A Woman of Genius

I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at the time it was notable for a disposition to take the amplitude of its pretension for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had dwindled to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans. I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained prettiness and dared to dispense with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal had its way with us, I saw that the land had set its mark on him.

He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed. There are times, no doubt, when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I had spread the crest of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable, enchanting; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the exigencies of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's attitude was an additional harassment. And there was so little else I could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient to the necessity of keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living together.

"At any rate," I said, consoling myself for his scant hours with me, "we shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say – " something curiously like embarrassment suffused him.

"I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena … at the Howards' … the girls are there, you know." I didn't know, and the circumstance of its having been kept from me smacked of offence. Why, since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the children; … why not have at least included me in a community of interest with them?

"I thought," he extenuated, "that the girls were the chief obstacle to your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if you didn't have them thrust too much upon you."

"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the main issue. "It isn't the girls – it isn't anything of yours, it is something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into the family with me."

"It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me about that?"

He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another path to my recently awakened resentment.

"Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's sister, isn't she?"

"They don't live together." He had answered my unspoken question, as though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition in his own before. "Miss Stanley and the young brother – you remember him at Cadenabbia? – live at the old place. She has been a mother to him."

"Ah," I couldn't forbear to suggest, "and she's mothering your children now."

"Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?"

"Yes, I am," I told him. "I'm jealous of every minute you spend away from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear – " I put my hands up to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there.

"Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our feelings count for something."

"I couldn't," I protested, "you don't understand; there's Polatkin and Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw."

"A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband – " he broke out, "think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she should or shouldn't do!" We went over that ground again until we ceased from sheer exhaustion.

It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go back to my work until he could claim me.

For a wild moment I yielded to the suggestion … if I could have him and my art … but I hope I am not altogether a cad. I saw what all his efforts could not keep me from seeing, that even to do that for me, to get me into his place in Mexico and back again would be a tax on him, and to ask him to do it with a reservation in my mind would be more than I would stand for.

"It isn't fair, Helmeth, my letting you think that anything could pull me away from the stage. It isn't that I don't agree with you about how a husband and wife ought to be with one another, nor that I am not entirely of the opinion that the atmosphere of the stage is not the place to bring up children the way you want yours brought up; it is because not even the kind of marriage you offer me would hold me."

"You mean that you'd leave me? That you'd go back to it?"

"Well, why not? I left my first husband. I know that wasn't the way it seemed to me then, but that's what it amounted to … and he fell in love with the village dressmaker." I had never told him that part of my life; I had never thought of it in the terms in which I had just stated it, I saw him grow slowly white under the sun-brown of his skin.

"I see … if your only idea in staying with me is that I might – Good God, Olivia, do you know what you've said to me?"

"Nothing except what is right for you to know. Do you remember, Helmeth, what I told you Mark Eversley called me?"

"A Woman of Genius; I remember." He was looking at me now as though the phrase were a sort of acid test which brought out in me traits unsuspected before.

"Well, then, I'm those two things, a woman and a genius, and the woman was meant for you; don't think I don't know that and am not proud of it with every fibre of my brain and body. I should have been glad once; if it were possible I'd be glad now to have kept your house and borne your children, and see to it that they brushed their teeth and had hair ribbons to match their clothes."

"Their mother thought that was important." He snatched at this as at an incontestable evidence of my being all that I was trying to show him that I was not.

"It is important… I remember to this day the effect on me of my hair ribbons – " He broke in eagerly.

"If you can see that … if you understand what their mother wanted … things I missed out of my life through having no mother, that I've heard you say you missed partly out of yours … birthdays and Christmas and good chances to marry when they grow up – "

"I do understand, Helmeth, but what I'm trying to tell you is that I can't go through with it. Those are the things that belong to the woman, that it takes all the woman's time to do the way their mother would have them done, and for me the woman has been swamped in the genius. Oh, I don't say that I'm not a better actress for having tried so long to be merely a woman, for being able even now, to know all that you mean when you say 'woman'; but there it is. I am an actress and I can't leave off being one just by saying so."

