A Woman of Genius Part 27

"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too, not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious.

Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too late of course to catch them.

"Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy.

"First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by my evident wish to speak to her.

"Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband; I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her.

"My husband never sees visitors in the morning."

"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.

He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.

"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."

"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back again ..." I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.

"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "_You_ wouldn't wish that.

What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"

"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something--something pressing to be done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."

"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"

"I shall believe you," I said.

He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate carving in his face of n.o.bility and gentleness. There were men like that then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a s.h.i.+bboleth of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me, groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay face downward on the table.

"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage.

Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter in Chicago rose up in the part of _Magda_ to protest against the judgment of Taylorville.

I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.

"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley could do for me.

"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"

"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not let myself down like that.... Was that why you asked me to do the part?"

I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without taking any note of my standing.

"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"

I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.

"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."

Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to see him the next day, and if he liked me--by the tone in which Mark Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone--he would take me on to New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.

So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast, I turned into the first attractive cafe and paid out almost my last cent for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the a.s.surance of Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled with _Magda_, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.

As I walked back to my lodging, a flood of hopes, half shapes of conquests and surmises, bore me like a widening flood apart from all that the last few months stood for. Suddenly at the door I realized how far it had carried me from Griffin; the figure of him was faint in my mind as one seen from the farther sh.o.r.e. I considered a little and then I wrote him a note and slipped it under the door. I went out again, and walked aimlessly all the rest of the afternoon, and when it was dark I stole softly up to my room again, but he heard me. He came knocking almost immediately, full of the appearance of rejoicing, but even the dusk didn't conceal from me that embarra.s.sment was on him. He looked checked and confounded as when he had told me about his relation to Miss Dean, like a man caught in an unwarrantable a.s.sumption. Whatever Dean had done to him, it had broken the back of his egotism completely. He knew well enough he had no business with a woman like me, a friend of Mark Eversley's, and he was ashamed to have been caught thinking he had.

He sidled and fluttered for an interval, making up his mind to a resumption of affectionateness, and finally making it up that he couldn't, and remembering an engagement somewhere for the evening.

It was about eleven of the next day that I had a note from Eversley to come to his rooms to meet Mr. Polatkin. I went in a kind of haze of excitement, numb as to my feet and finger-tips, moving about by reflexes merely and with a vague doubt as each new point of the way presented itself, the car I took, the hotel stair, the length of the corridor, if I should be equal to any one of them, so far was my consciousness removed from the means of communication.

Eversley shook hands with me out of a cloud, moving in an orbit miles outside of my own, and when he left me, saying that Polatkin would come up the next moment, it was as if he had withdrawn into the vastness of outer s.p.a.ce. In the interval before I heard Mr. Polatkin's knock I rehea.r.s.ed a great many ways of meeting him, none of which were from the right cue.

I do not know why I hadn't been prepared by the name for his being a Jew, nor for the sudden s.h.i.+fting of the ground of our meeting which that fact made for me. So far as I had thought of him at all, it was in a kind of nebulosity of the high disinterestedness that was responsible for Mark Eversley's interest in me. It had been, his generous succour, all of a piece of that traditional protectiveness, the expectation of which is so drilled into women that it rose promptly in advance of any occasion for it. The mere supposition that he was to provide for me, had tinged my mind, unaware, with the natural response of a docility made ridiculous by the figure of Polatkin edging himself in through a door that an arrangement of furniture made impossible completely to open. His height did not bring him above the level of my eyes, and as much of him as was visible above his theatrical-looking, furred coat, was chiefly nose and pallid forehead disdained by tight, black, curly hair, and extraordinarily black eyes which seemed to have retreated under the brows for the purpose of taking council with the intelligence that informed them.

I had put on my best to meet him, and though my husband had been dead more than two years, my best was still tinged with widowhood, for the chief reason that once having got into black I had not been able to afford to put it off for anything more suitable. I had put a good deal of white about the neck trying for an effect which I knew, as Polatkin's eyes travelled over me, had been feminine rather than professional. Now as I realized how I had unconsciously responded to the suggestion of preciousness in the fact of his coming to take care of me, I felt myself grow from head to foot one deep suffusing red. It comes out for me in retrospect how near I was to the situation which had intrigued Cecelia Brune and her kind, put at disadvantage, not by a monetary obligation so much as by the inevitable feminine reaction toward the source of care and protection. At the time, however, I was concerned to keep the stodgy little Jew, who stood hat in hand taking stock of me, from discovering that I had come to this meeting with a degree of personal expectation which I should have resented in him. I hoped indeed that my blush might pa.s.s with him for a denial of the very thing it confessed, or at least for mere shyness and gaucherie. I was helped from my confusion by the realization that Mr. Polatkin was not so much looking at me or speaking to me, as projecting me into the future and gauging me against a background of his own creation.

