On the morning between the second and third performance of "The Spy," for McWhirter never let the people off with less than three if he could help it, as I was sitting in the dining room of the Hotel Metropole at Kincade, enjoying the sense of leisure a late breakfast afforded, I saw the captain making his way toward me through an archipelago of whitish island upon which the remains of innumerable breakfasts appeared to be cast away without hope of rescue from the languid waiters, steering as straight a course as was compatible with a conversation kept up over his shoulder with a man, who for a certain close-cropped, clean-shaven, ever-ready look, might have been bred for the priesthood and given it up for the newspaper business. It was a type and manner I was to know very well as the actor-manager, but as the first I had seen of that species, I failed to identify it. What I did remark was the odd mixture of condescension and importance which the captain managed to put into the fact of being caught in his company. He introduced him to me as Mr. O'Farrell, Mr. Shamus O'Farrell, as though there could be but one of him and that one fully accredited and explained. He defined him further—after some remarks on the performance of the evening before in a key which seemed to sustain the evidence of Mr. O'Farrell's name in favour of his nationality—as manager of the Shamrock Players Company, billed for the first of the week in Kincade.
It turned out in the course of these remarks, which the captain delivered with a kind of proprietary air in us, that Mr. O'Farrell—he called himself The O'Farrell in his posters—had a proposition to make to me. He put it with an admirable mixture of compliment and depreciation, as though either was a sort of stopcock to meet a too reluctant modesty on my part or a too exorbitant demand for payment. I was afterward to know many variations of this singular blend, and to acquaint myself definitely how far it is safe to trust it in either direction before the stop was turned, but for the moment I was under the impression, as no doubt O'Farrell meant I should be, that a thing so perfectly asked for should not be refused.
What he asked was that I should come over to the opera house where the rest of the company awaited us, to assist at a rehearsal in the part left open by the illness of the star. I do not now recall if the manager actually made me an offer in this first encounter, but it was in the air that if I suited the part and the part suited me, I was to regard myself as temporarily engaged in Miss Dean's place.
So naturally had the occasion come about, that I cannot remember that I found any particular difficulty in reconciling myself to a possible connection with the professional stage. There had been no church of my denomination at Higgleston, and I had affiliated with one made up of the remnants of two or three other houseless sects, under the caption of the United Congregations, and there was nothing in its somewhat loosened discipline that positively forbade the theatre. In my work with McWhirter, the play had come to mean so much the intimate expression of life, so wove itself with all that had been profound and heroic in the experience of the people, that it seemed to come quite as a matter of course for me to be walking out between the captain and the manager toward the opera house. O'Farrell, too, must have beguiled me with that extraordinary Celtic faculty for the sympathetic note, for I am sure I received the impression as we went, that his play, "The Shamrock," meant quite as much to the Irish temperament, as "The Spy" could mean to Ohianna. The manager and McWhirter had crossed one another's trails on more than one occasion, which seemed to give the whole affair the colour of neighbourliness.
It transpired in the course of our walk that Laurine Dean, America's greatest emotional actress—it was O'Farrell called her that—had been taken down at Waterbury with bronchitis, and the cast having been already disarranged by an earlier defection, he had been obliged to cancel several one-night stands and put in at Kincade to wait until a substitute could be procured from St. Louis or Chicago, which difficulty was happily obviated by the discovery of Mrs. Olivia Bettersworth.
All this, as I was to learn later, was not so near the truth as it might be, but it served. I could never make out, so insistent was each to claim the credit of it, whether it was O'Farrell or McWhirter first thought of offering the part to me, but there it was for me to take it or leave it as I was so inclined. Our own performance was in Armory Hall and this was my first entrance of the back premises of a proper stage. I recall as we came in through the stage door having no feeling about it all but an odd one of being entirely habituated to such entrances.
