The week that Tommy went up to Chicago to do his summer buying, we made a practice of closing rather early in the long, enervating evenings, since hardly any customer could have been inveigled into the store on any account. I found it particularly irritating then, to have Mr. Montague leaning across the counter to me with a manner that would have caused the dogs in the street to suspect him of intrigue. The second or third time this happened I made a point of slipping around to Mr. Rathbone with the suggestion that if he would shut up and go home I would take the books upstairs with me and attend them.
I was indifferent whether or not Mr. Montague should hear me, but I judged he had not, for far from accepting it as a hint that I wished to get rid of him, that air he had of covert understanding appeared to have increased in him like a fever. He made no attempt to resume the conversation, but stood tapping his boot with a small cane he affected, a flush high up under the puffy eyes, the corners of his mouth loosened, every aspect of the man fairly bristling with an objectionable maleness. I made believe to be busy putting stock in order, and in a minute more I could hear old Rathbone come puttering out of his corner to draw the dust cloths over the racks of ready-made suits and, after what seemed an interminable interval, fumbling at the knobs of the safe.
"Oh," I snatched at the opportunity, "I changed the combination; let me show you." I was around beside him in a twinkling.
"Good-night," I called to Montague over my shoulder.
"Good-night," he said; the tone was charged. The fumbling of the locks covered the sound of his departure. I got Mr. Rathbone out at the door at last, and locked it behind him. I turned back to lower the flame of the acetylene lamp and in the receding flare of it between the shrouded racks I came face to face with Mr. Montague. He stood at the outer ring of the light and in the shock of amazement I gave the last turn of the button which left us in a sudden blinding dark. I felt him come toward me by the sharp irradiation of offensiveness.
"Oh, you clever little joker, you!" The tone was fatuous.
I dodged by instinct and felt for the button again to throw on the flood of light; it caught him standing square in the middle of the aisle in plain sight from the street; almost unconsciously he altered his attitude to one less betraying, but the response of his mind to mine was not so rapid.
"I'm going to shut up the store," I was very quiet about it. "You'll oblige me by going – "
"Oh, come now; what's the use? I thought you were a woman of the world."
I got behind the counter, past him toward the door.
"You an actress … you don't mean to say! By Jove, I'm not going to be made a fool of after such an encouragement! I'm not going without – "
"Mr. Montague," I said, "Tillie Hemingway is coming to stay with me nights; she will be here in a few minutes; you'd better not let her find you here." I unbarred the door and threw it wide open.
"Oh, come now – " He struggled for some footing other than defeat. "Of course, if you can't meet me like a woman of the world – you're a nice actress, you are!" I looked at him; the steps and voices of passersby sounded on the pavement; he went out with his tail between his legs. I locked the door after him and double locked it.
I climbed up to my room and locked myself in that. The boiling of my blood made such a noise in my ears that I could not hear Tillie Hemingway when she came knocking, and the poor girl went away in tears. After a long time I got to bed and sat there with my arms about my knees. I did not feel safe there; I knew I should never be safe again except in that little square of the world upon which the footlights shone, from which the tightening of the reins of the audience in my hands, should justify my life to me. I was sick with longing for it, aching like a woman abandoned for the arms of her beloved. I fled toward it with all my thought from illicit solicitation, but it was not the husband of my body I thought of in that connection, but the choice of my soul.
People wonder why sensitive, self-respecting women are not driven away from the stage by the offences that hedge it; they are driven deeper and farther into its enfoldment. There is nothing to whiten the burning of its shames but the high whiteness of its ultimate perfection. It is so with all art, not back in the press of life, but forward on some over-topping headland, one loses behind the yelping pack and eases the sting of resentment. I did not agree in the beginning to make you understand this. I only tell you that it is so. All that night I sat with my head upon my knees and considered how I might win back to it.
I tried, when my husband came home, to put the incident to him in a way that would stand for my new-found determination. I did not get so far with it. I saw him shrink from the mere recital with a man's timorousness.