I was standing still, after we had got through some perfunctory civilities, for I thought he would want me to act for him--but I found afterward that he had trusted Mr. Eversley for my capacity--and I had a feeling of being able to meet the situation better on my feet. I caught him looking at me with an irritating impersonality.

"Jalowaski shall make your corsets," he affirmed; "he makes 'em for Eames and Gadski--a little more off there, a little longer here ...

so...." He did not touch me, he was not even within touching distance, but he followed the outline of my figure with his thumb, flouris.h.i.+ng out the alterations which made it more to his mind. "Jalowaski would fix you so you wouldn't believe it was you," he concluded.

He appeared so well satisfied with his inspection that he expanded graciously. "And there is one thing you have which there is lots of actresses would give half they got for it. You have got imagination in the way you dress your hair. It is a wonder how some of them can act and yet ain't got no imagination at all about the way they look, only so it is stylish. For an actress it is all right for her to look stylish on the street, but there are times when she has to look otherways on the stage; y'understand me."

I slid somehow into a chair; I don't know exactly what I expected, but it certainly hadn't been this apprais.e.m.e.nt, which I had the sense to see was favourable and yet resented.

"The first thing we will see to yet, is some clothes; for you will excuse me, Miss Lattimore, but what you are wearing don't show you off at all. You don't need to wear black. Of course I know you are a widow, Mr. Eversley was telling me, but there are some actresses what make out like they was, because they think it becomes them, y' understand, but there is no need for you to wear it, for Mr. Eversley is telling me that your husband is dead more than two years already." He had loosened his coat to display an appropriate amount of gold fob dependent over a small balloon in the process of being inflated; now from somewhere in his inner recess he produced a folded paper.

"It is better we have a contract from the start. Though of course it is all right if Mr. Eversley recommends you, but it is better we don't have misunderstandings." He spread the paper out and weighted it with one of his pudgy hands.

"So you are going to take me ... you haven't seen me act yet."

"Eversley has."

"Well ... if you want to take his judgment ... but he hasn't told me anything about _you_ yet. What do you want of me; what are you going to do for me?"

If Eversley had told him how desperate my situation was, it wasn't a good move to try to hold out against him now, it might have given him the idea that I was ungrateful, but I couldn't stand for being handed about this way like a female chattel. That Eversley had told him, I saw by the expression of astonishment on his face which slowly changed to one of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"I'm going to save you from starving to death," he began, and then as the sense of my courage in the face of such an alternative grew upon him, "I'm going to make you one of the leading tragic actresses of America."

"And what am I to do?"

"Whatever I tell you. Eversley thinks you could study a while with Mrs.

Delamater. She is wonderful, wonderful!" He described with his arms a circle scarcely larger than the arc of his cherubic contour, to show how wonderful she was.

"I should like some dancing lessons, too," I submitted.

"Do you dance? Ah, no, it is too much to expect; but if I could find me a dancer, Miss Lattimore, a born dancer!" He brought his arms into play again to describe a felicity which transcended expression. "But they are not so easy to find," he sighed audibly. "We must do what we can already."

Eversley told me afterward that Polatkin had the soul of an actor, but the only part which he had ever been able to play without being ridiculous, was f.a.gin, and now he was too fat even for that, so that he took it out vicariously in the success of those whose opportunity he made. It was the dream of his life to find a real genius, a dancer or a prima donna; I believe I was the nearest he ever came to it; and I owe it to him to say that I couldn't have arrived at more than the faintest approach to it without him.

It was that contract I signed with him there in Eversley's room which brought him in the end about three hundred per cent. on the money he advanced me, but I never begrudged it. He gave me a check then and there, and an address of a hotel in New York where I was to meet him within five days. He looked me well over as he shook hands with me.