A Woman of Genius

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.

"Is it from my husband?" I demanded. I hardly knew what I hoped or expected, a possibility of release flashed up in me.

"It has been forwarded." She sat down on the bed beside me. "My poor Olivia … you must try to think of it as anything but a way out. Mr. O'Farrell will let you go for this…" If it had to happen it couldn't have happened better.

"Give it to me – "

"Remember it is a way out."

I read it hastily:

Mother had a stroke. Come at once.

Signed: Forester.

CHAPTER VII

It was a common practice in Taylorville never to send for the doctor until you knew what was the matter with you. So long as the symptoms failed to align themselves with any known disorder, they were supposed to be amenable to neighbourly advice, to the common stock of medical misinformation, to the almanac or some such repository of science; and though this practice led on too many occasions to the disease getting past the curable stages before the physician was called, I never remember to have heard it questioned.

"You see," people remarked to one another at the funeral, "they didn't know what was the matter with her until it was too late," and it passed for all extenuation. It was natural then that my mother should have kept any premonitory symptoms of her indisposition even from Forester; close as they were in their affections she would have thought it indelicate to have spoken to him of her health. The first determinate stroke of it came upon her sitting quietly in her usual place at prayer meeting on a Wednesday evening.

It had been Forester's habit to close the shop a little early on that evening, going around to the church to walk home with her, getting in before the last hymn to save his face with the minister by a show of regular attendance. But on this evening customers detained him beyond his usual hour, so that by the time he reached the corner opposite the church, he saw the people dribbling out by twos and threes, across the lighted doorway, and noted that my mother was not with them. He thought she might have slipped out earlier and gone around to the shop for him as occasionally happened, but seeing the lights did not go out at once in the church, he looked in to make sure, and saw her still sitting in her accustomed place. The sexton and the organist, who were fussing together about a broken pedal, appeared not to have observed her there, and one of them was reaching up to put out the light when Forester touched her on the shoulder. She started and seemed to come awake with an effort, and on the way home she stumbled once or twice in a manner that led him, totally unaccustomed as he was to think of my mother as ill in any sort, to get a little entertainment out of it by gentle rallying, which was dropped when he discovered that it caused her genuine, pained embarrassment. The following Tuesday he came home to the midday meal to find her lying on the floor, inarticulate and hardly conscious. There must have been two strokes in close succession, for she had managed after falling, to get a cushion from the worn sitting-room lounge under her head and to pull a shawl partly over her. Effie, who was at Montecito, was summoned home, and that evening, by the doctor's advice, the telegram was sent which separated me so opportunely from the Shamrocks. By the time I reached her, speech had returned in a measure, and by the end of a fortnight she was able to be lifted into the chair which she never afterward left.

I remember as if it were yesterday, the noble outline of her face and of her head against the pillows, the smooth hair parted Madonna-wise and brought low across her ears, the blue of her eyes looking out of the dark, swollen circles, for all her fifty-two years, with the unawakened clarity of a girl's. Stricken as I was from my first realizing contact with sin, and my identification with it through the assumed passions of the stage, it grew upon me during the days of my mother's illness that there was a kind of intrinsic worth in her which I, with all my powers, must forever and inalienably miss. With it there came a kind of exasperation, never quite to leave me, of the certainty of not choosing my own values, but of being driven with them aside and apart.

It was responsible in part for a feeling I had of being somehow less related to my mother's house than many of her distant kin who were continually arriving out of all quarters, in wagons and top buggies, to express a continuity of interest and kind which had the effect of constituting me definitely outside the bond.

The situation was furthered no doubt, by the whisper of my connection with the stage which got about and set up in them an attitude of circumspection, out of which I caught them at times regarding me with a curiosity unmixed with any human sympathy. Yet I recall how keen an appetite I had for what this illness of my mother's had thrown into relief, the web of passionate human interactions, bone and body of the spirituality that went clothed as gracelessly in the routine of their daily lives as the figures of the men under the unyielding ugliness of store clothing. It came out in the talk of the women sitting about the base burner at night with their skirts folded back carefully across their knees, in the watches we found it necessary to keep for the first fortnight or so. I remember one of these occasions as the particular instance by which my mother emerged for me from her condition of parenthood, to the common plane of humanity, by way of an old romance of her's with Cousin Judd. Cousin Lydia sat up with her that night and Almira Jewett, a brisk, country clad woman of the Skaldic temperament who from long handling of the histories of her clan had acquired an absolute art of it. She was own sister to the woman who married my mother's half-brother, and the Saga of the Judds and the Wilsons and the Jewetts and the Lattimores ran off the points of her bright needles as she sat with her feet on the fender, with a click and a spark. Cousin Lydia never knitted; she sat with her hands folded in her large lap and time seemed to rest with her.