"And I can't leave off being a proper father to my girls. I owe them the things we've been talking about just as I owe them a living. I suppose I should have married for their sakes, supposing I could get anybody to have me, even if I hadn't found you. And I don't want finding you to mean anything but the best to them." I had nothing to say to that, and he went back to a thought that had often been between us. "We ought to have married when we were young," he insisted as though somehow that made a better case of it, "if you hadn't begun you wouldn't have been called on to leave it off."

"The point is that it won't leave me. Genius – I don't know what it is except that it is nothing to be conceited about because you can't help it – isn't a thing you can pick up or lay down at your pleasure; it's a possession."

I could see that he didn't altogether follow me, that he was not very far removed, and that only by his admiration for me, from the Taylorvillian idea that to speak of yourself as a genius was to pay yourself an unwarrantable compliment, and that the most I could get him to understand of the meaning of my work, was what grew out of his being a most competent workman himself. He went back to the original proposition.

"Does that mean, then, that you are not going to marry me?"

"It means that I'm not going to leave the stage to do it."

"It seems to me to mean that you don't love me as you have professed to. Oh, I know how women love … good women."

"Helmeth!"

"I beg your pardon, Olivia." We stood aghast at what we had brought upon ourselves; across the breach of dissension we rushed together with effacing passion. After all, I believe I should have gone with him if he had had the wit to know that the point at which a woman is most prepared for yielding is the next instant after she has just stated the insuperable objection. Whether he knew or not, the whole of his outer attention was taken up with the purchase of pump fittings.

Understand that I didn't for a moment suppose that I had lost him, that I didn't believe anything but that I could go to him at any moment if the whim seized me, that I couldn't in reason pull him back if the need of him arose. I finished out my vacation at resorts up and down the California coast, warm with the certainty that I should see him in New York the next winter.

CHAPTER VIII

The next season was a brilliant one, made so by the strength of my wanting him, and by the sense of completeness and finality which came to me out of the faith that we had been ordained to be lovers from the beginning. It began to seem, in the fashion in which we had been brought together as boy and girl and then mated in ways which, creditable as they had been, yet offered no obstacle to the freshness and vitality of our passion, that we had been guided by that intelligence which in any emergency of my gift, I felt rush to save it. That I had been prevented from any absorbing interest until it had grown and flowered in me, appeared now to have come about by direct manipulation of the Powers. I had curious and interesting adventures that winter in the farthest unexplored territory of the artistic consciousness, which tempt me at every turn to put by my story for the purpose of making them plain to you, and I am only deterred from it by the certainty that you couldn't get it plain in any case.

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Dante and found myself convicted of shallowness in never having taken his passion for the cold-blooded Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in the circle within circle of his hells and paradisos, the rhythm of aches and exaltations. And if you couldn't get that from Dante, how much less from anything I might have to say to you. After all these years I do not know what is the relation of Art to Passion, but I have experienced it. If I said anything it would be by way of persuading you that loving is not an end in itself, but the pull upward to our native heaven, which is no hymn-book heaven, but a world of the Spirit wherein things are made and remade and called good.

What I made out of it at that time was the material of a satisfying success, and though I got on without him much better than I could have expected, the fact that after all, he did not get any nearer to me than the Pacific coast, had its effect in the year's adventures.

That I missed my lover infinitely, that I was thinned in the body by the sheer want of him, that I had moments of mad resolve, of passionate self-abandoning cry to him, goes without saying. One need not in a certain society, say more of love than that one has it, to be understood as well as if one displayed a yellow ribbon in the company of Orangemen, but since I couldn't say it, an opinion passed current among my friends that I was working too hard and in need of a holiday. It came around at last to Polatkin himself noticing it, though I believe with a better understanding of the reason why I should be restless and sleepless eyed. It was just after I had heard from Helmeth that he couldn't possibly hope to be in New York for another year, that my manager suggested that it might be good business policy for me to play a short tour in three or four of the leading cities, a strictly limited season which would be enough to whet the public appetite without satisfying it.

"What cities?"

I believe that I jumped at it in the hope somehow that it might be stretched to include Los Angeles, where Helmeth was at that moment, and where I felt sure he would come to me. When I learned, however, that nothing was contemplated farther west than Chicago, I lost interest. That very day I had a telegram:

"Will you marry me?

