A Woman of Genius

We didn't, however, strike the note of confidence until it was evening. Griffin kept up the form of looking for an engagement, which occupied his morning hours, and in the afternoon Jerry came in to see how I had come through the cold spell, and to win my interest with his wife to consent to his going as far as St. Louis with "The Futurist." I forget what reasons he had for thinking it advisable, except that they were all more or less complicated with Miss Filette.

"But, heavens, Jerry, haven't you ever heard of the freemasonry of women? How can you think my sympathies wouldn't be with your wife? Especially in her condition."

"It's only for a week; and, you know, except for her fussing, she is perfectly well. And look here, Olivia, you know exactly why I have to have – other things; why I can't just settle down to being – the plain head of the family." His tone was accusing.

"I know why you think you have to. Honest, Jerry, is it so imperative as all that?"

"Honest to God, Olivia, unless I'm … interested … I can't write a word." His glance travelling over my dull little room and makeshift furniture, the cheap kerosene lamp, the broken hinge of the stove. "You ought to know," he drove it home to me. I felt myself involved by my toleration of Griffin in a queer kind of complicity.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview, and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon, when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be with the play, meant advertising.

I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's vagaries.

"I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about it," I protested. Griffin shook his head.

"It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats into you."

I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She looked gnawed upon!"

"Miss Dean, you mean?"

"I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no cause. How well did you know her?"

"I … she … I was married to her." His face was mottled with embarrassment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I knew she couldn't act… I can't myself, but I know it when I see it. Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I thought I could pull her along."

"She has got on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth.

"Yes, she had something almost as good as acting … she could get hold of people."

"She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?"

"Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I – I got out of her way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which wanted trimming, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an incurable strain.

"Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"

"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."

"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal instance.

"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear you'll lose them altogether."

"I understand."

The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light, and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.

"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is just … Personality … whatever there is that we act to."

"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."

"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now." So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but there was nobody to open the gates for me.

I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself to my necessity.

"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I could send you something every month – " I cut her off absolutely.

"I'd rather try Cecelia Brune's plan first," I assured her.

"Not while you have me;" she was firm with me. "Besides, you don't really know that Cecelia – "

"Didn't buy her diamond sunburst on thirty-five a week!" I told her all that Griffin had said. Sarah looked worried.

"I'll tell you about the diamonds. About a year ago, while you were with the Hardings, she got into trouble. Oh, she loved him as much as she was able! He gave her the diamonds; but Cecelia cared. And then when the trouble came, he deserted her. That's what Cecelia couldn't understand. She had never given anything before, and she didn't realize that that had been her chief advantage. It gave her a scare."

But in spite of Sarah's confidence in Cecelia's bitter experience keeping her straight, I could see that she had taken what Griffin had told me to heart. A day or two later she referred to the matter again.

"If she goes over the line once, and doesn't have to pay for it, she is lost." She was standing at my window looking out over the roofs and chimneys cased in ice, and she might, for all the mark her profession has left on her, been looking across the pasture bars. I was irritated at her detachment, and her interest, in the face of my own problem, in an affair so unrelated as Cecelia Brune's.

"Why do you care so much?"

"You'd care too, if you had seen as much of her; it's like watching a drowning man: you don't stop to ask if he's worth it before you plunge in!"

"I can't swim myself," I protested.

I didn't want to be dragged in, rescuing Cecelia; I had myself to save and wasn't sure I could do it. It was after this talk, however, that Griff, who still hung about the Varieté from habit, told me that Sarah had fallen into the way of stopping to pick up Cecelia on her way home from her own theatre. He thought it a futile performance.

"Nothing can stop that kind; they don't always know it, but that's what draws them to the stage in the first place. It's a kind of what-do-you-call-it, going back to the thing they were a long time ago."

