A Woman of Genius Part 21

"Her coming to the funeral as one of the family? Well, how do we take it, Effie?"

"Mother couldn't bear the idea of it." Tears came into my sister's eyes; I could see the wings of self-immolation hovering over her.

"Look here, Effie, you go and take home Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons." There had been so many out of town connections dropping in for a meal that we had been obliged to fall back on our nearest neighbour.

"Lily's respectable, isn't she? and Forester has encouraged her. Well, you don't want to spoil the poor girl's life, do you?"

"Oh," said Effie, "oh, Olivia!" I could see she was torn between compunction and admiration for my way of putting it on high moral grounds. I heard her counting out the spoons in the kitchen as I went to let Mrs. Jastrow in.

I think she didn't know any more than Effie did, what to make of my manner of receiving her. She sat on the edge of a chair and snivelled a little into a handkerchief which was evidently her husband's, but it was chiefly, I could see, because she had come prepared to snivel and couldn't quickly adjust herself to my change of base.

"Poor Lily," she moaned, "she thought such a lot of Mr. Lattimore's mother; but I tell her she must bear up."

"She must indeed," I a.s.sured her. "Forester needs all the sympathy he can get just now." I could see her peeping over the top of her handkerchief, trying to guess what to make of that; but the sentimental was easy for her.

"That's what I tell her; they'll have to comfort each other. Them poor young things, they'd ought to be together. But Lily's so sensitive she couldn't bear to put herself forward."

"I'll tell Forrie you called," I a.s.sured her.

Mrs. Jastrow fanned herself with her damp handkerchief; her poor little pretence broke quite down under my friendliness.

"He's got to marry her," she whispered. "Lily's been talked about, and he's _got to_." I could guess suddenly what it meant to her to have reached up so desperately for something better for her daughter than she had been able to manage for herself, and to come so near not getting it.

I was able to put something like sympathy into my voice when I spoke to Forester at supper.

"Mrs. Jastrow called to-day. She says Lily isn't bearing up as she might. I suppose you ought to go and see her!"

Effie's eyes grew round at me over the teacups, but after all Forrie didn't know what had pa.s.sed between mother and me in regard to Lily. If I chose to take his relation to her as a matter of course, he couldn't object to it. We heard Forrie in his room changing his collar before he went back to the shop again.

"He'll go to her to-night after he closes up," Effie told me. "It will end with her getting him."

"So long as he doesn't get you----" But it was unfair to put ideas like that in Effie's head. "After all it is a very good match for him in some ways; she'll always look up to him, and that is what Forrie needs."

It was natural to Effie to judge every situation by what it had for those concerned; she wasn't troubled as I was by the pressure of an outside ideal. By the end of a month, when I thought of going back to the city, it was tacitly understood that as soon as convenient Forester was to marry Lily Jastrow. He meant, however, to be fair with us both about the property; he had given us notes for our share, and expected to pay interest. The note wasn't negotiable, as I learned immediately, and the interest wasn't any more than Effie would need for her clothing. I felt that the jaws of destiny which had opened to let Effie out, had closed on me instead. I returned to Chicago early in November; my place with the Coleman players had long been filled, and there was nothing whatever to do.

CHAPTER IV

Jerry's play, which had had its premier while I was away, was going on successfully. One of the first items of news Sarah told me about him was that his wife was expecting another child, undertaken in the hope that, if she couldn't hold her husband's roving fancy, she could at least fix his attention on her situation. All that she had got out of it so far, was a reason for staying at home, which left Jerry the freer to bestow his society where it was most acceptable.

"Does she know--Miss Filette, I mean--about the child."

"Not unless Jerry has told her--which he'd hardly do." Sarah laughed a little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour.

"Fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she inspired it. I imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of Mrs. McDermott to have intruded her condition on their relation. Of course it is understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...."

"It is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." I hadn't Sarah's reason for being lenient. "Somebody ought to speak to Jerry."

"You might--he would listen to you. It is just because there is so little in it that it is so hard to deal with."

I suppose I took to interfering in the McDermott's affairs because I had so little of my own to interest me. Besides, I was fond of Jerry and didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle.

"But after all," Sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own inspiration." It wasn't in me to tell her, even if I had understood it myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. I wanted, oh, I immensely wanted, what Jerry was getting out of his relation to Miss Filette, but I wanted it free of the implication that my abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything like the same case.

"The real trouble with you," Jerry told me, "is that you are trying to live in Chicago and Taylorville at the same time."

Not being able to make any headway with him, I went to call on Miss Filette. I wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an a.s.sault on her confidence, I didn't know her well enough to call on her in any case, but I wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small as a breech of manners in doing it. It wasn't so much the offense of my undertaking it that counted, I found, as Miss Filette's determination not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. I had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the road before Christmas.