"Signed: Garrett."

It was dated at Los Angeles, and as I could think of no reason for this urgency, I concluded that it must be because the association there with the idea of me, had been too much for him, and in that new yielding of mine to the beguiling circumstance, I was disposed to interpret it as evidence that he was coming round. I wired back:

"If you marry my work.

"Olivia."

and prepared myself for the renewal of that dear struggle which, if it got us no further, at least involved us in coil upon coil of emotion, making him by the very force he spent on it, more completely mine. I expected him in every knock on the door, every foot on the stair, and had he come to me then, would no doubt have provoked him to that traditional conquest which, as it has its root in a situation made, affected for the express purpose of provocation, is the worst possible basis for a successful marriage.

On the day on which at the earliest, I could have expected him from Los Angeles, I sent my maid away in order that, if I should find him there in the old place waiting for me, there should be no constraint on the drama of assault and surrender for which I found myself primed.

Then by degrees it began to grow plain to me that he did not mean to come, that the question and my answer to it, had carried some sort of finality to his mind that was not apparent to mine. By the time I had a letter from him, written at the mine, with no reference in it to what had passed so recently between us, I understood that he would not ask me to marry him again. He had accepted the situation of being my lover merely, and I was not any more to be vexed by the alternative. I said to myself that it was better to have it resolved with so little pain, and that it should be my part to see that what we were to one another was to yield its proper fruit of happiness. I found myself at a loss, however, in the application; for though you may have satisfied yourself of the moral propriety of dispensing with the convention of publicity, you cannot very well, with a week's journey between you, get forward in the business of making a man happy. About this time Jerry began to be anxious about what I couldn't prevent showing in my face, the wasting evidence of love divided from its natural use of loving.

"You'll break down altogether," he expostulated, "and then where will I be?" He was tremendously interested in his new play, which was by far the best thing he had done, and in the process of getting it to the public he had so identified it with my interpretation that he was no longer able to think of the one without the other. There had come into his manner a new solicitude very pleasing to me, born of his sense of possession in me, in as much as I was the lovely lady of his play, and a sort of awe of all that I put into it that transcended his own notion and yet was so integral a part of it. It had brought him out of his old acceptance of me as a foil and relief for the shallow iridescence that other women produced in him. He had begun to have for me a little of that calculating tenderness with which a man might regard the mother of his nursing child. Night by night then as he came hovering about me he could not fail to observe, though he could hardly have understood it, the wearing hunger with which I came from my work, pushed on by it to more and more desperate need of loving, and drawn back by its unrelenting grip from the artistic ruin in which the satisfaction of that hunger would involve me. Now at his very natural expression of concern, I felt myself unaccountably irritated.

"Jerry," I demanded of him, "would it matter so much if we left off altogether writing plays and playing them? What would it matter?"

"You are in a bad way if you've begun to question that? What does living matter? We are here and we have to go on."

"Yes, but when we go on at such pains? Is there any more behind us than there is behind a ball when it is set rolling? Are we aimed at anything?"

"Oh, Lord, Olivia, what has that got to do with it?" He was sitting in my most commodious chair with his long knees crossed to prop up a manuscript from which he was reading me the notes of a tragedy he was about to undertake, and his quills were almost erect with the tweaking he had given them in the process of arriving at his climax. It was a curious fact that the breaking off of his marriage, which in the nature of the case could not be broken off sharp but had writhed and frayed him like the twisting of a green stick, by setting Jerry free for those light adventures of the affections which had been so largely responsible for the rupture of his domestic relations, instead of multiplying his propensity by his opportunity, had landed him on a plane of self-realization in which they were no longer needful. The poet in Jerry would never be able to resist the attraction of youth and freshness, but the man in him was forever and unassailably beyond their reach. I was never more convinced of this than when he turned on this occasion from the preoccupation of his creative mood, to offer whatever his point of attachment life had provided him, to bridge across the chasm of my spirit.

