A Woman of Genius

"You can talk all you want to," Cecelia asseverated, "about man being the natural provider. I've noticed he don't work at the job much without he's gettin' something out of it. If you're sufferin' with that little old song and dance about men doin' for you because you're a woman and need it, you gotta get over it. There's nothin' laid down over that counter unless you deliver the goods." She was nibbling lumps of sugar moistened in her tea, and the wild rose of her cheeks and the distracting rings of her hair made her offensiveness a mere childish impertinence.

"Look at Helen Matlock," she ran on, "gettin' five hundred a week. And when old Sedgwick put it up to her she said she'd die rather; and then she went home and found her mother sick, and what did she do? Never batted an eye, but told her she'd got an engagement, and went back and made it good. An' now she's gettin' five hundred. That's what I call doin' well by yourself."

"She can't mean it," Sarah extenuated when Cecelia had gone; "she's too frank about it. When she stops talking I shall begin to suspect her."

"But is it true, about Miss Matlock, I mean?" Just at that juncture Helen Matlock was doing the work I felt most drawn to, most fit to undertake.

"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain, did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic," she said.

"None that want me," I averred.

"Oh," she cried, "you don't mean – ?"

"No," I had to own, "I don't mean that I have a chance to get on even by misbehaving myself. I'm not the kind to whom that sort of chance comes." Sarah stroked my hand a while.

"I've been thinking, if you could get a small part or a season, you could take it under another name until you are quite yourself again. It's often done." I could see she had gone much farther than that with it in her thought. It was just such cover as that I was seeking for the renaissance of my acting power.

And that was what led to my going out to Suburbia to see Gerald McDermott about the part of Mrs. Brandis in "The Futurist."

It was out quite in the frayed edge of outer fringe of real estate ventures which hedged Chicago round, in a district which was spoiled for country and not quite made into town, and from the number of weedy plots not built upon between the scroll-saw cottages, had almost a rural air. Leaning trolleys went zizzing along the banked highways, and at the ends of the unpaved avenues there were flat gleams of the lake. Depressed as I was by the consciousness of having fallen from the estate of actresses who command engagements to those who seek them, I was still able to be touched a little by curiosity by what Sarah had told me of McDermott and his wife, whom he had married for her pretty, feminine inconsequence, who, having no point of attachment to her husband's life but femininity, was able to imagine none for any other woman, and suffered incredibly in consequence.

"If one could only discover why clever men marry that sort of women!" I wondered.

"Oh, Jerry thought he was going to bend her to his will," Sarah explained. "But that kind don't bend, they just slump." I had hardly knocked at the door before I had an inkling of how painful to the author of "The Futurist" the process of slumping might be.

I could hear the fretting of a child, hushed suddenly by my knock, then the patter of little feet across the floor and voices startled and pitched low. I was just debating whether I shouldn't pretend I hadn't heard anything and go away again, when Mr. McDermott opened the door. I had met him once at Sarah's and should have known him again by the pallor of his countenance against the dead blackness of his hair, straight and shining like an Indian's. The effect of boyishness that one derived from his tall, thin figure was increased now by the marks of weeping about his eyes. In the glimpse of the room behind him I was aware of a disorder only excusable in the face of a family catastrophe; one of the children that ran to his knee was still in its little petticoat, without a slip, and had not been washed or combed that day. I wavered an instant between the obligation of politeness to ignore the situation and the certainty that I couldn't.

"Oh!" I cried. I snatched at my repertory for the proper mixture of commiseration and consternation. "Is any one ill?"

His desperate need of help opened the door to me.

"My wife" … he began, but the state of the room accounted for that, as he perceived, taking it in afresh through my eyes. Mrs. McDermott was lying on the sofa in the coma of exhaustion. She lifted her face to me for a moment, swollen with crying, and then let herself go again into that pit in which a woman sinks an impossible situation. She was really faint, poor thing, and, if I judged by the state of the house, had had no luncheon. I took all that in at a glance, but it was none of my business.