They were all there waiting for us, the Shamrocks, grouped around the prompter's table in a dimly lit, dusty space, with a half conscious staginess even in their informal groupings, men and women regarding me with a queer mixture of coldness and ingratiation. I had time to take that in, and an impression of shoppy smartness, before Manager O'Farrell with a movement like the shuffling of cards drew us all together in a kind of general introduction and commanded the rehearsal to begin. Well, I went on with it as I suppose it was foregone I should as soon as I had smelled the dust of action, which was the stale and musty cloud that rolled up on our skirts from the floor and shook down upon our shoulders from the wings, too unsophisticated even to guess at the situation which the manager's air of genial hurry was so admirably planned to cover. I read from the prompter's book—O'Farrell had sketched the plot to me on the way over—and did my utmost to keep up with his hasty interpolations of the business. I was feeling horribly amateurish and awkward in the presence of these second-rate folk, whom I took always far too seriously, and suddenly swamped in confusion at hearing the manager call out to me from the orchestra what was meant for instruction, in an utterly unintelligible professional jargon. McWhirter through some notion, I suppose, of keeping his work innocuously amateurish, had used no sort of staginess, and the phrase froze me into mortification. With the strain of attention I was already under I could not even make an intelligent guess at his meaning, as O'Farrell, mistaking my hesitation, repeated it with growing peremptoriness. I could see the rest of the cast who were on the stage with me, aware of my embarrassment, and letting the situation fall with a kind of sulky detachment, which struck me then, and still, as vulgar rather than cruel. Suddenly from behind me a voice smooth and full, translated the clipped jargon into ordinary speech. I had not time, as I moved to obey it, for so much as a grateful glance over my shoulder, but I knew very well that the voice had come from a young woman of about my own age, who, as I entered at the beginning of the rehearsal, had been sitting in the wings, taking in my introduction with the gaze of a tethered cow, quiet, incurious, oblivious of the tether. As soon as I was free from the first act, I got around to her.
"Thank you so much," I began. "You see I am not used——"
"Why do you care?" she wondered. "It is only a kind of slang. They all had to learn it once."
I could see that she sprang from my own class. Taylorville, the high school, the village dressmaker, might have turned her out that moment; and by degrees I was aware that she was beautiful; pale, tanned complexion, thick untaught masses of brown hair, and pale brown eyes of a profound and unfathomed rurality. As she moved across the stage at the prompter's call, with her skirts bunched up on her hip with a safety pin, out of the dust, as if she had just come from scrubbing the dairy, I fairly started with the shock of her bodily perfection and her extraordinary manner of going about with it as though it were something picked up in passing for the convenience of covering. It provoked me to the same sort of involuntary exclamation as though one should see a child playing with a rare porcelain. By contrast she seemed to bring out in the others, streaks and flashes of cheapness, of the stain and wear of unprofitable use.
She came to me again at the end of her scene. "Where do you live?" she wished to know. "I can come around with you and coach you with your part."
"I'm not sure," I hesitated: "I don't know if I shall go on with it." She took me again with her slow, incurious gaze.
"Why, what else are you here for?"
That in fact appeared to be Mr. O'Farrell's view of it, and though I went through the form of taking the day to think it over and telegraph to Tommy, I did finally engage myself to the Shamrock Company for the term of Miss Dean's illness. My husband made no objection except that he preferred I should not use my own name, as indeed, O'Farrell had no notion of my doing, as the posters and programmes stood in Miss Dean's name already.
We had from Thursday to Monday to get up my part. With all my quickness I could not have managed it, except for the alacrity with which, after the first day, all the company played up to my business, prompted me in my lines, and assisted in my make-up. There was, if I had but known it, a reason for this extra helpfulness, which, remembering the way the ladies of the United Congregations had pulled and hauled about the Easter entertainment, went far with me toward raising the estimate of professional acting among the blessed privileges. Several members of the cast had felt themselves entitled to Miss Dean's place, for the manager had refused to pay an understudy, and found it easier to concede it to me, a brilliant society woman as I had been figured to them—I suspected McWhirter there—a talented amateur who would return to privacy and trouble the profession no more, rather than to one who might be expected to develop tendencies to keep what she had got. Moreover, they had played to small houses of late, most of the salaries were in arrears, and from the first of my taking hold of it, it began to be certain that the piece would go. For I not only played the part of the gay, melodramatic Irish Eileen, but I played with it. There was all my youth in it, the youth I hadn't had, there was wild Ellen McGee and the wet pastures and the woods aflame. With Tommy and a home to fall back upon, with no professional standing to keep, with no bitterness and rancours, I adventured with the part, tossed it up and made sport of it, played it as a stupendous lark. The rest of the company took it from me that it was a lark, and were as solicitous to see it through for me as though I had been an only child among a lot of maiden aunts. And I did not know of course that this charm of good fellowship was based more directly on the box-office returns than on the community of art.
Incidentally a great deal that went on in my behalf threw light on the character and disposition of the star.