"Oh, come – he couldn't have meant so bad as that." His male dread of a "situation" plead with me not to insist upon it. "And he went just as soon as you told him to. Of course if he had tried to force you … but you say yourself he went quietly."
He was seeing and shrinking from what Higgleston would get out of the incident in the way of vulgar entertainment if I insisted on his taking it up; by the code there, I shouldn't have been subject to such if I hadn't invited it.
"Of course," he enforced himself, "you did right to turn him down, but I don't believe he'll try it again."
"He won't have a chance. I'm going back on the stage so soon;" the implication of my tone must have got through even Tommy's unimaginativeness; he said the only bitter thing that I ever heard from him.
"Well, if you hadn't gone on the stage in the first place it probably wouldn't have happened."
He came round to the situation in another frame when he learned that I had written to Sarah putting matters in train for an engagement.
"You will probably be away all winter," he said. "It seems to me, Olivia, that you don't take any account of the fact that I am fond of you." We were sitting on a little shelf of a back balcony we had, for the sake of coolness, and I went and sat on his knee.
"I'm fond of you, Tommy, ever so. But I can't stand the life here; it smothers me. And we don't do anything; we don't get anywhere."
"I don't know what you mean, Olivia; we're building up quite a business; we'll be able to make a payment this year, and as the town improves – "
"Oh, Tommy, come away; come away into the world with me. Let us go out and do things; let us be part of things."
"Higgleston's good enough for me. We're building up trade, and everybody says the town is sure to go ahead – "
"Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what do I care about a business here if we lose the whole world – and we'll be old and gray before we get the business paid for. Oh, it isn't because I don't care about you, Tommy, because I am not satisfied with you; it is the glory of the world I want, and the wonder of Art, and great deeds going up and down in it! I want us to have that, Tommy; to have it together … you and I, and not another. It's all there in the world, Tommy, all the colour and the splendour … great love and great work … let us go out and take it; let us go…" I had slipped down from his knees to my own as I talked, pleading with him, and I saw, by the light of the lamp from within, his face, charged with pained bewilderment, settle into lines of habitual resistance to the unknown, the unknowable. My voice trailed out into sobbing.
"Of course, Olivia, I don't want to keep you if you are not happy here, but I have to stay myself." His voice was broken but determined, with the determination of a little man not seeing far ahead of him. "I have to keep the business together."
I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September. Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction.
The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it very aptly.
"I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me.
CHAPTER IX
We had the good fortune that year, Sarah and I, to be with a manager who redeemed many O'Farrells. The Hardings – for his wife, under her stage name of Estelle Manning, played with him and was the better half of all his counsels – were of the sort of actor-managers to whom, if the American stage ever arrives at anything commensurate with its opportunity, it will owe much. They were not either of them of the stripe of genius, but up to the limit of their endowment, sound, sincere and able to interpret life to the people through the virtue of being so humanly of the people themselves. It was very good for me to be with them, not only for the stage craft they taught me, but for the healing of my mind against the contagion of irresponsibility. The Hardings taught me my way about the professional world, the management of my gift, its market value, but I am not sure I do not owe much more to the fact that they loved one another quite simply and devotedly, and to the certainty which they seemed to make for us all that loyalty, truth, and forbearance were part of the natural order of things.
I was aware, when I was with the Shamrocks, of a subconscious current against which any mention of my husband appeared a kind of gaucherie; it was wholesome for me then, to find it expected of me by the Hardings that I should act better after I had received a long, affectionate letter from Tommy, and to be able to refer to it quite unaffectedly. Everybody in the company took the greatest interest in his coming on at Christmas to spend four days with me.
We had a carefully chosen company, and clean, straightforward plays which met with gratifying success. At the end of February, when traffic was tied up during the great ice storm, I was near enough to get home to Taylorville and spend a week there.