"Is it her heart?" I wanted to know of her husband as I bent over her. He caught up the suggestion eagerly.

"Yes, her heart … she is very weak." He did whatever I suggested on that explanation. I would have proposed putting her to bed if I had not feared that that would involve more revelations of the family disorder than I was willing to tax him with.

We got her out of her faintness presently and found her a safety valve in pitying her poor children with that sloppy sort of maternal affection which is not inconsistent with a good deal of neglect. I wasn't working for anything but to save Jerry – I came to call him that before many weeks – from the embarrassment of what I was sure had been a family fracas which threatened at every moment to break out again. I suggested tea, for I was satisfied that both of them wanted food, and while I was making toast before the sitting-room fire, Mrs. McDermott managed to get herself and the children into some sort of order. I could see then how pretty she had been in a large-eyed, short-lipped way, and how charming in her youth had been the inconsequence which as the mistress of a family made her a sloven. Not to seem to notice too much the superficial air of being prepared for company which she managed to give the children by washing their faces surreptitiously, I explained to Mr. McDermott that I had come about the part of Mrs. Brandis.

"Oh, you'll do," he assented heartily. "You'll do just as you are. Mrs. Brandis is a widow you know … that is, the Mrs. Brandis that I created – "

"Just as you conceived it of course," I insisted, "I should want to play it that way."

"The trouble is that Moresco isn't satisfied so easily; he wants me to make changes in the part."

"Well …" I was prepared to make concessions.

"I'm afraid he has somebody in mind …"

"Fancy Filette," his wife broke in, "a painting, flirting, immoral!.." Jerry scraped his chair back along the floor to cover the word, but I knew where I was in a twinkling.

"Fancy Filette! She'll play it in short skirts!"

"I'll be lucky if she doesn't insist on a song and dance."

"He doesn't need to have her unless he wants to." Mrs. McDermott was positive on that point. She was sitting with both children on her lap, chiefly in order to keep up the fiction that I didn't know she had just been having hysterics, I had cautioned her against letting them climb over her, and she promptly let them, because the idea that she was tending them at a risk to her health, rather helped out with her own notion of herself as a misused but devoted wife and mother.

Jerry looked at me over her head in a mute appeal to me to understand.

"Unless Moresco puts on my play there is no chance for it," he protested. "I've been to the others. I'll tell you, though, if you go to him just as you are, he may think better of it. He can't possibly get anybody so good."

We neither of us believed that Mr. Moresco would turn down Fancy Filette for anybody, but we kept up the game of thinking so from sheer desperation. I played too at the pretence that Jerry's wife was a delicate, idealized sort of creature who did not understand the great hard world. That was no doubt what had appealed to him in the beginning, but she wasn't made up for the part. She had begun to put on weight after she had children, and her hair wanted washing. I got away as soon as I could and went straight to Sarah.

"They'd been having some kind of a row," I told her.

"Oh, it must have been Fancy Filette who set her off," Sarah was certain. "She took to you as a relief, but you'll be in for it too if you get the part."

I had to admit to myself after I had been to Mr. Moresco, that there was not much likelihood that I would get it. He laid the tips of his pudgy fingers together and addressed me with the slight blur in his speech which convinced one of the racial affinity which he commonly denied.

"Mr. McDermott thinks it will suit me admirably," I told him.

"Ah, yes, the author," the manager mentioned him as though it were a fact indulgently admitted to the discussion, "but then, my dear Miss Lattimore, we have to think of the audience."

There was this peculiarity of Moresco's handling of an audience, that he treated it as an entity, a sort of human stratification of which the three front rows were lubricious, the body of the orchestra high-brow, the first balcony sentimental and virtuous, the gallery facetious. As far as possible he arranged his plays to meet the requirements.

"Now we have Miss Croyden for Bettina, she is your type." – He meant as a woman, not as an artist; Sarah and I were both serious and respectable. – "For Mrs. Brandis I think we should have something a little more snappy."