"I 'most wore my fingers off, hookin' 'er up," confided the dresser who took in her gowns for me, "but she won't let out an inch, not she. Well, this spell 'll pull 'er down a bit, that's one comfort."
Cecelia Brune made me up. She was the youngest member of the company and that she was distractingly and unnecessarily pretty didn't obviate the certainty that in Milwaukee where she was born she had been known as Cissy Brown.
"You don't really need anything but a little colour and black around the eyes," she insisted. "Dean is a sight when she's made up; got so much to cover. I'll bet she is no sicker than me, she's just taken the slack time to get her wrinkles massaged. Gee, if I had a face like hers I'd take it off and have it ironed!"
Cecelia, I may remark, lived for her prettiness; she lived by it. She had a speaking part of half a dozen lines and a dance in the Village Green act, and her mere appearance on the street of any town where we were billed, was good for two solid rows clear across the house. In Cecelia's opinion this was the quintessence of art, to attract males and keep them dangling, and to eke out her personal adornment by gifts which she managed to extract from her admirers without having yet paid the inestimable price for them. Married woman as I was, I was too countrified to understand that inevitably she must finally pay it. She had all the dewy, large-eyed softness of look that one reluctantly disassociates from innocence, and a degree of cold, grubby calculation which she mistook, flaunted about in fact, for chastity. It was she who told me as much as I got to know for a great many years of Sarah Croyden, who had already taken me with the fascination of her Gift, the inordinate curiosity to know, to touch and to prove, which makes me still the victim of its least elusive promise and the dupe of any poor pretender to it. I wanted something to account for, except when she was under the obsession of a part, her marked inadequacy to her perfect exterior, for the rich full voice that, caught in the wind of her genius, gripped and threatened, but ran through her ordinary conversation as flaccid as a velvet ribbon.
She was, by Cecelia's account, the daughter of a Baptist elder in a small New York town, strictly brought up—I could measure the weals of the strictness upon my own heart—and had run away with an actor named Lawrence, after one wild, brief encounter when O'Farrell had been playing in the town. That was before Cecelia's time and she had no report of the said Lawrence except that he was as handsome as they make them and a regular rotter.
"She'd ought to have known," opined Cecelia—though where in her nineteen years she could have acquired the groundwork of such knowledge was more than I could guess—"She'd ought to have known what she was up against by his bein' so willing to marry her. He wouldn't have put his head in a noose like that without he had hold of the loose end of it himself."
That he had so held it, transpired in less than a year, in the reappearance of a former wife who turned up at his lodging one night to wait his return from the theatre, where, no one knew by what diabolical agency, Lawrence had word of her, and made what Cecelia called a "get away." What passed between the two women on that occasion must have been noteworthy, but it was sunk forever under Sarah's unfathomable rurality. O'Farrell, who of his class was a very decent sort, had been so little able to bear the sight of beauty in distress that he offered the poor girl an unimportant part as an alternative to starvation, and Sarah had very quickly settled what was to become of her by developing extraordinary talent.
I think no one of us at that time quite realized how good she was; Cecelia Brune, I know, did not even think her beautiful.
"No style," she said, settling her corset at the hips and fluffing up her pompadour with my comb, "and no figgur." But myself, I seemed to see her the mere embodiment of a gift which had snatched at this chance encounter with an actor, to swing into opportunity, regardless of its host. Whenever I watched her acting, some living impulse deep within me reared its head.
I have set all this down here because with the exception of Manager O'Farrell and Jimmy Vantine, the comedian, who was thirty-five, objectionable, and in love with Cecelia, these two women were all I ever saw again of the Shamrock players. Miss Dean I did not meet on this occasion, for though at the end of three weeks, before I had time to tire of travel and new towns and nightly triumphs, she wrote she would return to her work, it fell out that she did not actually return until I was well on my way home.
"I thought she would have a quick recovery when she found out what a sweep you'd been makin'," remarked Cecelia. That was all the comment that passed on the occasion. If Mr. O'Farrell made no motion toward making me a permanent member of his company, there were reasons for it that I understood better later. I had to own to a little disappointment that nobody came to the station to see me off except Cecelia and Sarah Croyden. It is true Jimmy Vantine was there, but he left us in no doubt that he only came because Cecelia had promised to spend the interval between their train and my own in his company. He fussed about with my luggage in order to get me off as quickly as possible.