"It will be hard on Judd," Almira offered to the unspoken reference forever in the air, as to the possible fatal termination of my mother's illness.

"Yes, it'll be hard on him." A faint, so faint nuance of assent in Cousin Lydia's voice seemed to admit the succeeding comment, shorn of impertinence. I guessed that the several members of the tribe were relieved rather than constrained to drop their intimate concerns into Almira Jewett's impartial histories.

"I never," Almira invited, "did get the straight of that. Sally was engaged to him, warn't she?"

"Not to say engaged," Cousin Lydia paused for just the right shade of relation, "but so as to want to be. Judd set store by her; he'd have had it that way anyway, but Sally couldn't make up her mind to it on account of their being own cousins."

"I reckon she had the right of it; the Lord don't seem no way pleased with kin marrying."

"I don't know, I don't know;" Cousin Lydia dropped the speculation into the pit of her own experience. "It looks like He wouldn't have made 'em to care about it then. But being as she saw it that way, they couldn't have done different. Not that Judd didn't see it in the light of his duty, too." There was evidently nothing in the annals of the Judds and the Lattimores which allowed a violation of the inward monitor.

"Well, I must say, he has turned it into grace, if ever a man has. Not to say but what you've helped him to it." It was in the manner of Almira's concession of not in the matter, that Cousin Judd had chosen Lydia chiefly for her capacity not to offer any distraction to his profounder passion, and nothing in Cousin Lydia's comment to deny it. From the room beyond we could hear the inarticulate, half-conscious notice of my mother's pain. Cousin Lydia moved to attend her.

"All those years," I whispered to Almira, "she has loved him and he has loved my mother!" I was pierced through with the pure sword of the spirit which had divided them. But Almira was more practical.

"She was better off," Almira insisted. "Lydia hadn't no knack with men folk ever. She knew Judd wouldn't have loved her, but so long as he loved your mother she was safe. They got a good deal out of it, her knowing and sympathizing. She could sympathize, you see, for she knew how it was herself, loving Judd that way. It was no more than right they should get what they could out of it. It was the only thing they had between them."

"All those years!" I said again. I felt myself immeasurably lifted out of the mists and mires of the Shamrocks into clear and aching atmospheres.

"I will say this for Lydia," extenuated the Skald, "that though she hadn't no gift to draw a man to her, she knew how to hold her hand off and let him go his own thought. It was religion kept your mother and Judd apart, and yet it was in religion they comforted one another. Lydia never put herself forward like she might, claiming it was her religion too. And she was one that appreciated church privileges."

But I wondered where my father came in. It had been, I knew, a passionate attachment.

"Like a new house," said Almira, "built up where the old one has been, but the cellars of it don't change. Real loving is never really got over." I felt the phrase sounding in some subterranean crypt of my own.

With this new light on it, it came out for me wonderfully in my mother's face, as I watched her through the anxious days, how much her life had been stayed in renunciations. I suppose my new appreciation must have shone out for her as well, for I could see rising out of her disorder, like a drowned person out of the sea, a bond of our common experience. We were two women, together at last, my mother and I, and could have speech with one another.

Something no doubt contributed to this new understanding by an affair of Forester's which, as I began to be acquainted with the incidents preceding it, I believed to be partly responsible for my mother's stroke. I have already sketched to you how Forester had grown up in the need of finding himself always at the centre of feminine interest without the opportunity of satisfying it normally by marriage, and how the too early stimulation of sentiment and affection had led to his being handed about from girl to girl in the attempt to gratify his need without transgressing any of the lines marked out by his profession as an eminently nice young man. It came naturally out of the mere circumstance of there being a limited number of girls at hand whom he might conceivably court without the intention of marrying, for him to fall into the society of others whom he might not court but who might nevertheless find it much to their advantage to marry him.

