A Woman of Genius

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.

CHAPTER X

As if the attraction Miss Rathbone had for my husband had been a spell, the mere naming of which dissipated it, we spent the ensuing three or four days in the glow of renewal. It was Miss Rathbone herself who drew us out of that excluding intimacy; set us apart where we could feel the cold stiffness of our hurts and the injury we had inflicted each on the other.

Whatever there had been between them, and I never knew very clearly what, they had failed to reckon on the recrudescence of the interest I had always had for my husband, and the tie of association. At any rate Miss Rathbone failed. I must suppose that she loved Tommy, that she was hungering for the sight of him, needing desperately to feel again the pressure of whatever bond had been between them. She came into the store on the fourth evening after my husband's admission of it, on one of the excuses she could so easily make out of her father's being there. I was sitting upstairs with some sewing when she came and neither saw nor heard her, but the unslumbering instinct, before I was half aware of it, had drawn me to the head of the stair.

As I came down it, still in the shadow of the upper landing, I saw her leaning across the counter with that factious air of modishness which was so large a part of her stock in trade with Higgleston. She had on all her newest things, and I think she was rouged a little. Even with the width of the counter between them she had the effect of enveloping my husband with that manner of hers as with a net; to set up in him the illusion of all that I was in fact; mystery, passion, the air of the great world. I was pierced through with the realization that with men it is not so much being that counts, as seeming. There was a touch of the fatuous in the way Tommy submitted to the implication of her attitude as she took a flower from her breast and pinned it in his coat. The foot of the stair came almost to the end of the counter where they stood, and a trick of the light falling from the hanging lamp threw the upper half of it in shadow. I stood just within it with my hand upon the rail. Something in the avidity of yielding in my husband's manner was like a call in me; I moved involuntarily a step downward.

They heard and then they saw me; they stopped frozen in their places and the thing that froze them was the consciousness of guilt. They stood confessed of a disloyalty. I turned full in their sight and walked back up the stair. It was very late that night when Tommy came up to me.

"If that is going on in the house," I notified him, "you can't expect me to stay."

"I dare say you'd be glad of a chance to leave."

"Is that why you are offering it to me?"

It was by such degrees we covered the distance between our situation and the open question of divorce. But there were lapses of tenderness and turning back upon the trail.

"I don't want anybody but you, Olivia," Tommy would protest. "If you would only stay with me!"

"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"

If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis, she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour – some criticism which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of romance.

"I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me." He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot."

"What do you owe her that you can't pay?"

"Well, I couldn't marry as long as you – "

"You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marry her?"

"I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again; "you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter.

"You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a great space out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world, but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things.

"We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want anybody but you; just stay with me!"

"You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higgleston forever?" The unfairness of this overcame me.

"Well, why not, if you're married to me?"

I believe he would have done it. He would have wasted me like that and thought little of it. I was married, and not altogether to Tommy, but to Higgleston and the clothing business. The condition he demanded of me was not of loving and being faithful, but of living over the store. Until now, though I knew I did not love my husband as life had taught me men could be loved, I had never given up expecting to. Somewhere, somehow, but I was certain it was not in Higgleston, the transmuting touch should find him which would turn my husband into the Lord of Life. Now I discovered myself pulled over into another point of view. He had become a man capable of being interested in the village dressmaker. The farther she drew him from me the more the stripe of Higgleston came out in him.

I had planned to go up to Chicago for a week in August; to consult with Mr. Harding about the plays he was to produce the next season. I had not signed with him yet, but I knew that I should, that I could no more dissever myself from that connection than I could voluntarily surrender my own breath; I might try, but after the few respirations withheld, nature would have her way with me. It was not that I came to a decision about it; the whole matter appeared to lie in that region of finality that made the assumption of a decision ridiculous. I do not know if I expected to divorce my husband or if he or Miss Rathbone expected it. I think we were all a little scared by the situation we had evoked, as children might be at a dog they let loose. We felt the shames of publicity yelping at our heels.

The day before I left, I went to see Miss Rathbone; I had to have a skirt shortened. It was absurd, of course, but there was really no one else to go to. If there had been I shouldn't have dared; all Higgleston would have known of it and drawn its own conclusion. As it was, Higgleston was extremely dissatisfied with the affair. It did not know whom properly to blame, me for neglecting my husband or Miss Rathbone for snapping him up; they felt balked of the moral conclusion.

I hardly know what Miss Rathbone thought of my coming to her. I think she had braved herself for some sort of emotional struggle sharp enough to drown the whisper of reprobation. My quiet acceptance of the situation left her somehow toppling over her own defences. Sometimes I think the emotionalism which the attitude of that time demanded to be worked up over a divorce, drew people to it with that impulse which leads them to rush toward a fire or hurl themselves from precipices. Miss Rathbone must have been aching to fling out at me, to justify her own position by abuse of mine, and here she was down on the floor with her mouth full of pins squinting at the line of my skirt. It was then that I told her what I was going to Chicago for. "You'll be away from home all winter, then?" The question was a challenge.

"I don't know, I haven't signed yet." For the life of me I couldn't have foreborne that; it was exactly the kind of an advantage she would have taken of me. If I chose not to sign for the next winter, where was she? She stood up blindly at last. "I guess I can do the rest without you," she said. Some latent instinct of fairness flashed up in me.

"But I think I shall sign," I admitted. "I couldn't stand a winter in Higgleston." I was glad afterward that I had said that; it gave her leave for the brief time that was left to them, to think of him as being given into her hands.

I was greatly relieved to get away, even for a week, from the cold curiosity of Higgleston which, without saying so, had made me perfectly aware that I showed I had been crying a great deal lately. But no sooner was I freed from the pull of affection than I began to feel a deep resentment against Tommy. His attempt to charge his lapse of loyalty, on my art, on that thing in me which, as I read it, constituted my sole claim upon consideration, appeared a deeper indignity than his interest in the dressmaker. It was all a part of that revelation which sears the path of the gifted woman as with a flame, that no matter what her value to society, no man will spare her anything except as she pleases him. At the first summer heat of it I felt my soul curl at the edges. His repudiation of me as an actress began to appear a slight upon all that world of fineness which Art upholds, a thing not to be tolerated by any citizen of it. In its last analysis it seemed that my husband had deserted me in favour of Higgleston quite as much as I had deserted him, and it was for me to say whether I should consent to it. In that mood I met Mr. Harding and signed with him for the ensuing season, and then quite unaccountably, ten days before I was expected, I found myself pulled back to Higgleston. I had wired Tommy, and was surprised to have Mr. Ross meet me at the station.

"Mr. Bettersworth is not very well," he explained, as he put me into Higgleston's one omnibus. "It came on him rather suddenly. Some kind of a seizure," he admitted, though I did not gather from his manner that it was particularly serious until the 'bus, instead of stopping at our store, drove straight on up the one wide street.