The very bread-and-buttery relation of the Shamrocks to what was for me the community of Art, had never struck so sourly upon me as at the casual quality of their good-byes. I remembered noticing that morning how very little hair there was on the top of Jimmy Vantine's head, and that he did not seem to me quite clean. I found myself so let down after the three weeks' excitement that I thought it necessary at Springfield, where I changed, to interpose two days' shopping between me and Higgleston. Among other things I bought there was a spirit lamp and a brass teakettle.
Understand that up to this time I had not yet thought of the stage as a career for myself. I hadn't yet needed it. I had not then realized that the insight and passion which have singled me out among women of my profession couldn't be turned to render the mere business of living beautiful and fit. I hardly understand it now. Why should people pay night after night to see me loving, achieving, suffering, in a way they wouldn't think of undertaking for themselves? Life as I saw it was sufficiently dramatic: charged, wonderful. I at least felt at home in the great moments of kings, the tender hours of poets, and I hadn't thought of my participation in these things rendering me in any way superior to Higgleston or even different. If I had, I shouldn't have settled there in the first place. If I had glimpsed even at Tommy's exclusion from all that mattered passionately to me, I shouldn't have married him. It was because I had not yet begun to be markedly dissatisfied with either of them that I presently got myself the reputation of having trampled both Tommy and Higgleston underfoot. I must ask your patience for a little until I show you how wholly I offered myself to them both and how completely they wouldn't have me.
The point of departure was of course that I didn't accept the Higglestonian reading of married obligations to mean that my whole time was to be taken up with just living with Tommy. It was as natural, and in view of the scope it afforded for individual development, a more convenient arrangement than living with my mother, but not a whit more absorbing. I couldn't, anyway, think of just living as an end, and accordingly I looked about for a more spacious occupation; I thought I had found it in the directing of that submerged spiritual passion which I had felt in the sustaining drama of the war. I had a notion there might be a vent for it in the shape of a permanent dramatic society by means of which all Higgleston, and I with them, could escape temporarily from its commonness into the heroic movement. It was all very clear in my own mind but it failed utterly in communication.
I began wrongly in the first place by asking the Higgleston ladies to tea. Afternoon tea was unheard of in Higgleston, and I had forgotten, or perhaps I had never learned, that in Higgleston you couldn't do anything different without implying dissatisfaction with things as they were. You were likely on such occasions to be visited by the inquiry as to whether the place wasn't good enough for you. As a matter of fact afternoon tea was almost as unfamiliar to me as to the rest of them, but I had read English novels and I knew how it ought to be done. I knew for instance, that people came and went with a delightful informality and had tea made fresh for them, and were witty or portentous as the occasion demanded. My invitations read from four to five, and the Higgleston ladies came solidly within the minute and departed in phalanxes upon the stroke of five. They all wore their best things, which, from the number of black silks included, and black kid gloves not quite pulled on at the finger tips, gave the affair almost a funereal atmosphere. They had most of them had their tea with their midday meal, and Mrs. Dinkelspiel said openly that she didn't approve of eating between meals. They sat about the room against the wall and fairly hypnotized me into getting up and passing things, which I knew was not the way tea should be served. In Higgleston, the only occasion when things were handed about, were Church sociables and the like, when the number of guests precluded the possibility of having them all at your table; and by the time I got once around, the tea was cold and I realized how thin my thin bread and butter and chocolate wafers looked in respect to the huge, soft slabs of layer cake, stiffened by frosting and filling, which, in Higgleston went by the name of light refreshments. The only saving incident was the natural way in which Mrs. Ross, our attorney's wife who visited East every summer and knew how things were done, asked for "two lumps, please," and came back a second time for bread and butter. I think they were all tremendously pleased to be asked, though they didn't intend to commit themselves to the innovation by appearing to have a good time. And that was the occasion I chose for broaching my great subject, without, I am afraid, in the least grasping their incapacity to share in my joyous discovery of the world of Art which I so generously held out to them.
It hadn't been possible to keep my professional adventure from the townspeople, nor had I attempted it. What I really felt was that we were to be congratulated as a community in having one among us privileged to experience it, and I honestly think I should have felt so of any one to whom the adventure had befallen. But I suspect I must have given the impression of rather flaunting it in their faces.
I put my new project on the ground that though we were dissevered by our situation, there was no occasion for our being out of touch with the world of emotion, not, at least, so long as we had admission to it through the drama; and it wasn't in me to imagine that the world I prefigured to them under those terms was one by their standards never to be kept sufficiently at a distance.