Tommy came to meet me and we were all happy together, mother sitting nearly inarticulate in her chair, pleased as a child to see me doing all the parts in our repertory, and Effie reading my press notices to whoever could be got to listen to them. I seemed to have found the groove in which the wheels of my life went round smoothly; I was justified of much that in my girlhood I had been made to feel so sorely, set me reprehensibly apart. I remember Forester telling how he had heard Charlie Gowers retailing the incident of my having slapped him when he tried to kiss me, getting a kind of reflected glory out of the incident being so much to my credit.
I went back to Higgleston in May and was happier than I had been in the six years of my married life. I had my work and my husband; all that I wanted now was to bring the two into closer relation; it seemed not unlikely of accomplishment. With what I had saved of my salary, Tommy was able to make quite a payment on the business, and with the release of that pressure the whole grip of Higgleston seemed to be loosed from him. When I suggested that I might get permanent engagements in Chicago or St. Louis, where he could establish himself, he was disposed to view it as not unthinkable in connection with what might be expected from a live business man.
I had to leave home early in the autumn for rehearsals, and to leave Tommy, by some chance of the weather a trifle under it. I felt I shouldn't have been able to do so if my husband and Miss Rathbone hadn't been eminently on those terms that fulfilled Tommy's ideal in respect to the womenfolk of his partner. Very likely, as she maintained, it was a feeling of caste that rendered her professional affectionateness offensive to me. One had to admit that when she applied it to her shuffling, peering old father, with red-lidded eyes and a nose that occasionally wanted wiping, it was every way commendable. At any rate I was glad on this occasion to take what she did for old Rathbone as an assurance that if Tommy fell ill, or anything untoward, he wouldn't lack for anything a woman might do for him.
That winter Mr. Harding starred me, and what a wonderful winter it was! Sarah says, taking account of the cold and the condition of the roads, it was rather a hard one, but I was floated clear of all such considerations on the crest of success. Nothing whatever seemed to have gone wrong with it except that Tommy failed me at Christmas. He was to have spent a week, but wired me at the last moment that he could not leave before Wednesday, and then when he came stayed only until Saturday. He had something to say about the pressure of the holiday trade in neckties and cuff links such as the ladies of Higgleston habitually invested in, on behalf of their masculine members, and all the time he was with me, wore that efflorescence of appreciation which I have long since learned to recognize as the overt sign of male delinquency.
If I thought of it at all in that connection, it was clean swept out of my mind by meeting early in January with Mr. Eversley and hearing him first apply to myself that phrase which I have chosen for the title to this writing. Mark Eversley, the greatest modern actor! So we all believed. He had been an old friend of Mr. Harding's; they had had their young struggles together; we crowded around our manager to hear him tell of them; struggles which, in so far as they identified themselves with our own, seemed to bring us by implication within reach of his present fame. Eversley played in St. Louis while we were there, and having an evening to spare, in spite of all the eager social appeal, chose to spend it with the Hardings. They had had dinner together, and as Mr. Harding did not come on until the second act, the great tragedian sat with him in his dressing room, visiting together between the cues like two boys in a dormitory. That was how Eversley happened to be standing in the wings in my great third act, and as I came out between gusts of applause after it, he was very kind to me.
"You will go far, little lady," said he, his lean face alive with kindliness, "you will go farther and have to come back and pick up some dropped stitches, but in the end you will get where you are bound." It was not for me to tell him how the mere consciousness of his presence had carried me that night to the utmost pitch of my capacity; I stood and blushed with confusion while he fumbled for his card.
"I will hear of you again," he said; "I am bound to hear of you; in the meantime here is my permanent address. It may be that I can be of use to you when you come to the bad places."
"Oh," said Mrs. Harding, whose failure to win any conspicuous distinction for herself had not embittered her, "she seems to have cleared most of the hard places at a bound."
"My dear young lady," Eversley appealed to me with a charming whimsicality, "whatever you do, don't let them put that into your head; you will indeed need me if you get to thinking that. You are, I suspect, a woman of genius, and in that case there will always be bad places ahead of you – you are doomed, you are driven; they will never let up on you."
