A Woman of Genius

CHAPTER V

Within a week after my return, Polatkin came to see me about a project of a theatre of my own, which had been on the horizon since the year before. Polatkin himself was to furnish the money, which, considering what he had made out of me under our earlier contract, he was not in the least loath to do. He couldn't understand why I hesitated.

"Is it that you think you are getting along without Polatkin? Well, you can try." I hastened to reassure him. "Well then – are you getting cold feet about that Ravenscroft woman? Understand me, she can't act at all. It's something scandalous the way she tries to act like you do, and she can't. If I was her manager I would introduce a tight rope into the third act and have her walk it, but what I would have something that wasn't copied from somebody else."

"I wasn't thinking of Miss Ravenscroft," I confessed. "I'm thinking of getting married."

"Married! Married! And leave the stage? My God – it is a sin – !" He clutched the air and shook handfuls of it in my face. "What do you want to get married for?" he demanded. "Ain't you getting on like anything? Ain't you popular? Ain't you making money?"

"All of those," I admitted.

"Well, then?" His wrath which had frothed white for a moment, cooled down into a fluid sort of bewilderment which seemed about to set and harden in a smile of disbelief.

"The man I am going to marry lives in Mexico."

"Mexico! Mexico!" he bubbled again. "I ask you is that any sort of a place for a man to live what marries the greatest tragic actress ever was going to be?

"Ach, my Gott," in moments of great excitement he reverted to the trick of the tongue to which he was born. "All these years I have waited for this, I have said Miss Lattimore is a great actress, she has talent, she has brains, and when she will have passion – Pouff!" He blew out his loose lips and made a balloon with his hands to express the rate at which I would rise in the scale of tragic actresses. "And now that it has happened, she wants to live in Mexico." He deflated himself suddenly, folded his hands over what he believed to be his bosom, and looked at me reproachfully. This being the first time he had studied my face directly since I came home, I suppose he must have seen there my doubt and indecision.

"Understand me," he said soberly, "I have known a lot of actresses, and I want to tell you that this marrying business don't pay. They got to come back to the stage; they got to. You ain't going to be any different down there in Mexico to what you are in New York, understand me. Yah! Mexico!" The word seemed to inflame him. But he had the sense to let me alone for a while.

A few days later I saw in the paper that he had taken the lease of the theatre he had mentioned to me, and I knew that he wasn't counting on my going to Mexico.

I suppose if I had had the courage to look into my own mind to find out what I wished to do, I might have surmised what was going on there from the fact that I didn't mention the idea of marriage to Sarah. I have tried – all this book has had no other purpose in fact, than to try to tell how I came to be in the relation I was to Helmeth Garrett, came into it as to a room long prepared for me, without any struggles or tormenting, and without thinking much about the effect that his presence in my life would have upon my work. I suppose that in as much as I had a man's attitude toward work, I had come unconsciously to the man's habit of keeping love and my career, in two watertight compartments. I found I was not able to think of them as having much to do with one another. Still less had I the traditional shames of my situation.

I remember the first time I went to rehearsal, groping about in my consciousness for the source of what I felt suddenly divide me from the rest of my company, and finding it in the knowledge of myself as a woman acquainted with passion, with a secret, delicious life. And far from identifying me with the cheapness and betrayal which until now I had supposed inseparable from the uncertified union, it set me apart in the aloofness of the exclusive, the distinguishing experience. It remained for Sarah to pierce me, in spite of all I intrinsically felt my relation to Helmeth Garrett to be, with the knowledge of where I stood in the world which I still believed had the last word about human conduct.

It was not altogether the intent to deceive, that kept me from opening the matter to her in the beginning, but a feeling that the less advice I had about it the better. And if I did tell her, I wished first to arrange that I need not feel any constraint upon me of our habit of living together. I was anxious to have Helmeth find me when he came, free to be all to him that our love demanded, and in view of all the years in which Sarah and I had lived together, I did not know how to go about it. I began to think that I should have to tell her after all, when the Powers, who must have known very well what was going on, took that into account also.

Sarah's season began a week before mine, and I remember her saying that she would be glad when we could come home together, as she had had an uneasy sensation for the last night or two, of some one following her. Sarah had any number of admirers, but the sort of men who were attracted to her still splendour, were not the kind to follow her home at night.

"Turn them over to the police," I suggested. I had had to try that once or twice.