"It isn't written snappy in the play," I reminded him.

"Ah, no, that is the trouble; I have spoken to Mr. McDermott; he will perhaps change it."

"And if he doesn't you will keep me in mind for it." I kept my voice with difficulty from being urgent. "You see, I don't feel like playing a heavy part this year." I glanced down at my mourning; I hoped he would accept it as an explanation. Two or three days later I saw Sarah and she remarked that Jerry was rewriting some parts of his play at the request of the manager.

"The part of Mrs. Brandis?" Sarah nodded.

"Mr. Moresco wants it more – more – "

"Snappy," I supplied. "And who is to have it, have you heard?"

"Fancy Filette!"

"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."

"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.

CHAPTER II

I saw more than a little of Jerry McDermott during the spring and summer that I stayed in Chicago, haunting managers' offices in my winter's suit and a fixed determination not to let any of them suspect that I knew I couldn't, for the moment, act at all. Where the gift had gone I did not know, nor when, in some desperate encounter with the chance of an engagement, I attempted to draw about me the tattered remnants of my old facility, had I any notion what would bring it back again.

Effie wrote me to come home for the hot weather, but though I regretted afterward not having done so I could not make up my mind to leave Chicago. It seemed to me then that the deadly quality of Taylorville lay waiting like a trap, which in my present benumbed condition might close on me if I put myself in the way of it. I thought that if I got out of reach of the flare of light from the theatre doors, of the smell of back scenes and the florid grip of the posters, that I should never in this world win back to them. A summer in Taylorville would have saved me money, would have rested and perhaps restored the balance of my powers, but the inward monitor of which I was the mere shell and surface, clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circumstances afforded, like the drowned upon a rope, and waited for the resuscitating touch. Somewhere beyond me I was aware of succour; not knowing from whence it should come, I grasped at everything within reach and was buffeted and torn about in the eddy of reverses.

What more even than his need of me, drove me back on Gerald McDermott, was the certainty that he was deriving from Fancy Filette the quality I missed. She was playing in one of the cheaper theatres in one of those entertainments that men are supposed to resort to when their families are out of town, and I had a moment's feeling that he exposed his sex to ridicule by the avidity with which he surrendered himself to her perfectly obvious methods. Until he sent his family north to one of the lake resorts for the hot weather, I found myself involved in certain obligations of visiting at his house, where I saw that his wife created for him by her incompetence much the same sort of background that my bereaved and purse-pinched condition made for me, and watched with alternate sympathy and resentment his flight from it to the effective self-complacency which Miss Filette induced in him.

I don't mean that Jerry wasn't fond of his wife in a way, and faithful to her, in so far as she didn't interfere with his male prerogative of being played upon by other women, but I do not think he had ever an inkling that the vortex of anger and despair which she forced him to share with her, in lieu of the passion which she couldn't any more excite, was of the same stripe as his need of the high, inflated mood that Miss Filette provided for him with her little bag of tricks. For from the first Jerry seized on me, poured himself out, despoiled himself of all the hopes, conjectures, half-guesses of his career, and that without in the least discovering that I was in need of much the same sort of relief myself. After his wife had taken the children to the country – though she used even then to come down on him suddenly with both of them and break up his work for days, or just when it was running smoothly, wire to him to rush up to Lake View and allay the horrors of her too active imagination – often evenings after the day's work, he would take me to dine at queer little French or Italian restaurants which were supposed to be preferred on account of the "atmosphere" rather than their cheapness, and uncoil for me there all the intricate turnings of his work upon itself, and the rich shapes and colours it took, played upon by the slanting eyes and carmine smile of Miss Filette. He would sit opposite me with a cigarette and a glass of "Dago red," his black, shining hair, which he wore too long, slanting above his forehead like a boding wing, uncramping his soul; and though I liked him as a friend, and as a playwright thought him immensely worth while, I was divided between exasperation at his tacit exclusion of me from the world of excited powers in which any stimulation of his maleness threw him, and fear that in missing his capacity for quick, shallow passions, I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art.