Well, he should know; he was a man of genius. I hope it might be true about me, but I was afraid. For to be a genius is no such vanity as you imagine. It is to know great desires and to have no will of your own toward fulfilment; it is to feed others, yourself unfed; it is to be broken and plied as the Powers determine; it is to serve, and to serve, and to get nothing out of it beyond the joy of serving. And to know if you have done that acceptably you have to depend on the plaudits of the crowd; the Powers give no sign; many have died not knowing.
There is no more vanity in calling yourself a woman of genius if you know what genius means, than might be premised of one of the guinea pigs set aside for experimentation in a laboratory; but the guinea pigs who run free in the garden impute it to us. I wrote my mother and Tommy what Eversley had said, but I knew they would see nothing more in it than that he had paid me a compliment which it would not be modest to make much of in public.
The successes of that year prolonged the season by a month, and by the time I got home to Higgleston the leaves were all out on the maples and the wide old yards smelled of syringa. I came back to it full of the love of the world, alive in every fibre of my being, and the first thing I noticed was that it caused my husband some embarrassment. There was a shyness in his resumption of our relations more than could be accounted for by the native Taylorvillian gaucheries of emotion.
"My dear," I protested, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me."
"You are away so much," he excused. "You're getting to seem almost a stranger."
"Getting? I should say I am. This morning it seemed to me almost as if I waked up in another woman's house." I meant no more than to suggest how little the walls of it, the furniture, the draperies, expressed my new mood of creative power, but suddenly I saw my husband colour a deep, embarrassed red.
"You never did take any interest in our life here … in the business … in me." He seemed to be making out a case against me.
"Don't say in you, Tommy; but the life here, yes; there is so little to it. Another year and Mr. Harding says I could hope to stay in Chicago." My husband pushed away his plate; we were at breakfast the second morning.
"Higgleston's good enough for me," he protested. He got up and stood at the window with his back to me, looking out at the side street and the tardy traffic of the town beginning to stir in it. "When you hate it so," he said, "I wonder you come back to it." But my mood was proof against even this.
"Oh, Thomas, Thomas!" I got my hands about his arm and snuggled my head against it. "And you can't even guess why I come back?" He looked at me, vaguely troubled by the caress, but not responding to it.
"Do you care so much?"
"Ever and ever so." I thought he was in need of reassurance.
I hardly know when I began to get an inkling of what was wrong with him; it trickled coldly to me from dropped words, inflections, sidelong glances. Whenever I went out I was aware of all Higgleston watching, watching like a cat at a mouse-hole for something to come out. What? Reports of my success had reached them through the papers. Were they looking for some endemic impropriety to break out on me as a witness to what a popular actress must inevitably become? By degrees it worked through to me that all Higgleston knew things about my situation that were held from me. What they expected to see come out in my behaviour was the stripe of chastisement.
When I had been at home four or five days it occurred to me Miss Rathbone had not yet run in to see me with that quasi-familiarity which had grown out of the business association of our men. Old Rathbone had said that she had the trousseau of one of the Harvey girls in hand, but I knew that if the courtesy had been due from me, I couldn't have neglected it without the risk of being thought what Miss Rathbone herself would have called uppish. So the very next afternoon, having fallen in with some Higgleston ladies strolling the long street that led through the town from countryside to countryside, passing her gate, it struck me that here was an excellent opportunity to run in and exchange a greeting with her. I said as much to Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Harvey, as I swung the picket gate out across the board walk; there was something in their way of standing back from it that gave them the air of sheering off from any implication in the incident. They looked at the sidewalk and their lips were a little drawn; I should have known that look very well by that time. I threw out against it just that degree of impalpable resistance that was demanded by my official relation to the women of my husband's business partner, and clinched it with the click of the gate swinging to behind me, but as I went up the peony-bordered walk I wondered what Miss Rathbone would possibly have done to get herself talked about.