Mrs. Miller put the case for most of them with the suggestion thrown out guardedly that she didn't "know as she held with plays for church members"; she was a large, tasteless woman, whose husband kept the lumber yard and derived from it an extensive air of being in touch with the world's occupations. "And I don't know," she went on relentlessly, "that I ever see any good come of play acting to them that practise it."
Mrs. Ross, determined to live up to her two lumps, came forward gallantly with:
"Oh, but, Mrs. Miller, when our dear Mrs. Bettersworth——"
"That's what I was thinking of," Mrs. Miller put it over her.
"Well for my part," declared Mrs. Dinkelspiel, with the air of not caring who knew it, "I don't want my girls to sell tickets or anything; it makes 'em too forward." Mrs. Harvey, whose husband was in hardware, began to tell discursively about a perfectly lovely entertainment they had had in Newton Centre for the missionary society, which Mrs. Miller took exception to on the ground of its frivolity.
"I don't know," she maintained, "if the Lord's work ain't hindered by them sort of comicalities as much as it's helped."
I am not sure where this discussion mightn't have landed us if the general attention had not been distracted just then by my husband, an hour before his time, coming through the front gate and up the walk. He had evidently forgotten my tea party, for he came straight to me, and backed away precipitately through the portières as soon as he saw the assembled ladies sitting about the wall. It was not that which disturbed us; any Higgleston male would have done the same, but it was plain in the brief glimpse we had of him that he looked white and stricken. A little later we heard him in the back of the house making ambiguous noises such as not one of my guests could fail to understand as the precursor of a domestic crisis. I could see the little flutter of uneasiness which passed over them, between their sense of its demanding my immediate attention and the fear of leaving before the expressed time. Fortunately the stroke of five released them. The door was hardly shut on the last silk skirt when I ran out and found him staring out of the kitchen window.
"Well?" I questioned.
"I thought they would never go," he protested. "Come in here." He led the way to the living room as if somehow he found it more appropriate to the gravity of what he had to impart, and yet failed to make a beginning with his news. He shut the door and leaned against it with his hands behind him for support.
"Has anything happened?"
"Happened? Oh, I don't know. I've lost my job."
"Lost? Burton Brothers?" I was all at sea.
He nodded. "They're closing out; the manager's in town to-day. He told us...." By degrees I got it out of him. Burton Brothers thought they saw hard times ahead, they were closing out a number of their smaller establishments, centering everything on their Chicago house. Suddenly my thought leaped up.
"But couldn't they give you something there ... in Chicago?" I was dizzy for a moment with the wild hope of it. Never to live in Higgleston any more—but Tommy cut me short.
"They've men who have been with them longer than I have to provide for.... I asked."
"Oh, well, no matter. The world is full of jobs." Looking for one appealed to me in the light of an adventure, but because I saw how pale he was I went to him and began to kiss him softly. By the way he yielded himself to me I grasped a little of his lost and rudderless condition, once he found himself outside the limits of a salaried employment. I began to question him again as the best way of getting the extent of our disaster before us.
"What does Mr. Rathbone say?" Rathbone was our working tailor, a thin, elderly, peering man of a sort you could scarcely think of as having any existence apart from his shop. He used to come sidling down the street to it and settle himself among his implements with the air of a brooding hen taking to her nest; the sound of his machine was a contented clucking.
"He was struck all of a heap. They're better fixed than we are." Tommy added this as an afterthought as likely to affect the tailor's attitude when he came to himself. "They" were old Rathbone and his daughter, one of those conspicuously blond and full-breasted women who seem to take to the dressmaking and millinery trades by instinct. As she got herself up on Sunday in her smart tailoring, with a hat "from the city," and her hair amazingly pompadoured, she was to some of the men who came to our church, very much what the brass teakettle was to me, a touch of the unattainable but not unappreciated elegancies of life. Tommy admired her immensely and was disappointed that I did not have her at the house oftener.
"They've got her business to fall back on," Tommy suggested now with an approach to envy. He had never seen Miss Rathbone as I had, professionally, going about with her protuberant bosom stuck full of pins, a tape line draped about her collarless neck, and her skirt and belt never quite together in the back, so he thought of her establishment as a kind of stay in affliction.