"I should hope so," I dropped squarely on her; "Jerry's wife needs him.

There's a child coming in April."

"Yes," said Miss Filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "Have you seen what we have done with the second act lately?"

"Anyway," I said to myself as I went, "she knows. She can't skid over the facts as she has my telling her."

But it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with Jerry, that drove me back on Pauline and Henry Mills. I fled to them to be saved from what, in the only other society I had access to, fretted all my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.

What I should have done was to take my courage in my hands and have gone on from Taylorville to New York. But the most I was equal to was a fixed determination to accept anything which would take me nearer Broadway, which, even then, was to the player world all that the lamp is to the moth. In the meantime I had settled in two housekeeping rooms in a street that I wouldn't have dared to give to a manager as an address; one of those neighbourhoods where there are always a great many perambulators, and waste paper blowing about. There was never anything for me, in the frame of life called Bohemian, more than a picturesque way of begging the question of poverty. What I looked for in a lodging, was escape from the bedraggled professionalism which went on in what were called studios, by means of a cot bed, an oil stove, and a few yards of art muslin. That I hadn't managed it so successfully as I hoped, was made plain to me a few days after I had moved in, by the discovery of a card tacked on the opposite door, that read, "Leon Griffin, the Variete." It was the same theatre at which Cecelia Brune was playing the chief attraction in song and dance. In the glimpses I had of Mr. Griffin in the dark hall going in and out, I was aware that he gave much the same impression of unprofitable use that was a.s.sociated in my mind with the Shamrocks.

All this time I kept going through the motions of looking for an engagement. Now and then some s.h.i.+ning bubble of opportunity seemed to float toward me, to dissolve in thin air as soon as I put my hand out to it. One of these brought me to Cline and Erskine's waiting room on the day that Cecelia Brune elected to register her complaint against what she considered a slight of her turn at the Variete. She flounced about more than a little, not to let the rest of us escape the inference that she was not used to being kept waiting. When she had hooked and unhooked her handsome furs for the fourth time, she introduced me to Leon Griffin, who except for the name, I shouldn't have recognized for my hall neighbour. It was like being slapped in the face with my own hard condition to have him crowded on me in that character before the whole roomful. Life seemed so to have beggared him. In broad day he looked the sort of a man who has failed to sustain himself in the man's world, and must reinforce his value with the favour of women. Little touches of effeminacy about his dress failed to take the attention away from its shabbiness. His hair had the traditional thespian curl in spite of being cropped short, to allow of various make-ups, one surmised, and his very blue eyes were in a perpetual state of extenuating the meagreness of his other features. Being ashamed of my shame at meeting him there, I began to be very nice to him. Cecelia, in spite of her magnificent raiment, perhaps on account of it, had been disposed to graciousness. She drew us together with a wave of her hand.

"She ought to be doin' _Ophelia_ on Broadway," she introduced me handsomely; "wouldn't that get you!"

"I saw you with the Hardings last year," Griffin a.s.sented, almost as though I might think it a liberty. "Where are you playing now?" He had the stamp of too many reverses on his face not to estimate mine at its proper worth. He had fine instincts too, for as soon as I told him that I was out of an engagement that season, he put himself on record quite simply. "My turn goes off next week--I'm trying to get Cline to put it on the circuit." When we came out of the office together he fell into step with me. One of the young women ahead of us made the shape of a bubble with her hands and blew it from her. "Pouff" she said. "There goes another of my chances." She laughed with a fine courage.

"They all go through with it," Griffin affirmed. "There's Eversley----"

I have forgotten which of the well-known incidents he related.

"Eversley told me I might come to it. What made you think of him?" I demanded.

"I saw his name in the paper; he's to play here this winter. He's a wonder."

"He said wonderful things to me once." I had just recalled them.

"They'll come true then. Eversley never makes a mistake. Why, I remember once----" He broke off as though he had changed his mind about telling me. I was wondering if I couldn't get rid of him by stopping in at Sarah's, when he broke out again suddenly.

"To think of you being out of an engagement and a girl like Cecelia Brown--yes, I know her name is Brown, Cissy Brown of Milwaukee----"

"I've always suspected it," I admitted, "but it is her looks of course, and the clothes; Cecelia has lovely clothes."

"Well, so could you if...." He checked himself. "I don't mean to say anything against a lady...."

"I've always suspected that, too," I admitted, "but one doesn't like to say it."

"Well, you know what she gets--thirty-five a week. A girl doesn't wear diamond sunbursts on that."

"Mr. Griffin, I wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives diamond sunbursts to Variety girls: I've never seen any of them."