"Oh, I couldn't!" She turned scarlet. Even after all those years I had not realized how all her life was timed to catch the slightest approaching footfall of what, to her simple faith, must inevitably come. I found her waiting for me at the stage door on my first night – no matter how many of them you have, first nights are always in the balance – and we were so taken up with discussing how I had got on with it, that it wasn't until I was fitting the key in the lock that I was recalled to the occasion of her annoyance. Just below us there seemed to be a man dodging in and out of the blocks of shadow made by the high-railed stairways that led up to the first floor of the row of flats in which our rooms were located. Something in the figure, or in our standing there before the shadowed door with the dull light of the transom over us, brushed me with a light wing of memory; I seemed to recall some such conjunction before, but it was gone before I could connote the suggestion with time or place. All I said to Sarah was that if we saw anything more of that we would certainly speak to the police.

The next night we went to supper with friends, and it was after midnight when my cab – Sarah didn't afford cabs for herself – drew up at the door. The approach to it was by way of a handsome pair of stairs with an ornamental iron railing of so close a pattern that any one sitting on the steps in the dark, would be pretty well concealed by it. That there was some one so sitting, dropped there in a stupour of fatigue or drunkenness, we did not discover until we stumbled fairly on to him.

The exclamation we raised, awoke him; it arrested the attention of the cab driver just turning from the curb, he raised his lamp and sent the rays of it streaming over us. The man I could see, was shabby, ill and embarrassed, he ducked his head from the light, but his hat had fallen off on the step and as he threw up his arm to protect himself from recognition I knew him by the gesture.

"Griff," I cried. "Griffin! You!" I caught him by the arm. He let it fall at his side and stood looking at us pitifully, like a trapped animal.

"I wasn't doing any harm," he mumbled. The cab driver seeing that we knew him, let down his lights and clattered away. I thought quickly; he must have been in want, he had looked for me and at the last was ashamed to claim me.

"But, Griffin," I insisted, "you don't know how glad I am to see you – you must come in." He wasn't looking at me; he hadn't heard me.

"Look out," he said, "she's going to faint!" He brushed past me to Sarah. She leaned limp against the railing; he steadied her as a man might a sacred vessel in jeopardy. But Sarah didn't faint so easily as that, she gathered herself away from his hand.

"Come upstairs," she commanded. It was only one flight up. I don't know how we managed to get a light and to find ourselves in its pale flare, confronting one another. I could see then that my first surmise had been correct about Griffin, to the extent that he looked ill and in want. He was holding his hat, which he had picked up from the stairs, and fumbled it steadily in his hands. His hair, which wanted trimming more even than when I had last seen him, had still its romantic curl; he looked steadily out from under it at Sarah. I had an idea, though I think it must have been derived from my own dizziness at what rushed in upon me, that Sarah was floating in air, that she hung there swaying with the breeze from the open window, as a spirit. She was spirit white and her voice seemed to come from far.

"Leon! Leon!" How he knew what she demanded of him only the God who makes men and women to love one another, knows.

"She died," he said to the unspoken question. "She died two years ago. I've been all this time finding you." Suddenly a quick flame burst over Sarah.

"You came – you came to me!" I could see that she moved toward him, all her magnificent body alight, her arms, her bosom. I turned quickly through the door into the room beyond. I couldn't stay to see that. I went on into my bedroom and knelt down, hiding my face in the bedclothes. I think I meant to pray, but no words came. I rose presently and went into the kitchen. The maid did not sleep in the flat but came every morning at nine; on the table there was a tray as she left it always, with everything laid out in case we should be hungry coming late from the theatre. I moved about softly and made chocolate and sandwiches and arranged them on the tray; I knew Sarah would understand. About half an hour after I had gone to my room again, I heard her go out to find it.

From time to time I could catch a faint murmur from the front room. I put the pillow over my head and cried softly. I remembered how Griffin had looked at her that time in Chicago when I had taken him to "The Futurist," and how I had been ashamed ever to introduce him. I wondered whether his real name were Lawrence or Griffin. I had fallen asleep at last, and I was awakened by Sarah standing beside me in her white gown.

"May I sleep with you, Olivia? I've put … Mr. Lawrence … in my room." I drew her under the cover with me; she was cold and now and then a shudder passed through her from head to foot.

"You guessed, didn't you?" she whispered. "He said you knew him in Chicago. His … Mrs. Lawrence is dead … you heard him say that?" I understood she meant by that to extenuate his coming back to her. It was right for him to come if no other woman stood in the way; what there was in himself that stood in the way didn't seem to matter.

"He's been ill," she said. "I hope you didn't mind my keeping him in the house, Olive… We can be married to-morrow."

I sat straight up in bed in my amazement.

"Sarah! You don't mean that you are going to marry him!"

