A Woman of Genius Part 19

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 sh.e.l.l and surface, clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circ.u.mstances 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 s.e.x 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 pa.s.sion 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 gla.s.s of "Dago red," his black, s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sions, I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art.

"It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be rea.s.suring 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 a.s.suming 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 s.e.x 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 sh.o.r.e 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.s 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.

One night when the wind out of the lake was fresh enough to suggest, in the closed window and the drawn blind, a reciprocated intimacy, I told Sarah all about Helmeth Garrett.

"And to think," I said, "how different it all might have been if only I had got that letter."

"Yes," Sarah admitted, "but that doesn't prove you'd have been happy."

"Not if we loved one another?"

"Oh, I am not sure loving has anything to do with happiness, or is meant to. Sometimes I think G.o.d--or whoever it is manages things--has a very poor opinion of happiness, because you don't find it invariably along with the best of experiences. It happens, or it doesn't. If love does anything for you it is just to give you the use of yourself."

"But it hasn't," I protested; "I'm just stumping along."

"You haven't really had it--just being kissed once, what does that amount to?"

"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, that is what hurts me! I haven't really had it. I'm never going to. I'll just go halting like this all my life."

"No, you won't," Sarah shook her head, piecing her own knowledge slowly into comfort for me. "You remember what I told you that time when you found out about Dean and Mr. O'Farrell? There's a kind of feeling that goes with acting that is like loving, only it isn't. I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it is what they call genius, but I know you can slide off from loving into it. That is what makes Jerry think he has to be in love all the time; it is a little stair he climbs up, and then he goes sailing off. You don't think Fancy Filette really does anything for him?"

"Goodness, no; she hasn't a teaspoonful of brains!"

"Well, then," she triumphed. "After a while his genius will be so strong in him that he won't need that sort of thing and he will think it ridiculous."

"And you think that will come to me?"

"It did come. You didn't have to be in love to begin," Sarah objected.

"Sarah, I will tell you the truth! I was in love all the time, I didn't know with whom, but always wanting somebody ... trying to get through to something; trying to mate. That was it. Nights when I would do my best, and the house would be storming and cheering, I would look around for ... for somebody. And I would go to my room, and he wouldn't be there! I used to think Tommy would be He, I wanted him to be. I thought some day I would turn around suddenly and find him changed into ...

whatever it was I wanted. But I know now he never could have been that.

And all this summer ... I've heard it calling. I've walked and walked.

Sometimes it was just around the corner, but I never caught up with it.

And when I saw Helmeth Garrett, I _knew_!"

I had leaned back out of the circle of our small shaded lamp to make my confession, but Sarah came forward into it the better to show me the condoning tenderness of her smile.

"It's no use, Sarah, I'm no genius; I have to be in love like the rest of them." She shook her head gently.

"You'll get across. Love would help; I wish you had it. But I'll confess to you; I had love and it only opened the door. There's something beyond, bigger than all men. You must reach out and lay hold of it. Oh, if it were love one needed, I should die--I should die!" I had never seen her so moved before.

"Tell me, Sarah; I've always wanted to know."

"I want you to know, but it isn't easy! I didn't know anything about love ... how could I the way I was brought up! My father was a Baptist preacher. I had been taught that it was wrong to let anybody ... touch you; and when he kissed me I felt as if he had the right...."

"I know, I know!" I had been kissed that way myself.

"How can anybody know? I loved him, and I was the only one of many. He left me without a word, ... like a woman of the street ... not looking backward." She got up and moved about the room, the thick coil of her rich brown hair slipping to her shoulders, and her bodily perfection under the thin dressing gown distracting me even from the pa.s.sion of her speech. I had a momentary pang of sympathy with the delinquent Lawrence, I could see how a man might be afraid almost, of the quality of her beauty.

"Sometimes," she said, "I think marriage is a much more real relation than people think--that something real but invisible happens between them so that even if they are parted they are never quite the same again. It is like having a limb torn from you; you ache always, in the part you have lost." I knew something of what that ache could be, but I could only turn my face up to hers that she might see my tears.

"You have enough of your own to bear," she said. "I must not lay my troubles on you; but I wanted to tell you how I know it is not love that makes art. I was dying for love when Mr. O'Farrell put me to acting. I was bleeding so ... and suddenly I reached out and laid hold of Whatever is, and I found I could act. It was as if the half of me that had been torn away had been between me and It, and I laid hold of It. That's how I know." She came behind me, leaning on my chair, and I put up my hands to her.

"Oh, Sarah, Sarah, help me to lay hold of it, too!" But for all her shy confidences, deep within I didn't believe her.

Toward the first of September we went back to the city, Sarah to begin rehearsals for _The Futurist_, and I to take up the dreary round of manager's offices and dramatic agencies. The best that was offered me was poor enough, but it had a faint savour of a superior motive clinging to it. It was from a Mr. Coleman, an actor manager of the old, heavy-jowled Shakespearian type, who was projecting a cla.s.sic revival with himself in all the tragic parts, and I signed with him to play _Portia_, _Cleopatra_, and the wife of _Brutus_. We had been busy with rehearsals about ten days when I had a telegram from Forester saying that mother had died that day and I was to come immediately.

It was late Sunday evening when I received it and I hunted up the manager at the hotel.

"I'm going," I told him.