. Love was the central fact around which all modes and occupations should arrange themselves. Let us but love then, and live as we may. In all the world there was no need like the need I had for his breast, his arm.

Always the point of our conclusions had been that I agreed with him, that I _had_ thought that failing to repeat the pattern of their mother in his children, I had failed in all, that I didn't any more than he see my way to keeping on with my work and meeting him at the door every night when he came home, in the sort of garment that, in the ladies'

journals, went by the name of house gown. I laughed to think that we had not seen before that it was ridiculous. I had no more doubt now, no more trepidation. What burned in me was so clear a flame that he could not but be illuminated. Only let me find him, let me go to him again. At the hotel desk where I paused for my key I asked them to send up telegraph blanks to my room. With them came letters forwarded from New York. I started, as one does at an unexpected presence, to find an envelope among them with his familiar superscription. For the first time I would rather not have had a letter from him; it would be interposing a fresher picture between me and my new resolution, to put him for the moment farther from me.

I saw then that the letter in my hand had been posted at Los Angeles; it was as though he had leaped suddenly all that distance nearer than his Chilicojote, Mexico. I noticed that it was a very thin letter. A thousand conjectures rushed upon me, not one of them with any relativity to what I would find, for when I tore it open there floated out a printed slip. It was a clipping from a Pasadena newspaper and announced his engagement to Edith Stanley.

CHAPTER IX

There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came, though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ...

sometimes even yet....

For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn't in me to understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it.

There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with her husband's declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie was expecting another baby and wasn't to be thought of, so I turned at last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all America stood for that high identification of his work with the source of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again, practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is loving that is the fructifying act.

That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss, dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build.

I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else has happened to me, I am at least a success.

I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some sort of brokers' convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to face with them.

They were walking in the lobby. Pauline was in what for her, was evening dress, her manner a little daunted, not quite carrying it off with the air of being established at the pivot of existence which she could manage so well at Evanston. They were walking up and down, waiting, it seemed, for friends to join them, and they wheeled under the great chandelier just in time to come squarely across us. I could see Pauline clutch at her husband's arm, and the catch in her breath with which she jerked herself back from the impulse to nod, and looked deliberately away from me. For her, the evidence of my misdoing hung about me like an exhalation. She was afraid I should insist on speaking to her and some of her friends would come up and see me doing it. I didn't, however, offer to speak to her, I looked instead at Henry. I stood still in my tracks and looked at him steadily and curiously. I wished very much to know what he meant to do about it. He turned slowly as I looked, from deep red to mottled purple, and very much against his will his head bowed to me; his body, to which Pauline clung, dared not move lest she detect it, but quite above and independent of his smooth-vested, self-indulgent front, his head bowed to me. So went out of my life thirty years of intimacy which never succeeded in being intimate.

But though one may excise thirty years of one's past without a tremor, one may not do it without a scar. To allay the irritation of Pauline's slight, I came near to being as abandoned as she believed, as I had moments of believing myself. For the possibility that Helmeth Garrett had found in our relation of setting it aside, made it at times of a cheapness which seemed to extend to me who had entertained it. I should have been happier, I thought, to have taken it lightly as he did. If so many women who had begun as I had begun, had gone on repeating the particular instance, wasn't it because they found that that was the easiest, the only possible way to bear it? How else could one ease the pain of loving except by being loved again? And if I was to lose the Pauline Millses of the world by what had been entered upon so sincerely, why, then, what more had I to risk on the light adventure?

All this time I was sick with the need of being confirmed in my faith in myself as a person worthy to be loved, to feel sure that since my love had missed its mark, it wasn't I at least that had fallen short of it.

It was that summer Jerry had been driven by some such need I imagined, as I admitted in myself, to put his future in jeopardy by another marriage which on the face of it, offered even a more immediate occasion for s.h.i.+pwreck than the first, and I hadn't scrupled to put forth to save him, the new capacity to charm which had come upon me with the experience of not caring any more myself to be charmed. I knew; it would have been a poor tribute to my skill as an actress if I hadn't by this time known, the moves by which a man who is susceptible of being played upon at all, can be drawn into a personal interest; and though I didn't then, and do not now believe that a love serviceable for the uses of living together, can be built up out of "made" love, I was willing for the time to pit myself against the game that was played by Miss Chichester for Jerry's peace of mind. I played it all the better for not being, as the young lady was, personally involved in the stake. That I thought afterward of doing anything for myself with what I had got, when at last I had by this means brought Jerry down from Newport to my place on the Hudson for a week end, was in part due to the extraordinary charm that Jerry displayed under the stimulus of a male interest in me, of whom for years he had thought of as being quite outside such consideration. There was a kind of wistfulness about Jerry when he was a little in love, that made him irresistible; no doubt I was also a little warmed by the fire which I had blown up.

