I remember the talk that went on at first, because it was so much in the way of doing business in Higgleston, and impressed me even then with its factitious shrewdness, based very simply on the supposition that Capitalists – it was under that caption that Burton Brothers figured – never meant what they said. Capitalists were always talking of hard times; it was part of their deep laid perspicacity. Burton Brothers wished to sell out the business; was it reasonable to suppose they would think it good enough to sell and not good enough to go on with?
"Father thinks," said Miss Rathbone, and I am sure he had done so dutifully at her instigation, "that they couldn't ask no great price after talking about hard times the way they have."
It was not in keeping with what was thought to be woman's place, that she should go on to the completed suggestion. In fact, so far as I remember it never was completed, but was talked around and about, as if by indirection we could lessen the temerity of the proposal that old Rathbone and Tommy should buy out the shop on such favorable terms as Burton Brothers, in view of their own statement of its depreciation, couldn't fail to make.
"You could live over the store," Miss Rathbone let fall into the widening rings of silence that followed her first suggestion; "your rent would be cheaper, and it would come into the business."
I felt that she made it too plain that the chief objection that my husband could have was the lack of money for the initial adventure; but because I realized that much of my instinctive resistance to a plan that tied him to Higgleston as to a stake, was due to her having originated it, I kept it to myself. I had a hundred inarticulate objections, chief of which was that I couldn't see how any plan that was acceptable to the Rathbones, could get me on toward the Shining Destiny, but when you remember that I hadn't yet been able to put that concretely to myself, you will see how impossible it was that I should have put it to my husband. In the end Tommy was talked over. I believe the consideration of going on in the same place and under the same circumstances without the terrifying dislocation of looking for a job, had more to do with it than Miss Rathbone's calculation of the profits. We wrote home for the money; Effie wrote back that everything of mother's was involved in the stationery business, which was still on the doubtful side of prosperity, but Tommy's father let us have three hundred dollars.
The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself as an occasion was the Fourth of July.
I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.
"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of a month to get the children ready."
"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our house Thursday – " She went on to tell me who was to read the Declaration and who deliver the oration.
"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these twenty years!"
"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind of a celebration, they've a right to have it."
"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.
They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.
I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions. The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation – the air of being man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to avoid doing it. Er … yes, he believed there had been a meeting … he hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular member, was I?
"No," I admitted, "but last year – " The intention of the slight began to dawn on me.
"You see, the programme is usually made up from the children of the united Sunday schools…"
"I know, of course, but what has that?.." He did know how mean it was; I could see by the dexterity with which he delivered the blow.
"A good many of the mothers thought they'd rather not have them exposed to … er … professional methods." As an afterthought he tried to give it the cast of a priestly remonstrance which he must have seen didn't in the least impose on me.
I suppose it was the fear of how I might put it to one of his best paying parishioners that led him to go around to the store the next morning and make matters worse by explaining to Tommy that though the children weren't to be contaminated by my professionalism, it could probably be arranged for me to "recite something." To do Tommy justice, he was as mad as a hatter. Being so much nearer to village-mindedness himself, I suppose my husband could better understand the mean envy of my larger opportunity, but his obduracy in maintaining that I had been offended led to the only real initiative he ever showed in all the time I was married to him.
"I'd just like to show them!" he kept sputtering. All at once he cheered up with a snort. "I'll show them!" He was very busy all the evening with letters which he went out on purpose to post, with the result that when a few days later he made his contribution to the fireworks fund, he made it a little larger, as became a live business man, on the ground that he wouldn't be able to participate as his wife had "accepted an invitation to take charge of the programme at Newton Centre." Newton Centre was ten miles away, and though I couldn't do much on account of the difficulty of rehearsals, I managed to make the announcement of it in the county paper convey to them that what they had missed wasn't quite to be sicklied over with Mrs. Miller's asseveration of a notable want of moral particularity at Newton Centre. The very first time I went out to a Sunday-school social thereafter it was made plain to me that if I wanted to take up the annual Library entertainment, it was open to me.
