As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my mind as one seen from the farther shore. I considered a little and then I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the dusk didn't conceal from me that embarrassment was on him. He looked checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable assumption. Whatever Dean had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had. He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.
It was about eleven of the next day that I had a note from Eversley to come to his rooms to meet Mr. Polatkin. I went in a kind of haze of excitement, numb as to my feet and finger-tips, moving about by reflexes merely and with a vague doubt as each new point of the way presented itself, the car I took, the hotel stair, the length of the corridor, if I should be equal to any one of them, so far was my consciousness removed from the means of communication.
Eversley shook hands with me out of a cloud, moving in an orbit miles outside of my own, and when he left me, saying that Polatkin would come up the next moment, it was as if he had withdrawn into the vastness of outer space. In the interval before I heard Mr. Polatkin's knock I rehearsed a great many ways of meeting him, none of which were from the right cue.
I do not know why I hadn't been prepared by the name for his being a Jew, nor for the sudden shifting of the ground of our meeting which that fact made for me. So far as I had thought of him at all, it was in a kind of nebulosity of the high disinterestedness that was responsible for Mark Eversley's interest in me. It had been, his generous succour, all of a piece of that traditional protectiveness, the expectation of which is so drilled into women that it rose promptly in advance of any occasion for it. The mere supposition that he was to provide for me, had tinged my mind, unaware, with the natural response of a docility made ridiculous by the figure of Polatkin edging himself in through a door that an arrangement of furniture made impossible completely to open. His height did not bring him above the level of my eyes, and as much of him as was visible above his theatrical-looking, furred coat, was chiefly nose and pallid forehead disdained by tight, black, curly hair, and extraordinarily black eyes which seemed to have retreated under the brows for the purpose of taking council with the intelligence that informed them.
I had put on my best to meet him, and though my husband had been dead more than two years, my best was still tinged with widowhood, for the chief reason that once having got into black I had not been able to afford to put it off for anything more suitable. I had put a good deal of white about the neck trying for an effect which I knew, as Polatkin's eyes travelled over me, had been feminine rather than professional. Now as I realized how I had unconsciously responded to the suggestion of preciousness in the fact of his coming to take care of me, I felt myself grow from head to foot one deep suffusing red. It comes out for me in retrospect how near I was to the situation which had intrigued Cecelia Brune and her kind, put at disadvantage, not by a monetary obligation so much as by the inevitable feminine reaction toward the source of care and protection. At the time, however, I was concerned to keep the stodgy little Jew, who stood hat in hand taking stock of me, from discovering that I had come to this meeting with a degree of personal expectation which I should have resented in him. I hoped indeed that my blush might pass with him for a denial of the very thing it confessed, or at least for mere shyness and gaucherie. I was helped from my confusion by the realization that Mr. Polatkin was not so much looking at me or speaking to me, as projecting me into the future and gauging me against a background of his own creation.
I was standing still, after we had got through some perfunctory civilities, for I thought he would want me to act for him – but I found afterward that he had trusted Mr. Eversley for my capacity – and I had a feeling of being able to meet the situation better on my feet. I caught him looking at me with an irritating impersonality.
"Jalowaski shall make your corsets," he affirmed; "he makes 'em for Eames and Gadski – a little more off there, a little longer here … so…" He did not touch me, he was not even within touching distance, but he followed the outline of my figure with his thumb, flourishing out the alterations which made it more to his mind. "Jalowaski would fix you so you wouldn't believe it was you," he concluded.
He appeared so well satisfied with his inspection that he expanded graciously. "And there is one thing you have which there is lots of actresses would give half they got for it. You have got imagination in the way you dress your hair. It is a wonder how some of them can act and yet ain't got no imagination at all about the way they look, only so it is stylish. For an actress it is all right for her to look stylish on the street, but there are times when she has to look otherways on the stage; y'understand me."
I slid somehow into a chair; I don't know exactly what I expected, but it certainly hadn't been this appraisement, which I had the sense to see was favourable and yet resented.