"Atavism," I supplied; I thought it very likely. All the centuries of bringing women up to be toys must have had its fruit somehow. Cecelia was made to be played with; she wasn't serviceable for anything else. And what was more, I didn't care to be identified with her even in the Christian attitude of a rescuer. I said as much to Sarah one evening about a week later, when I had gone with Jerry to give my opinion of some changes in the cast, preparatory to going on the road with his play, and in the overflow of his satisfaction at the way the audience rose to them, he had asked me to go to supper with him. Then as Sarah joined us and the spirit of the crowd caught him, pouring along the street, bright almost as by day and with the added brightness of evening garments, Jerry, always open to the infection of the holiday mood, proposed that for once we stretch a point by going to supper at Reeves's. Sarah and I demurred as women will at such a proposal from a man whose family exigencies are known to them, but Sarah found a prohibitory objection in a promise she professed to have made, to go around for Cecelia on her way home, which Jerry promptly quashed by including her in the invitation. I protested.

"Supper at Reeves's is quite enough of an adventure for one time. Cecelia paints."

"Not really," Sarah protested. "It's only that she uses so little make-up that she doesn't think it necessary to take it off."

"All the better," insisted Jerry. "I never did take supper at Reeves's with a painted lady, and I'm told it is quite one of the things to do."

I let it pass rather than spoil his high mood. It was not more than three blocks to the Varieté, and at the stage door Sarah insisted on getting out herself.

"Why did you let her?" I protested to Jerry.

"Because it will please her, and Miss Brune will be gone; Sarah doesn't realize how late we are." I could see her returning through the fogged glass of the stage door.

"Cecelia's gone! The man said she was going to Reeves's too; we can pick her up there."

"Oh," I objected, "I can stand Cecelia, but I draw the line at her gentleman friends. She didn't go there alone, I fancy."

"We'll have a look at him, anyway, before we give him the glad hand," Jerry temporized.

The cab discharged us into the press of black-coated men and bright-gowned women that at that hour poured steadily into the anteroom of Reeves's, which was level with the pavement, divided from it by a screen of plate glass and palms. Beyond that and raised by a few steps, was the palm room, flanked on either side by dressing rooms; and opening out back, the great revolving doors, muffled with crimson curtains, that received the guests and sorted them like a hopper, according to the degree of their resistance to the particular allurements of Reeves's. There was a sleek, satin-suited attendant who swung the leaves of the door at just the right angle that inducted you to the public café, or to the corridor that led to private rooms, and was famed never to have made a mistake. Jerry dared us hilariously as we went up the steps, to put his discrimination to the test.

"You and I alone then; Olivia's black dress would give us away," Sarah insisted.

"I want you to stay here and watch for Cecelia," she whispered to me; "I must see her; I must."

Her going on with Jerry would give her an opportunity to look through the café; if Cecelia hadn't already arrived, I would be sure to see her come in with the crowd that broke against the bank of palms into two streams of bright and dark, proceeding to the dressing rooms, and returning by twos and threes to be swallowed up by the hopper turning half unseen behind its velvet curtains. I slipped behind a group of bright-gowned women waiting for their escorts under the palms. I was hypnotized by the movement and the glitter; I believe I forgot what I was looking for; and all at once she was before me.

The theatrical quality of Cecelia's prettiness and the length of her plumes would have picked her out anywhere even without the blackened rim of the eyelids and the air she had always of having just stepped into the spot light.

She had stationed herself, with her professional instinct for effect, just under the Australian fern tree, waiting for her escort, and in the moment it took me to gather myself together he joined her. I had come up behind Cecelia and was brought face to face with him; it wasn't until he had wheeled into step with her that he saw me and his face went mottled all at once and settled to a slow purple. Cecelia was magnificent.

"Oh, you here! How de do!" She slipped her hand under her escort's arm and sailed out with him. I caught the glint of the brass-bound door under the curtains. I don't know how long I stood staring before I started after her, to be met by the leaves of the revolving door which, reversing its motion, projected Sarah and Jerry into the palm room beside me.

"I have been all over the café – " Sarah began.

"Didn't you meet her?"

"In the café? I was just telling you …"

"No, no. In the corridor, just now; they went through."