"It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be reassuring me, "to delineate a character that will be so intimate an expression of the one who is to play it … it's really extraordinary that she should have been named Fancy … it's symbolic."

"Oh, if you imagine she is really in the least like the Mrs. Brandis you are creating … besides, I happen to know her name is Powers, Amanda Powers." He caught at this delightedly.

"Ah, she's a poet, a poet! Such self-knowledge! To think of her knowing what would suit her so exactly!"

But I was not in the least interested in Miss Filette's psychology. What I was trying to get at was the source of the creative mood which I was sensible did not arise from anything Miss Filette was, but from what Jerry was able to think of her. I admitted it was a mood you had to be helped to, but I wasn't going to accept it from any male compliment to his inamorata. I set up Jerry's case alongside of Miss Dean and Manager O'Farrell, and a kind of fine intolerance drove me from it as ships are driven apart upon the tide.

It drove me back in the first instance upon what Pauline and Henry Mills stood for in my life. I was full of a formless importunate capacity, like the motor impulses of a paralytic, and I imagined a relief from it in the shadow of some succoring male who, by assuming the traditional responsibility of getting a living, should leave me free to produce the perfect flower of Art. At the time I was as far from realizing as Pauline, that she was eminently the sort of woman the sheltered life produced; had Henry Mills been upon the market I should have seized upon him promptly as the solution of all my difficulties.

Pauline did her best for me – that is to say, she brought out for me an infinite variety and arrangement of the sentimentalized sex attractions with which she charmed dull care from Henry's brow. It was only by degrees that I perceived that the utter want of relativity of the quality that was known in Evanston as True Womanliness, was due to its being conditioned very much as I thought of myself as happiest to be. It was not until Pauline went to the country for the hot weather without making any sensible change in my affairs, that I began to understand how little she contributed. What I chiefly missed was a place to walk to when I went out for exercise.

I spent a great deal of time just walking, for there was not much doing in the theatrical line to interest me, and I was sustained and tormented by intimations that somewhere, not far from me, my Help walked too. I don't know where this conviction came from that there was help somewhere in the world; but by the middle of the summer the terrible, keen need of it walked with me through all my days and lay down with me at night. There were times when the certainty that it was there seemed almost enough to lift me again to a plane of power, other times when the sheer hunger of it bit into the bone. It was most like the sense I had had as a child of the large friendliness that brooded over Hadley's pasture; it was like the promise of the shining destiny that had moved between my youth and the common occurrence; but now at times, just along the edge of sleep, or out of the thick, waking drowse of heat, it shaped familiarly human. I think about that time I must have dreamed again the dream I had of Helmeth Garrett just after I had seen Modjeska, writing that letter in his uncle's house; and with the help of what my mother had told me I was able to read it plain. I do not distinctly remember dreaming this, but there were times when, just after waking, my mind would be full of him, and there would be a stir in me of the wings of power. But in the broad day, though I thought of him often, I could not so much as recall his face clearly.

The one thing that I remembered about him was that I had pleased him. It was a mortifying certainty that Jerry's ready acceptance of me as a woman of whom his wife could not possibly be jealous, had defined for me, that I didn't in general know how to please and interest men. They often were interested in me, but I was never in the least conscious of what drew them or caused them to sheer away. I had a suspicion, doubtless of Taylorvillian extraction, that there was a sort of culpability in knowing; but it came back to me now almost with a thrill that I had known with Helmeth Garrett. I had been able, out of all the possible things which might be said, to choose the thing that swayed him. I hadn't known ever for what things my husband loved me; but in a brief hour with Helmeth Garrett I was conscious of much in my manner to him arising from his conscious need. And I had no more than shaped this in my mind than I felt a faint stirring within me as of power.