"The first thing we will see to yet, is some clothes; for you will excuse me, Miss Lattimore, but what you are wearing don't show you off at all. You don't need to wear black. Of course I know you are a widow, Mr. Eversley was telling me, but there are some actresses what make out like they was, because they think it becomes them, y' understand, but there is no need for you to wear it, for Mr. Eversley is telling me that your husband is dead more than two years already." He had loosened his coat to display an appropriate amount of gold fob dependent over a small balloon in the process of being inflated; now from somewhere in his inner recess he produced a folded paper.
"It is better we have a contract from the start. Though of course it is all right if Mr. Eversley recommends you, but it is better we don't have misunderstandings." He spread the paper out and weighted it with one of his pudgy hands.
"So you are going to take me … you haven't seen me act yet."
"Eversley has."
"Well … if you want to take his judgment … but he hasn't told me anything about you yet. What do you want of me; what are you going to do for me?"
If Eversley had told him how desperate my situation was, it wasn't a good move to try to hold out against him now, it might have given him the idea that I was ungrateful, but I couldn't stand for being handed about this way like a female chattel. That Eversley had told him, I saw by the expression of astonishment on his face which slowly changed to one of amusement.
"I'm going to save you from starving to death," he began, and then as the sense of my courage in the face of such an alternative grew upon him, "I'm going to make you one of the leading tragic actresses of America."
"And what am I to do?"
"Whatever I tell you. Eversley thinks you could study a while with Mrs. Delamater. She is wonderful, wonderful!" He described with his arms a circle scarcely larger than the arc of his cherubic contour, to show how wonderful she was.
"I should like some dancing lessons, too," I submitted.
"Do you dance? Ah, no, it is too much to expect; but if I could find me a dancer, Miss Lattimore, a born dancer!" He brought his arms into play again to describe a felicity which transcended expression. "But they are not so easy to find," he sighed audibly. "We must do what we can already."
Eversley told me afterward that Polatkin had the soul of an actor, but the only part which he had ever been able to play without being ridiculous, was Fagin, and now he was too fat even for that, so that he took it out vicariously in the success of those whose opportunity he made. It was the dream of his life to find a real genius, a dancer or a prima donna; I believe I was the nearest he ever came to it; and I owe it to him to say that I couldn't have arrived at more than the faintest approach to it without him.
It was that contract I signed with him there in Eversley's room which brought him in the end about three hundred per cent. on the money he advanced me, but I never begrudged it. He gave me a check then and there, and an address of a hotel in New York where I was to meet him within five days. He looked me well over as he shook hands with me.
"You would be better if you would weigh about ten pounds more," he assured me, and I was mixed between resentment at his personality and thankfulness to have even that sort of interest taken in me. I had lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Eversley afterward; there was not time for half the things I wished to hear from him, but this sticks in my memory. I had put it to him that the meagreness of my personal experiences had, so far, tended to the skimping of my art.
"There's no question as to that," he told me, "but it is nothing compared to the effect that your art will have on your experience. It's a mistake to let it set up in you an appetite for particular kinds of it. There's the experience of having done without experience, you can put that into your acting as well as the other, and you'll find it is often the most valuable." I was later to find the worth of that, but like most advice, it only proved itself in the event of my not taking it.
There was not much to be done about my leaving Chicago; I had rooted there shallowly. I went out that afternoon to tell Pauline good-bye, for I wished to avoid Henry. It seemed a great step, my going away. There was a kind of finality about it. The casual character of my relation to the stage had disappeared; I was about to be married to it. Pauline cried a little; in spite of there being so much in my life that I couldn't tell her, I remembered how long we had been friends and that we were very fond of one another. She couldn't, of course, quite abandon her favourite moral attitude.
"You have a great work, Olivia, a great responsibility. You must remember that you are the trustee of a rare gift."
"I'll take as good care of it," I assured her, "as those who sent it take of me." At the time I believe I felt that the Powers had taken notice of me at last.
I got away as soon as possible; it seemed kinder to Griffin. We had been divided as by a sword; he knew now there was nothing between us and he was abashed at the memory of having touched me. All that time we had lurked behind the pressure of packing and settling my affairs; we never came out squarely and faced one another. I think some latent manhood that had risen to my need of him, slunk back with the certainty that I could do very well without him.
"You'll be sure and hunt me up if you come to New York?" I urged; I wasn't going to be accused of disloyalty because of the rise in my fortunes. He shook his head.