"But they couldn't," urged Sarah. "I was standing at the door of the café with Jerry …" The truth of the situation began to dawn on her.

"There's such a crowd, of course you missed her." Jerry began to build up a probability by which we could sustain Sarah through the supper which followed. We all of us talked a great deal as people will when they are anxious not to talk of a particular thing. When we were in the dressing room again, putting on our wraps, Sarah turned on me.

"She wasn't in the café at all," she declared.

"I never said she was. I said she went through into the corridor." In the silence I could feel Cecelia dropping into the pit.

"Did you know the man?"

I nodded. "It was Henry Mills!"

CHAPTER VI

Before I had an opportunity to talk the incident over with Sarah, she had seen Cecelia.

"She is perfectly furious with you," she reported. "She hasn't heard from Mr. Mills since, and she thinks it is on your account; that you have taken steps for breaking it off."

"Well, if she admits there was something to break off … I tell you, Sarah, you are fretting yourself to no purpose, the girl had been there before."

"I'm afraid so." Sarah's taking it so much to heart was a credit to her, but I was more curious than commiserating.

"Tell me, what is in the mind of a girl when she does things like that? What does she get out of it?"

"Excitement, of course; the sense of being in the stir, and the feeling of being protected. She says Mr. Mills has been kind to her. It is odd, but she seems to think it is all right so long as it is going on; it is only when it is broken off she can't bear it. That is why she is so angry at you."

"There might be something in that," I conceded. "When it is broken off she is able to realize how cheap and temporary it has been; while it is going on she can justify it on the ground that it is going on forever. That would justify it, I suppose." I did not know how I knew this, but lately I had discovered in myself capacities for understanding a great many things of which I had had no experience. What concerned me was not Cecelia's relation to the incident.

"Whatever am I going to do about going there again, to Pauline's, I mean?"

"You can't tell!"

"And I can't go there and not tell. I've got to choose between deceiving Pauline and condoning Henry, and I've no disposition to do either." Sarah thought it over.

"There is only one thing you can do. You'll simply have to go to New York."

"For a great many reasons besides. You needn't tell me that. But how? How?"

"You know what I offered – "

"What I refused. It is out of the question. Don't speak of it."

"I suppose after this you couldn't ask the Millses?"

"Sarah … I did ask."

"Well?" All her interest hung upon the interrogation.

"They told me it was good for my spiritual development to suffer these things." We faced one another in deep, unsmiling irony. "Sarah, what do you suppose it costs a man for supper and a private room at Reeves's?"

"Don't!" she begged. "It's only a step from that to Cecelia."

"Yes; I remember she said that men never afforded protection to women except for value received."

"You must go to New York," Sarah reiterated. "You must!"

The truth was I had never told Sarah exactly how poor I was.

In the end I let her go away without telling; at the worst I thought I might borrow from Jerry, who had given up the notion of going to St. Louis, largely no doubt because I had failed to back him up in it completely, and then just at the end changed his mind and went anyway. I knew nothing about it until Jerry wrote me from Springfield, for I had grown shy of going there where all Mrs. McDermott's conversation was set like a trap to catch me in something that would convict Jerry of misdemeanour. Jerry asked me to visit her in his absence, but I put it off as long as possible. I had to settle first about going to Pauline's. I arranged to spend the afternoon there, meaning to come away before dinner and so by leaving Henry to discover my attitude in the circumstance of my having been there without destroying his home, open the way to my meeting him again without embarrassment. To do that I should have left the house before the persuasive smell of the dinner began to creep up the stairs into the warm, softly lighted rooms, but from the beginning of my visit, Pauline, in order that I might not feel her failure to put her affection more cogently, had wound me about as with a cocoon of feminine devices, from which I hadn't been able to extricate myself earlier. I am not blaming her, I am not sure, indeed, seeing how completely she justified herself to Henry Mills by what she had to offer, that I had any right to expect her to understand how completely her playful and charming affectionateness failed of any possible use to me. But I felt myself so far helpless in the presence of it, that I stayed on until the smell of the roast unloosened all the joints of my resolution. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I found myself at a point where what Henry might think of me became inconsiderable before the possibility of my being put out of the house before dinner was served.