"And I always will say," Mrs. Miller conceded, "that there's nobody can make your children seem such a credit to you as Mrs. Bettersworth."
"It's a regular talent you have," Mrs. Harvey backed her up, "like a person in the Bible." This scriptural reference came in so aptly that I could see several ladies nodding complacently. Mrs. Ross sailed quite over them and landed on the topmost peak of approbation.
"I've always believed," she asserted, "that a Christian woman on the stage would have an uplifting influence."
But by this time my ambition had slacked under the summer heat and the steady cluck of old Rathbone's machine and the mixed smell of damp woollen under the iron, and creosote shingle stains. There had been no loss of social standing in our living over the store; such readjustments in Higgleston went by the name of bettering yourself, and were commendable. But somehow I could never ask ladies to tea when the only entrance was by way of a men's furnishing store. The four rooms, opening into one another so that there was no way of getting from the kitchen to the parlour except through the bedroom, I found quite hopeless as a means of expressing my relation to all that appealed to me as inspiring, dazzling. Because I could not go out without making a street toilet, I went out too little, and suffered from want of tone. And suddenly along in September came a letter from O'Farrell offering me a place in his company, and a note from Sarah begging me to accept it. If up to that time I had not thought of the stage as a career, now at the suggestion the desire of it ravened in me like a flame.
CHAPTER VI
"And you never seem to think I might not want my wife to go on the stage?"
I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me; but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself whirled about this attitude of his in the deep-seated passionate Why of my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things? What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any association with the stage.
Whatever attitude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands, the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me … words, looks … sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the general attitude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.
"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as far as that."
It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on, and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.
"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs. Bettersworth – Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."
Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning, afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was that it left too much over.
"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.
I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible attitudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.
"You dear, ridiculous child," she hovered over the point with indulgent patronage, "what will you think of next?"
Pauline herself was going through a phase at the time. They had moved out to a detached house at Evanston on account of its being better for the baby, and there was a visible diminution of her earlier effect of housewifely efficiency, in view of Henry's growing prosperity. You could see all Pauline's surfaces like a tulip bed in February, budding toward a new estimate of her preciousness in terms of her husband's income. When she took me by the shoulders, holding me off from her to give play to the pose of amused, affectionate bewilderment, I could see just where the consciousness of a more acceptable femininity as evinced by her being provided with a cook and a housemaid, prompted her to this gracious glozing of my not being in quite so fortunate a case. I was to be the Wonder, the sport on the feminine bush, dear and extenuated, made adorably not to feel my excluding variation; an attitude not uncommon in wives of well-to-do husbands toward women who work. It was an attitude successfully kept up by Pauline Mills for as long as I provided her the occasion. Just at first I suspect I rather contributed to it by my own feeling of its being such a tremendous adventure for me, Olivia Lattimore, with Taylorville, Hadley's pasture and the McGee children behind me, to be going on the stage. How I exulted in it all, the hall bedroom where I finally settled across from Sarah Croyden, the worry of rehearsals, the baked smell of the streets bored through by the raw lake winds, the beckoning night lights – the vestibule of doors opening on the solemn splendour of the world.
At the rehearsals I met Cecelia Brune, if anything prettier than before, and quite perceptibly harder, and Jimmy Vantine, still in love with her, still with his bald crown not quite clean and the same objectionable habit of sidling about, fingering one's dress, laying hands on one as he talked. I met Manager O'Farrell, not a whit altered, and Miss Laurine Dean. I liked and I didn't like her. She drew by a certain warm charm of personality that repelled in closer quarters by its odours of sickliness. There was a quality in her beauty as of a flower kept too long in its glass, not so much withered as ready to fall apart. She had small appealing hands, such as moved one to take them up and handle them, and served somehow to mitigate a subtle impression of impropriety conveyed by her slight sidewise smile. She was probably good-natured by temperament and peevish through excessive use of cigarettes. She made a point of always speaking well of everybody, but it was a long time before I learned that no sort of blame was so deadly as her commendation. "Such a beautiful woman Miss Croyden is," she would say, "isn't it a pity about her nose," and though I had never thought of Sarah's nose as mitigating against her perfection, I found myself after that thinking of it. You could see that magnanimity, which was her chosen attitude, was often a strain to her. I do not think she had any gift at all, but she had a perception of it that had enabled her to produce a very tolerable imitation of acting and kept her, in a covert way, inordinately jealous of the gift in others. She was jealous of mine.