"I don't see why it is important that we should know what we are working for; we might, in our confounded egotism, not approve of it, we might even think we could improve on the pattern. I write plays and you act them and a bee makes honey. I suppose there's a beekeeper about, but that's none of our business."

"Ah, if we could only be sure of that – if He would only make himself manifest; that's what I'm looking for, just a hint of what He's trying to do with us."

"Well, I can tell you: He'll smoke you out of New York and into a sanitarium, if you don't know enough to take a change and a rest."

"Poly wants me to go on the road for a while; sort of triumphal progress. He thinks applause will cure me."

"You're getting that now. What would bring you around would be a good frost."

"You wouldn't want that in Chicago?" Jerry disentangled his limbs and sat up sniffing the wind of success.

"If I could have you to open with my play in Chicago," he averred solemnly, "I'd be ready to sing the Lord Dismiss Us." He really thought so. To go back to the scene of his early struggle with his laurels fresh on him, to satisfy the predictions of his earliest friends and confound his detractors, above all to be received in his own country with that honour which is denied to prophets, seemed to him then almost as desirable in prospect as it proved in fact not to be. I found another advantage in the confusion and excitement of touring, in being able to conceal from myself that I hadn't had a satisfactory letter from Helmeth since the pair of telegrams that passed between us, and no letter at all for a long time. It was always possible to pretend to myself that the letters had been written but were delayed in forwarding.

It was a raw spring day when we came to Chicago, the promise of the season in the sun, denied and flouted by the wind. It slanted the tails of the labouring teams and cast over the clean furrow, handfuls of the winter rubbish from the stubble yet unturned, and between field and field it wrung the tops of the leafless wood. Now and then it parted them on white painted spires without disturbing them or the rows of thin white gravestones. It laid bare the roots of my life to the cold blasts of memory, it rendered me again the pagan touch, the undivided part that the earth had in me. My dead were in its sod, in me the sap of its spiritual fervours and renunciations. What was I, what was my art but the flower, the bright, exotic blossom borne upon its topmost bough, its dying top; here in its abounding villages, in the deep-rutted county roads was the root and trunk. Outside, the wind flicked the landscape like the screen of the moving picture that the swift roll of the train made of it, and I felt again the pressure of my small son upon my arm, and the pleasant stir of domesticity and the return of my man. For the last hour Jerry had come to sit in my compartment, opposite me, and stare stonily out of the window; now and then his jaws relaxed and set again as he bit hard upon the bitter end of experience. No one, I suppose, can go through that country so teeming with the evidences of the common life, the common labour, the common hope of immortality, and not feel bereft in as much as the circumstances of his destiny divide him from it. We passed Higgleston; beyond the roofs of it the elms that marked the cemetery road, gathered green. The roofs of the town were steeped in windy light. I had no impulse to stop there. I withdrew from it as one does from a private affair upon which he has stumbled unaware. Rather it was not I who withdrew, but Life as it was lived there, turned its back upon me.

Getting in to Chicago through that smoky wooden wilderness, within which the city obscures itself as a cuttlefish in its own inky cloud, I felt again the wounding and affront, the cold shoulder lifted on my needs, the eager hand stretched out to catch my contribution. Chicago received me with its hat off, bowing to meet me, and when I remembered how nearly it had let me fall into the pit prepared for me by Griffin and the "Flim-Flams," I burned with resentment.

It was seven years now since I had seen the city or Pauline, the only friend I had made there who could be supposed to take an interest in my coming again. I meant of course to see Pauline; we had kept up a correspondence which with the years had shown a disposition to confine itself to a Christmas reminder, and an occasional marked copy of a magazine, but I meant, of course, to see her. I had trusted to her finding out through the newspapers that I would be there and on such a date. It fell in quite naturally with my inclination, to have her card sent up to me the next morning a little after eleven. I was needing to be distracted. On my way up from breakfast I had met Jerry going down with his suit case.

"Back to New York," he admitted to my question, "as quick as I can get there."

"But with all this success … why, they fairly stood on their feet last night."

"I know, I know," he looked unendurably harassed. "I can't stand it, Olivia, I can't stand it. This place is full of ghosts." I remembered that both his children had been born there and that he had not seem them for more than a year, and I did not press him.