I do not know how and when it came to my mother's ears that he was calling frequently at the Jastrows; very likely they brought it to her notice themselves. They were a poor, pushing sort, forever exposing themselves to the slights arising from their own undesirability, which they forever tearfully attributed to an undeserved and paraded poverty. They paraded it now as the insuperable bar to all that they might have done for my mother, all that they actually had it in their hearts to do on their assumption of a right of being interested, an assumption which, even in her weakness, before she could trust herself to talk very much, I felt her dumbly imploring me to deny. The girl – Lily they called her – was not without a certain appeal to the senses; and knowing rather more of my brother's methods, I did not find Mrs. Jastrow's pretension to a community of interest in what might be expected to come of his attention, altogether unjustified. But in view of mother's condition and what Effie told me of the way business was going – rather was not going at all – any kind of marriage would have been out of the question. It was the way I put the finality of that into my dealings with Mrs. Jastrow, that drew mother over into the only relation of normal human interdependence I was ever to have with her. Whenever Mrs. Jastrow would come to call with that air she had, in her dress and manner, of being pulled together and made the best of, I could see my mother's fears signalling to me from the region of tremors and faintness in which she had sunk, and I would set my wits up as a defence against what, considering all there was against her, was a really gallant effort on Mrs. Jastrow's part to make out of Forester's philanderings a basis for a family intimacy. It was plain that neither my mother nor Mrs. Jastrow dared put the question to Forester, but rested their case on such mutual admissions of it as they could wring from one another.

I could never make out on my mother's part, whether she was really afraid of the issue, or if in the preoccupation of their affection both she and Forester had overlooked his young man's right to a woman and a life of his own. Through all her dumb struggle against it, never but once did my mother openly face the ultimate possibility of his marriage with Lily Jastrow.

It was about the third week of her illness, and Mrs. Jastrow, making one of her interminable calls, had been brought so nearly to the point of tears by my imperiousness, that Effie had been obliged to draw her off into the kitchen to have her opinion about a recipe for a mince meat such as she knew the Jastrows couldn't afford to be instructed in, and so had gotten her out of the side door and started down the walk before the situation could come to a head. My mother watched her go.

"Do you think," she hazarded suddenly, "that Forester really is engaged to her?"

"To Lily? Oh, no; Forester doesn't get engaged to girls, he just – dangles." It was characteristic of my mother's partiality that even damaging insinuations such as this, slid off from it as too far from the possibility to be even entertained. Perhaps a trace of my old exasperation with the whole situation, and the glimpse I had of Mrs. Jastrow letting herself out of our gate with her assumption of being as good as anybody still to the fore but a little awry, prompted me to add:

"And it is only natural for her mother to make the most of it. She's looking out for her own, just as you are."

"A mother has a right to do that;" she protested, "to keep them from making themselves miserable. It is no more than her duty."

"Yes," I said; the remark had the effect of a challenge.

"Young people don't know how to choose for themselves; they make mistakes." She revolved something in her mind. "You, now … you're unhappy, aren't you, Olivia?"

"Yes; oh, yes." I had not thought of myself as being so particularly, but I did not see my way to deny it.

"I've been afraid … sometimes … since you wrote me about going on the stage, maybe you weren't exactly … satisfied. But it isn't that, is it?"

"No, mother, it isn't that."

"There! You see!" She shook off her weakness with the conviction. "And you mightn't have been if I hadn't looked out for you a little."

"Why, mother, what could you possibly – " She triumphed.

"You remember that Garrett boy that was visiting at his uncle's? He called that night; the night you were engaged to Tommy."

"Yes, I remember. You sent him away?"

"He wasn't suitable at all … smoking, and driving about on Sunday that way…" Her tone was defensive. "He left a letter that night – "

"Mother! You didn't tell me!"

"I was thinking it over … I had a right … you were too young!"

"Mother … did you read it?"

"I … looked at it. You hadn't met him but once and I had a right to know; and that night you were engaged. I took it for a sign."

"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable loss.

"I sent it back … and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully, despairingly wrong.

"I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian, Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that distinction and I laughed.

"Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers."

"Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that.

"Tell me what became of him – of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?"

"He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West, Olivia."

I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt so, passionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that assurance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen.

"Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any more children?"

"Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first one. We didn't think it advisable."

"Well, if you can manage it that way …" There was a trace in her tone of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to reassure her.

"When I was in the hospital the doctor told me …" I could see the deep flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take up her thought again.