It was not all at once I discovered it. In the beginning, because I never detected her in any of the obvious snatchings of lines and positions that went on at rehearsals, but even making a stand for me against incursions into my part which I was too unaccustomed to forestall, I thought of her as being of rather better strain than most of the company. I was probably the only member of it unaware of her deliberate measures not to permit me such a footing as might lead to my supplanting her with Manager O'Farrell, toward whom I began to find myself in what, for me, was an interesting and charming relation. It was a relation I should have been glad to maintain with any member of the company, but it was only O'Farrell who found himself equal to it. I was full and effervescing with the joy of creation; night by night as I felt the working of the living organism we should have been, transmitting supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very communicating act became a part of us, I felt myself also warming toward my fellow players. I was so charged I should have struck a spark from any one of them when we met, but for the fact that by degrees I discovered that they presented to me the negative pole.
I was aware of such communicating fluid between particular pairs of them. I saw it spark from eye to eye, heard it break in voices; it flashed like sheet lightning about our horizons on occasions of great triumph; but I was distinctly alive to the fact that the medium by which it was accomplished was turned from me. At times I was brushed by the wing of a suspicion that among the men, there was something almost predetermined in their denial of what was for me, the sympathetic, creative impulse. I was a little ashamed for them of the gaucherie of withholding what seemed so important to our common success, and yet I seemed always to be surprising all of them at it, except Jimmy Vantine and the manager. I couldn't of course, on account of his propensity for laying hands on one, take it from Jimmy, but between Mr. O'Farrell and me it ran with a pleasant, profitable warmth. I was conscious always of acting better the scenes I had with him. The thrill of them was never quite broken in off-the-stage hours. I felt myself sustained by it. For one thing the man had genuine talent, and I think besides Sarah Croyden and Jimmy Vantine, no one else in the company had very much. Jimmy had a gift, besmeared and discredited by his own cheapness, but O'Farrell had a real flowing genius and a degree of personal vitality that sketched him out as by fire from the flat Taylorville types I had known. We used to talk together about my own possibilities and I had many helpful hints from him, but in spite of this friendliness I never made any way with him against Miss Dean. Not that I tried, but by degrees I found that suggestions made and favours asked, were granted or accepted on the basis of their non-interference with our leading lady. I was not without intimations, which I usually disregarded because I found their conclusions impossible to maintain, that she even triumphed over me in little matters too inconsiderable to have been taken into account except on the understanding that we were pitted in a deliberate rivalry. I was hurt and amazed at times to discover that we presented this aspect to the rest of the company. I felt that I was being judged by my conduct of a business in which I was not engaged.
The situation, however, had not developed to such a pitch by the time we played in Kincade, that it could affect my pleasure in the visit Tommy paid me there; I was overjoyed to have the arms of my own man about me again; I was proud of his pride in my success as Polly Eccles, and pleased to have him and Sarah pleased with one another. I thought then that if I could only have Tommy and my work I should ask no more of destiny; I do not now see why I couldn't, but I like best to think of him as he seemed to me then, wholesome and good, raised by his joy of our reunion almost to my excited plane, generous in his sharing of my triumphs. It seemed for the moment to put my feet quite on solid ground. I knew at last where I was.
It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate, convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her sex attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow, commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels, irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at Louisville.