I was let into the workroom by Tillie Hemingway, in the character of a baster, with her mouth full of threads; Miss Rathbone came hurrying from a fitting, and in the brief moment of crossing my half of the room to meet her I was aware that she had turned a sickly hue of fear. She must have seen me coming up the street with the other women, I surmised, and guessed that I knew. I felt a kind of compulsion on me to assure her by an extra graciousness that I did not know, and that it wouldn't make any difference if I did. She was not changed at all except perhaps as to a trifle more abundance of bosom and a greater insensibility to the pins with which she bristled. There was the same effect of modishness in the blond coiffure with the rats showing, and the well cut, half-hooked gown, but she seemed to know so little what to do with my visit that I was glad to cut it short and get away into the wide, overflowing day. I went on under the maples in leafage full and tender, following the faint scent of the first cutting of the meadows, quite to the end of the village and a mile or two into the country road, feeling the working of the Creative Powers in me, much as it seemed the sentiment earth must feel the summer, a warm, benignant process. I was at one with the soul of things and knew myself fruitful. At last when the dust of the roadway disturbed by the homing teams, collected in layers of the cooler air, and the bats were beginning, I tore myself away from the fair day as from a lover and went back to Tommy waiting patiently for his supper. While I was getting it on the table I recalled Miss Rathbone.
"What," I said, "has she been doing to get herself talked about?" Suddenly there whipped out on his face the counterpart of the flinching which I had noted in the dressmaker.
"Who said she had been talked about? What have they been telling you? A pack of lying old cats!"
"So she has been talked about?" I put down a pile of plates the better to account to myself for his excitement.
"I might have known somebody would get at you. Why can't they come to me."
"Tommy! Has Miss Rathbone been talked about with you? Oh, my dear!" I meant it for commiseration. Tommy went sullen all at once.
"I don't want to talk about it. I won't talk about it!"
"You needn't. And as for what the others say, you don't suppose I am going to believe it?" He turned visibly sick at the assurance.
"I'll tell you about it after supper," he protested. "I meant to tell you." I kept my mind turned deliberately away from the subject until it was night and I heard the last tardy customer depart, then the shutters go up, and after a considerable interval my husband's foot upon the stairs.
I hope I have made you understand how good he was, with what simple sort of goodness, not meant to stand the strain of the complexity in which he found himself. He wanted desperately to get out of it, to get in touch again with straight and simple lines of living. As he stood before me then his face was streaked red and white with the stress of the situation, like a man after a great bodily exertion. I was moved suddenly to spare him – after all what was the village dressmaker to us? Tommy flared out at me.
"She is as good as you are … she's as pure … as kind-hearted. It's as much your fault as anybody's. You were away; you were always away." His voice trailed out into extenuation. There fell a long pause in which several things became clear to me.
"Tell me," I said at last.
Tommy sat down on the red plush couch. He had taken off his coat downstairs, for the evening was warm. There was pink in his necktie and the freckles stood out across his nose. I was taken with a wild sense of the ridiculous. Miss Rathbone, I knew, was six years my husband's senior.
"I went there a good deal last winter," he began. "I never meant any harm … my business partner … it was lonesome here. Of course I ought to have known people would talk. Nobody told me. She was brave, she bore it a long time, and then I saw that something was the matter. I didn't know until she told me, how fond of her I was – "
"Tommy, Tommy!" Strangely, it was I crying out. "Fond of her? Fond of her?"
"I was fond of her," he insisted dully. "She suffered a lot on account of me." The words dropped to me through immeasurable cold space. I believe there were more explanations, excusings. I was aware of being wounded in some far, unreachable place. I sat stunned and watched the widening rings of pain and amazement spread toward me. By and by tears came; I cried long and quietly. I got down on the floor at my husband's knees and put my arms about his body, crying. After a time I remember his helping me to undress and we got into bed. We had but the one. I know it now for the sign that I never loved my husband as wives should love, that I felt no offence in this; sex jealousy was not awake in me. We lay in bed with our arms around one another and cried for the pain and bewilderment of what had happened to us.