"You'll be up among the nobs then." He looked at me for a moment wistfully, "You'll remember that I said I wouldn't try to hold you?" I let him get what comfort he could out of the generosity he imagined in himself at that. Seen against the shining background which Polatkin's money had made for me, he looked almost weazened. "Good-bye," I said, with another handshake, and I set my face steadily toward New York.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I
The third season in New York found me in a very gratifying situation. I had made a public for myself, and friends, not only new friends but old ones drawn there by good fortune of their own. I had worked out my obligation to Polatkin, though I was still on such terms with him as allowed him to give me a good deal of advice, and for me to call him Poly in his more human moments. I used even to go out to his house at One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street to spend an hour with Mrs. Polatkin and the several little replicas of himself, of whom, in spite of their tendency to run mostly to nose and forehead, he was exceedingly proud. The help he had afforded me had uncovered new layers of capacity, to fill out satisfyingly the opportunities he created. I was a successful actress, there was no doubt whatever that I was a success; I would have been able to prove it by the figure of my salary. And often when the house rocked with applause, and I was called time after time before the curtain, I would question the high, half-lighted void. I would look and ache and cry out inwardly. For what? Well, I suppose I knew pretty well what I was looking for by the end of that year, though it wasn't a thing I could say much about, even to Sarah.
Sarah and I had a flat together on Thirty-first Street. The second winter we had played together, in a comedy Jerry had written for us, with so much success that it was impossible that we should remain together long. To have kept together two players of such distinguished and equal quality would have been to miss the lustre of achievement which they might each shed on a lesser group, wholly without any other excuse for coherence. Our managers, too, contrived to get us not a little advertisement out of the circumstance of our being friends and undivided by success. There was, however, one fact known to us both, though without any conscious communication, which we would not for worlds have made known to an unsuspecting public; and that was that while I was still on the hither side of my full power, Sarah had come to the level of hers.
Sarah was always wonderful in what I call static parts, parts all of one mood and consistency. She was notable as Portia; as Hermione, absolute. Perhaps the greatest favourite with her public was Galatea, which, besides being well within the average taste, allowed the greatest display of her bodily perfection. Yet with all this, Sarah knew that she was nearing the end of her contribution; knew it perhaps with that prescience of the Gift itself, folding up its wings for withdrawal. I have never been able to make up my mind whether she abandoned her talent because she had no more use for it, or if it left her because its time was served.
I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night, that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished, but I – I came hungry —always! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the course; when I would continue acting in my room, going over my part, recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled and aching with incompletion.
I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing something; not less in sheer bodily well-being, leisure, beautiful clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours and adjustments were in tune with my temperament, as nothing I had had before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality called charm.
And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded. I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I wanted.
"It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute."
That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world, wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her limbered up."
"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to me the probable outcome of such a relation.
"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.
It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane and open passion as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife, noble, extenuating, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able to conceive such a relation and to discriminate it so readily from the ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny. Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.
The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs. Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children, though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling infrequently.
No one could be on a footing of any intimacy with Mrs. Jerry without being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy which gnawed upon the bosom that nursed them. Connubial misery was a kind of drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.
It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children, who were nice children except for the way in which they continually reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.
I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.
Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement, especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.
"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can feel news of it coming up through the stems."
"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me. "There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."
"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"
"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to bring on a crisis."
"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't, however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the – not heart – let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes – of Mineola Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the mentor of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I ventured on a word of caution.
"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."
"You think I'd do that?"
"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live with her."
"I could live with you," he affirmed.
"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any one … like Miss Doran, I mean … do you mean that you wouldn't write plays at all?"
"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell? This thing is. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back from it."
"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"
"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better clear out before it.
I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah, who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast, but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me. It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve and apprise him that I was there. What deterred me was the reflection that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled head to make a case of his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of sundry vagrant impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain above the din of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter. The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance at Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.
He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.
"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."
"For where?"
"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment. "Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."
"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers, and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.
Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.
"I don't blame you for going."
"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of consternation passed in his face between his divided interest and a suspicion of the reason for my desertion.
"Look here, Olivia – oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.
I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre closed for the season I sailed for London.