I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T, with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T.
Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a casual errand as my own.
But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home from the theatre more than an hour!
I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort. Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It was part of the admitted business of the men of my class to keep their women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman – with his mistress.
I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs; other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the dark circles under my eyes.
"What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted it out.
"Mr. O'Farrell … I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room … at a quarter of one. He was … oh, Sarah … he was!.." I relapsed again into the horror of it.
"Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently under the covers and got into bed beside me.
"Didn't you know?" she questioned.
"Did you?"
"No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to suggest it to you."
"Do the others know?"
"As much as we do. It has been going on a long time."
"And you put up with it – you go about with them?" I was astonished at the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it.
"My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many people do such things."
"I know —wicked people. I never thought of its being done by anybody you liked."
"Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah Croyden.
"You mustn't think Mr. O'Farrell such a bad man. He is probably fond of her. In some respects he is a very good man. When I was – left, without a penny, he might have made terms with me. Some managers would. But he gave me a living salary and left me to myself. He has been very kind to me."
"But she – " I choked back my sick resentment to get at what had been tearing its way through my consciousness for the last three hours. "She must have thought that that was what I wanted of him…"
"Well, it is natural she should be anxious, with other women about. She is in love with him."
"Did you think so? About me, I mean?"
"No," said Sarah. "No, I didn't think so."
It was light enough now to show the outline of the drifts along the sills and the fine gritty powder which the wind dashed intermittently against the panes; the filter of day under the scant blinds brought out in the affair streaks of vulgarity as evident as the pattern of the paper on the wall. It seemed to borrow cheapness from the broken castor of the bureau, as from my recollection of the eaten face of the clock and the leaning chandelier. I sat up in the bed and laid hold of Sarah in my eagerness to get clear of what by my mere knowledge of it, seemed an unbearable complicity.
"I had a feeling for him," I admitted. "I could act better with him; but it was different from that – you know it was different."
"Yes," said Sarah, "I know. I know because I am that way myself; it is like that, but it isn't that." I was still, holding my breath while she considered; we were very close upon the twined roots of sex and art.
"There's a feeling that goes with acting, with other sorts of things, painting and music, maybe, a feeling of your wanting to get through to something and lay hold of it, and your not being able to leaves you … aching somehow, and you think if there's a particular person … I think O'Farrell would understand … it is being able to act makes you know the difference I suppose. He really can act you know, and you can, but Dean wouldn't understand, nor the others. My – Mr. Lawrence didn't understand!" It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me. "Sometimes I think they might have felt the difference just at first, but nobody told them and they got used to thinking it is … the other thing." She drew me down into the bed again and covered me. "You mustn't take it to hard … we all go through it once … and you are safe so long as you know."
"But I can't go on with it." I was positive on that point. "Sarah, Sarah, don't say I have to go on with it."
"I know you can't. But you just have to."
"I should never be able to face either of them again without showing that I know."
"And then the others will know and they will think …"
I threw out my arms, seeing how I was trapped. I wanted to cry out on them; to despise the woman openly. "And they will think that I am jealous … that I wanted it myself…"
I rolled in the bed and bit my hands with shame and anger. Sarah caught me in her arms and held me until the paroxysm passed. I was quieted at last from exhaustion.
"You can stay in your room to-day," she suggested. "I can bring your meals up to you; this neuralgia will give you an excuse, and you needn't see any one until you go to the theatre. That will give you one day. Maybe by to-morrow …"
But I had no confidence that to-morrow would bring me any sensible relief. The moral shock was tremendous. All my pride was engaged on the side of never letting anybody know; to have been misunderstood in the quality of my disgust would have been the intolerable last thing. Sarah brought up my breakfast before she had her own; she reported nobody about yet except Jimmy Vantine who had inquired for me. About half an hour later she came softly in again with a yellow envelope open in her hand. I saw by her face that it was for me and that the news it contained put the present situation out of question.