About this time I began to be more aware of the Something Without, toward which my work tended, just after I had been asleep, as if the self of me had gone on seeking more successfully in the silences. I would arise very early with such a faint consciousness as a vine might have toward the nearest wall, and get up in the blue of the morning to go for long walks through the pleasant, empty streets, sometimes out to the lake shore where the glint of the moving water under the mist, struck faint sparkles from my stagnant surfaces. I would come back from these excursions beginning to faint with the day's heat, to wear through the afternoon with books and long drowses, and then in the cool of the evening It would call me again, and I would seek It until late at night, sometimes in the lit streets, fetid with the day's smells, sometimes on a roof garden or at a park concert, where the lights, the gayety, and the music served merely as a drug to my outer sense, which went on busily at its absorbing quest. Sometimes men spoke to me in these lonely wanderings; I would remember it afterward as one recalls little, unnoticed incidents in the midst of great excitement; but for the most part I was, except for the invisible presence, as unaccompanied as if the city had been quite empty. If I could have laid the anxiety of my diminishing bank account and the dread of not getting an engagement, I should have been almost happy.

It was along early in August that Chicago was greatly stirred by the visit of one of the Presidential candidates – for that was a Presidential year – who was also a popular hero. It had come rather unexpectedly and the preparations for it were of the hastiest. There was to be speaking at Armory Hall, and a reception afterward, and I thought I would go and clasp hands with the great man, as if, perhaps, I might find in it, as many of his admirers did, a sort of king's touch for the lethargy of my spirit. The meeting began early in the sweating afternoon and dragged out three heavy hours. Nothing of any importance transpired there until we were moving up the right side of the hall toward the receiving committee. The hall was split lengthwise by a bank of chairs, and down the left aisle the company of those who had already gripped the broad palm of the candidate, had been elbowed to oblivion by the committee. It was in the very beginning of the handshaking and there were not so many of them as of us. They lingered in groups and talked with one another. I was about midway of the aisles and several persons deep in the crush, when I saw him. How well I knew the lock falling over his forehead, and the quick unconscious motion of the head that tossed it back! There was the indefinable air of the outdoor man about him, though he was quite correctly dressed and had a lady's light wrap over his arm.

"Helmeth! Helmeth!" I cried out to him from the centre of my will. I fought my way to the outer edge of the moving crowd, I caught at chairs and struggled to maintain my position opposite him. He was talking to two or three men, and just at the edge of the group a woman stood with an air of waiting. I resented her immobility, so near him and so little moved by him.

"Helmeth, Helmeth, Look! Look at me!" I demanded voicelessly across the bank of chairs.

He heard me; slowly he turned; his attention wandered from the group.

"Helmeth! Helmeth!" All my will was in my cry. Now he looked in my direction. There was that in his face that told me my cry had touched the outer ring of his consciousness. Then the lady who stood by, took advantage of his detachment to touch him on the arm. Only a man's wife touches him like that. I knew her at once; she was the type of woman who subscribes to the Delineator, and belongs to the church because she thinks it is an excellent thing for other people. She had blond hair, discreetly frizzled about the temples, and her dress had been made at home.

As soon as she touched him, Helmeth Garrett turned to her with divided attention. I saw her take his arm; he looked back; the cry held him; his eyes roved up and down; the moving mass closed between us and carried me completely out of sight.

It was fully a quarter of an hour before the crowd released me, and by that time he had quite vanished. I hung about the entrance to the hall, I pushed here and there in the press, elbowed out of it by resentful citizens. At last when the hall was closed and even the policemen had gone from before it, I went home, to lie awake half the night planning how to get at him. And the moment I woke from the doze of exhaustion into which I finally fell, I knew that the thread which bound me to Chicago had snapped. I stayed on two or three days, vaguely hoping to come across him. I even looked in the hotel registers before I accepted Sarah's urgent invitation to spend the rest of the month with her at Lake View.