He was to come from Sat.u.r.day to Monday, and the moment I saw him getting down from the dog-cart I had sent to the station for him, I knew that I had only to let that interest take its course, to find myself provided with a lover, whether or no I could command my heart to loving. I do not remember that I came to any conscious decision about it, but I know that I yielded myself to the growing sense of intimacy, that I consciously drew, as one draws perfume from a flower, all that came to me from him: his new loverliness, touched still with the old solicitous sense of the preciousness of my gift. I dramatized to the full the possibility of what hung in the air between us, I dressed myself, I set the stage accordingly.

It was Sat.u.r.day evening after dinner that I sent him to the garden to smoke, keeping the house long enough to fix his attention on my joining him, by wondering what kept me, and so overdid my part by just so much as I made myself conscious of the taint of theatricality. For as I went down the veranda steps to meet him in the rose walk, the response of the actress in me to the perfectness of the setting and my fitness for the part of the great lady of romance, drew up out of my past a faint reminder of myself going up another pair of stairs so many years ago in the figure of an orphan child toiling through the world. Out of that memory there distilled presently a cold dew over all my purpose.

It was a perfect night, warm emanations from the earth shut in the smell of the garden, and light airs from the river stirred the full-leafed trees. At the bottom of the lawn the soft, full rush, of the Hudson made a stir like the hurrying pulse. Beyond the silver gleam of its waters, lay the farther bank strewn with primrose-coloured lights, and above that the moon, low and full-orbed and golden. Its diffusing light mixed and mingled with the shadow of the moving boughs. I was wearing about my shoulders a light scarf that from time to time blew out with the wind, and as we paced in the garden strayed across Jerry's breast and was caught back by me, but not before on its communicating thread, ran an electric spark. It must have been a good two hours after moonrise before we turned to go in, where the great hall lamp burned with a steady rose-red glow.

At the foot of the veranda a breeze sprang up fresher than before, that caught my scarf from me and wrapped us both in it as in a warm, suffusing mood. We were so close that I had instinctively to put up my hand as a barricade against what was about to come from him to me, and as I did so I was aware of something that rose up from some subterranean crypt in me ... that old romance of my mother's ... women like her, worlds of patient, overworking, women who could do without happiness if only they found themselves doing right. Somehow they had laid on me, the necessity of being true to the best I had known, because it was the best and had been founded in integrity and stayed on renunciations. I knew what I had come into the garden to do. I had planned for it. I thought myself prepared to take up, as many women of my profession did, the next best in place of the best which life had denied me, but my past was too strong for me. The unslumbering instinct that saves wild creatures before they are well awake, had whipped me out of the soft entanglement, and before Jerry could grasp the change of mood in me, I was halfway up the stair.

"This wind," I said, "I think it will blow up a rain before morning." I went on up before him. "You can see the river darkling below its surface, it does that before a change." I went on drawing the chairs back from the edge of the veranda, I called Elsa to fasten all the windows. When at last we came into the glow of the hall lamp, I could see his face white yet with what he had missed; he thought he had blundered. He caught at my hand as I gave him his bedroom candle in an effort to recapture what had just trembled in the air between us.

"Olivia! I say ... Olivia!"

"Your train leaves at nine-thirty," I reminded him. "I'll be up to pour your coffee."

I went into my room and blew out my candle. The warm summer air came in between the white curtains. I knelt down beside my bed; an old habit, long discontinued. I was too much moved to pray, but I continued to kneel there a long time listening to the soft shouldering of the maples against the wall outside the window. Far within me there was something which inarticulately knew that whatever the world might think of me, in spite of what I had confessed to Pauline, I was a good woman; I had loved Helmeth Garrett with the kind of love by which the world is saved.

Past all loss and forsaking, past loneliness and longing, there was something which had stirred in me which would never waken to a lighter occasion; and whether great love like that is the best thing that can happen to us or the most unusual, it had placed me forever beyond the reach of futility and cheapness.