"Why, what else is there to do?"

"But, Sarah …" I lay down again. After all what else was there to do?

"You know, Olivia, you have never really loved anybody." I had no answer to that; suddenly she broke out shaking the bed with her sobs. "Oh, my dear, my dear, it is true that he loved me. It is true. He came back to me as soon as he was free. Oh, Olive, if you had known what it is all these years not to know if it was true! If he hadn't only taken me just as a stop-gap … a fancy … how was I to know?"

I didn't think very much of the proof that he loved her now. Sarah, beautiful, prosperous, was a goal for any man to strive toward, even without the necessity which was written in every line of Leon Griffin Lawrence.

"Sarah," I questioned gently, "do you mean to say you've loved him all this time, that you love him now?" She left off sobbing to answer me with that steady, patient truth with which she met any issue of life.

"I loved him … all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now, of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you can't take it back again."

"But he – he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?"

"I am married to him."

"But, Sarah … look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved. I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no self-respecting woman should go into."

"Love," said Sarah, "is a thing that once you've gone into, binds you by something that grows out of it that is stronger than love itself. Olivia, I am bound … if you want to know, I'd rather be bound to – to Leon Lawrence by that tie than to the dearest love without it. Oh, Olivia, can't you see, can't you understand that I have to do right … that the way I see things there's a law … not a civil law but a law of loving that goes on by itself; and being faithful to it is better to me than loving. You must see that, Olivia."

"I see that this is the happiest thing for you and I'll not put anything in your way, Sarah." I kissed her. What, after all, does one soul know of another.

It came to me as an extenuating circumstance when I looked him over the next morning, that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't live long enough to do her any particular harm. He had been so little of a man always to me, so much less so now, eaten through as he was by poverty and sickness, that I could never understand how he happened to be the vehicle of that appealing charm which even as I looked, drew me over to his side in something like a sympathetic frame.

I could see that he regarded me anxiously, and I thought it to his credit to be able to realize that there might be somebody not absolutely delighted at his marrying Sarah. But it wasn't, as I learned later, any sense of his shortcomings that waked in his eye toward me.

He was lying on the sofa in our little parlour, for the shock of the encounter had been too much for the abused and broken thing he was. Sarah had gone out, to consult Jerry, I believed about their marriage; – she wouldn't have asked me knowing how I felt about it. Griffin looked up at me with the old formless demand on my consideration.

"You've never told her, have you?"

"Told what?" On my part it was genuine amazement.

"About us, you know … there in Chicago." He dropped his eyes; something almost like a blush of shame overcame him. I stared.

"Good heavens, Griff, I'd forgotten it."

"Oh, well, I didn't know – some women – " He stopped, embarrassed by my sheer credulity of its having anything to do with his relation to Sarah. "I told you I was a bad lot," he protested, "but I swear that since my wife died and I could come back to her, I've been straight. You believe that, don't you?"

"Oh, I'll believe it if it's any comfort to you." When I talked it over with Jerry afterward I could see the queer, twisted kind of moral standard by which he made it appear that any irregularity of his during his wife's life, was unfaithfulness to her, and not Sarah.

She had come back with Jerry and I was walking with him to the City Hall for the license; he had begun by protesting just as I had, and had surrendered to his conviction that nothing less would satisfy Sarah.

"After all," I said, "it shows that there is some sort of harmony between them, that he should realize that the only reparation he could make would be to come back to her."

"Cur!" Jerry kicked at the pavement, "to pollute the life of a woman like Sarah with his wretched existence."

"That's how you feel," I reminded him, "but remember how all these years Sarah has felt polluted by the thought that she wasn't married to him."

"Oh, damn!"

"Sarah thinks, and I'm beginning to think so too, that there is something to marriage that binds besides the ceremony."

"I know." Jerry's wife had left him that summer and though he knew it was the best thing for both of them, he was trying to get her back again: "It binds of itself. If only they would tell us that in the beginning instead of putting up all this stuff about its being the law and religion. We think we can get out of it just by getting out of the law, and none of us know better until it is too late."

"People like Sarah know. They know just the way swallows know to go south in winter. You'll see; she will be happier married, not because it is pleasant but because it is right."

They were married that afternoon in our apartment, and it was not until I was settled in the hotel where I had elected to stay until I could find suitable quarters, that I realized that the chance of this marriage had accomplished for me the freedom that I had not known how to obtain for myself.