At the same time I could have wept at the indignity of wanting food so much. I remember to this day the wasteful heaping of the children's plates, and my struggle with the oblique desire to smuggle portions of my helping home to Griff, who looked even more of a stranger than I to soup and fish and roast, to say nothing of dessert.

It wasn't until we had got as far as the salad that I had leisure to observe Henry grow rather red about the gills as he fed, and speculate as to how far it was due to his consciousness that I could bring down the pillars of his home with a word, and didn't intend to.

There was nothing said during dinner about my prospects or the stage in general, but when Henry took me out to the car about nine o'clock, he cleared his throat several times as though to drag the subject up from the pit of his stomach, where it must have lain very uneasily.

"You know," he began, "I've been thinking about that scheme of yours of going to New York. I am inclined to think there is something in it."

"I haven't thought about it for a long time," I told him, which was only true in so far as I thought of it as a possibility.

"It would freshen you up a whole lot," Henry insisted. "Everybody needs freshening. I have been taking a little stir about myself." So that was the way he wished me to think of his relation to Cecelia!

"I've given it up," I insisted.

We were standing under the swinging arc light in a bare patch the wind had cleared of the fine, white February grit. Little trails of it blew up under foot and were lost among the wind-shaken shadows. I could see Henry's purpose bearing down on me like the far spark of the approaching trolley.

"I wouldn't do that," he advised. "It looks like pretty good business to me. You'd have to stay there some time to learn the ropes and if a few hundred dollars – "

"I've given it up," I said again. The car came alongside and Henry helped me on to it.

"If you were at any time to reconsider it, I hope you will let me know – " The roar of the trolley cut him off.

I knew I was a fool not to have accepted the sop to my discretion; I don't know for what the Powers had delivered Henry Mills into my hands, if it wasn't to get out of his folly what his sober sense refused me. Without doubt there are some forms of integrity that, persisted in, cease to be a virtue and become merely a habit; I could no more have taken Henry Mills's money than I could have gone to New York without it. I went home shivering to my fireless little room. I put on my nightgown over my underwear and my dressing gown over that, and cried myself to sleep.

It was a day or two later that I recalled that Jerry had asked me to go out and see his wife, and I thought if I must ask Jerry for help, it would be no more than prudent for me to do so, but I wasn't in the least prepared as I went up the path, from which the snow of the week before had never been cleared, to find the house shut and barred, and no smoke issuing from it. I made my way around to the kitchen door to try to discover some sign which would give me a clue to the length of time it had been deserted, if not the reason for it.

While I was puzzling about among the empty milk bottles and garbage cans, a neighbour woman put her head out of a nearby window and announced the obvious fact that Mrs. McDermott wasn't in.

"But in her condition – " I protested as though my informant had been in some way responsible for it.

"Well, if her own mother's isn't the best place for a woman in her condition!.. Three days ago," she answered to my second question. Mrs. McDermott's mother lived in Peoria, and I knew that when Jerry left there had been no such understanding, but as lingering there ankle deep in the dry snow didn't seem to clear the affair, I undertook to rid myself of a sense of blame by writing all that I knew of it to Jerry within the hour. It was the third day after that he came storming in on me like a man demented. He had been to Peoria immediately on receipt of my letter and his wife had refused to see him. It hardly seemed a time for indirection.

"Jerry, what have you done?" I demanded.

"Nothing – not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was married."

"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.

"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.

"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always proud of you."

"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over. They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and by my sensibilities got the better of me.

"Would it do any good if I were to write?"

"You? Oh, they think you're in it … a kind of general conspiracy. You know you said that – that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an artist was the source of his inspiration."

"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production. "Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."

"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.

"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and having children take that out of a woman."

"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."

I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram. Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn away the young life that nestled there.