A Woman of Genius Part 37

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 fas.h.i.+on 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion for the cold-blooded Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in the circle within circle of his h.e.l.ls 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 Pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed 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 appet.i.te 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 a.s.sociation there with the idea of me, had been too much for him, and in that new yielding of mine to the beguiling circ.u.mstance, 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 a.s.sault 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 pa.s.sed 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 ma.n.u.script 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 una.s.sailably 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 pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances of his destiny divide him from it. We pa.s.sed 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 hara.s.sed. "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.

"I'll keep your end up for a week if I can," I a.s.sured him as he wrung my hand. He turned back when he was a step or two down the stair.

"Don't stay too long yourself," he admonished. "New York's the place."

I was feeling that when Pauline came to me. It wasn't until I saw her that I realized what a distance there was--in spite of our common youth, had always been--between us. It started out for us both in the first glimpse we had of one another, in the witness in all the inconsiderable elements of line and colour which go to make up a woman's appearance, of growth and amplitude in me and fulfilment in hers. Pauline had been in her girlhood, if not pretty, at least what is known as an attractive girl, and though there was only a matter of months between us, it came to me with a shock that she was now, not only not particularly attractive, but middle-aged. It was not so much in the fulness under her chin which apparently caused her no uneasiness, nor in the thickness of her waist, of which I was sure she made a virtue, but in the certainty that all that was ever to happen to her in the way of illuminating and self-forgetting pa.s.sion, had already happened.

She had reached, she must have reached about the time I was taking my flight upward by the help of Morris Polatkin, the full level of her capacity to experience. She was living still, as I saw by the card which I still held in my hand, in Evanston, and she was living there because it was no longer within the scope of her possibility to live anywhere else. All this flashed through me in the moment in which Pauline, checked by what she was able to guess of unfamiliar elements in me, was crossing the room and taking me by the hands in the old womanly way, keyed down to the certainty of not requiring it in her business any more. It was so patent that Pauline was now in the position of having done her duty toward life and Henry Mills, and was accepting all that came to her from it as her due, that it almost seemed for a moment that she had said something of the kind. What did pa.s.s between us besides a kiss of greeting, were some commonplaces about my being there and how pleased Henry and the children would be to see me. We sat down on a sofa together and for a moment the old girlish confidence put forth a tender sprig of renewal.

"So many years since we were at school together! You've gone a long way since then, Olivia."

"A long way," I admitted, but she didn't catch the double meaning the phrase had for me.

"Henry and I were talking about it this morning. And the times you had here in Chicago, you poor dear; you had to make a good many starts before you got on the right road at last."

"A great many."

"But you found out that it all came right in the end, didn't you? That it was best just for you to trust ... you used to be bitter about it ...

but trusting is always best."

"Oh, if you think I've been trusting all these years ... I've been working."

"Of course, _of_ course." Much of her old manner came back with the occasion for moralizing. "But you were too amusing, you were quite fierce with Henry because he wouldn't do anything about it." She laughed reminiscently. "And now, you see...." Her look travelled about the rose-coloured room, full of the evidence of prosperity.

"Pauline," I said, "if you are thinking that I could have gone to New York and become the success I am, _without_ the help that you and Henry might have given me, you are making a great mistake. What did happen was that I had to accept it from a quarter where it wasn't so much to be expected, and was not nearly so agreeable."

"That man Mark Eversley found for you, you mean. Well, I suppose you did get on better for a little start."

"Start!" I cried. "Start! I had to have everything--food and clothes."

A sudden recollection flashed upon me of those first days in New York, of myself become merely a dummy on which to hang a fat little Jew's notions of acceptable contours; the offence of it; the greater offence from which by the opportune appearance of the Jew I had so hardly escaped.

"Have you any idea, Pauline, what it means to have a man invest money in you?... a man like Polatkin. I was his property, a horse he had entered for the race. He had a stake on me...."