I lay awake a long time after I came from the theatre, and the mere circumstance of my being alone and in a hotel, as well as the events that led up to it, brought back to me the sense of my lover, of his being just in the next room and presently to come in to me. I felt near and warm toward him. And then I thought of Sarah and Griffin and how almost I had become the stop-gap to his affections that she dreaded most to find herself to have been. It didn't seem very real in retrospect. I shuddered away from it. Then I began to think how I had first been kindly disposed toward him, and that brought up an image of the dim corridor of the hotel where I had come to my first knowledge of such relations, and my abhorrence and terror of it. I thought of O'Farrell and of Miss Dean, and that suspicion of sickliness which her personality had for me, and saw how it must have arisen from her consciousness of what she had done to Griffin rather than her relation to Manager O'Farrell. Then I thought of Helmeth Garrett and one night in Sienna when the moonlight poured white over the cathedral … and a linden tree in bloom outside the window … and a nightingale singing in it … Suddenly it was mixed up in my mind with the slanting chandelier and the tin-faced clock, and slowly a sense of unutterable stain and shame began to percolate through and through me.

CHAPTER VI

It is a great mistake to suppose that assertiveness is the only mannish trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know, but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods, my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.

How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my resistences serve to push me on to the assured position of a theatre and a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, space and opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the extraordinary florescence of my art.

Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware of all forms and passions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.

"You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine." That was his opinion of my support. "And to think you could have a theatre of your own, and what you like – "

"A theatre like me —Me spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried out to the least detail?"

"You shall have it even in the box office!" he responded magnificently.

"How soon?"

"I will bring the plans this afternoon; I got 'em ready in case you came around." But he was much too intelligent to undertake to bind me to them at that juncture.

Things went on like this until the last week in November, then I had a telegram from Helmeth saying that he would be detained still longer. Every pulse of me had so been set to his coming on the twenty-seventh that I thought I should not be able to go on after that, I should go out like a light when the current is stopped. I had so little of him, not even a photograph, nothing but my ring and a few trinkets he had bought me in Italy. If I could have had a garment he had worn, a chair in which he had sat … I went round and looked at the Astor House, because he told me that he had stopped there once, years ago.

I stood that for three days and then I went down to New Rochelle where he had written me earlier, his girls were at school; not on my own account, you understand, but as a possible patron of the school on behalf of my niece, who was, if the truth must be told, less than two years old. While I was being shown about, I had Helmeth's children pointed out to me. They looked, as I had surmised, like their mother. If they had in the least resembled their father I should have snatched them to me. Everything might have turned out quite differently. They were, the principal said, nice girls and studious, but they did not look in the least like their father.

It was one of those dark, gusty days that come at the end of November, damp without rain, and of a penetrating cold. There had been a great storm at sea lately and you could hear the wash of its disturbances all along the Sound. There was no steady wind, but now and then the damp air gave a flap like an idle wing. It was like the stir in me of a formless, cold desire, not equal to the demand Life was about to make on it. As I turned into the station road after a formal inspection of the premises, I met the girls coming back from their afternoon walk with the teachers, two and two. The Garrett girls were next to the last, they were very near of an age; I waited half hidden by a tree to watch them as they passed.

They were well covered up from the weather in large blue coats with capes, and blue felt hats with butterfly bows to match at the ends of their flaxen braids. They looked like their mother … I couldn't see them growing up to anything that would fit with Sarah and Jerry and Polatkin. The wing of the wind shook out some gathered drops of moisture as they passed, the branches of the trees clashed softly together, and as they turned into the grounds I noticed that the older one had something in her walk that reminded me of her father.

I was pierced through with a formless jealousy of the woman who had borne them in her body. I was moved, but not with the impulse to draw them to my bosom. I felt back in the place where my boy had been, for the connecting link of motherliness and failed to find it. I had had it once, that knowledge of what is good to be done for small children and the wish to do it, but it was gone from me. It was as though I might have had a hand or a claw, any prehensile organ by which such things are apprehended, and when I reached it out after Helmeth's children it was withered.

What I found in myself was the familiar attitude of the stage. I could have acted what swept through me then, I could have brought you to tears by it, but there was nothing I could do about it but act. I wrote Helmeth that night that I had seen the children and then I burned the letter.

He came at last. He was greatly concerned about his enterprise which was not yet established on that footing which he would like to have for it, and I think it was a relief to him to have me without the conventions and readjustments of marriage. It was tacitly understood between us that things were better as they were until that business was settled. I think he could not have had a great deal of money at the time; all that racing to and fro between London and Mexico must have cost something. His anxiety about the girls, which occasioned his sending them to the most expensive schools, and his affection for them, which led to their being carted about by their aunt to meet him occasionally at far-called places, was an additional drain.