"And I have the stage," I flourished. It was the first time I had thought of it as an expedient, but I glanced away from the thought in passing, for to say the truth I didn't in the least know how to go about getting a living by it. I creamed some chipped beef for Tommy's supper, a dish he was particularly fond of, and opened a jar of quince marmalade, and all the time I wasn't stirring something or setting the table, I had my arms around him, trying to prop him against what I did not feel so much terrifying as exciting. We talked a little about his getting his old place back in Taylorville, and just as we were clearing away the supper things we saw Miss Rathbone, with her father tucked under her arm, pass the square of light raying out into the spring dusk from our window, and a moment later they knocked at our door. It was one of the things that I felt bound to like Miss Rathbone for, that she took such care of her father; she did everything for him, it was said, even to making up his mind for him, and this evening by the flare of the lamp Tommy held up to welcome them, it was clear she had made it up to some purpose. It must have been what he saw in her face that made my husband put the lamp back on the table from which the white cloth had not yet been removed, as if the clearing up was too small a matter to consort with the occasion.
I was relieved to have my husband take charge of the visit, especially as he made no motion to invite them into the front room where the remains of the bread and butter and the chairs against the wall would have apprised Miss Rathbone of my having entertained company on an occasion to which she had not been invited. It was part of Tommy's sense of social obligation that we ought never to neglect Mr. Rathbone, whom, though his connection with the business was as slight as my husband's, he insisted on regarding as in some sort a partner. So we sat down rather stiffly about the table still shrouded in its white cloth, as though upon it were about to be laid out the dead enterprise of Burton Brothers, and looked, all of us, I think, a little pleased to find ourselves in so grave a situation.
Miss Rathbone, who had always a great many accessories to her toilet, bags and handkerchiefs and scarves and things, laid them on the table as though they were a kind of insignia of office, and made a poor pretence to keep up with me the proper feminine detachment from the business which had brought them there. We neither of us, Miss Rathbone and I, had the least idea what the other might be thinking about or presumably interested in, though I think she made the more gallant effort to pretend that she did. On this evening I could see that she was full of the project for which she had primed her father, and was nervously anxious lest he shouldn't go off at the right moment or with the proper pyrotechnic.
I remember the talk that went on at first, because it was so much in the way of doing business in Higgleston, and impressed me even then with its factitious shrewdness, based very simply on the supposition that Capitalists—it was under that caption that Burton Brothers figured—never meant what they said. Capitalists were always talking of hard times; it was part of their deep laid perspicacity. Burton Brothers wished to sell out the business; was it reasonable to suppose they would think it good enough to sell and not good enough to go on with?
"Father thinks," said Miss Rathbone, and I am sure he had done so dutifully at her instigation, "that they couldn't ask no great price after talking about hard times the way they have."
It was not in keeping with what was thought to be woman's place, that she should go on to the completed suggestion. In fact, so far as I remember it never was completed, but was talked around and about, as if by indirection we could lessen the temerity of the proposal that old Rathbone and Tommy should buy out the shop on such favorable terms as Burton Brothers, in view of their own statement of its depreciation, couldn't fail to make.
"You could live over the store," Miss Rathbone let fall into the widening rings of silence that followed her first suggestion; "your rent would be cheaper, and it would come into the business."
I felt that she made it too plain that the chief objection that my husband could have was the lack of money for the initial adventure; but because I realized that much of my instinctive resistance to a plan that tied him to Higgleston as to a stake, was due to her having originated it, I kept it to myself. I had a hundred inarticulate objections, chief of which was that I couldn't see how any plan that was acceptable to the Rathbones, could get me on toward the Shining Destiny, but when you remember that I hadn't yet been able to put that concretely to myself, you will see how impossible it was that I should have put it to my husband. In the end Tommy was talked over. I believe the consideration of going on in the same place and under the same circumstances without the terrifying dislocation of looking for a job, had more to do with it than Miss Rathbone's calculation of the profits. We wrote home for the money; Effie wrote back that everything of mother's was involved in the stationery business, which was still on the doubtful side of prosperity, but Tommy's father let us have three hundred dollars.
The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself as an occasion was the Fourth of July.
I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.
"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of a month to get the children ready."
"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our house Thursday——" She went on to tell me who was to read the Declaration and who deliver the oration.
"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these twenty years!"
"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind of a celebration, they've a right to have it."
"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.
They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.
I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions. The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation—the air of being man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to avoid doing it. Er ... yes, he believed there had been a meeting ... he hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular member, was I?
"No," I admitted, "but last year——" The intention of the slight began to dawn on me.
"You see, the programme is usually made up from the children of the united Sunday schools...."
"I know, of course, but what has that?..." He did know how mean it was; I could see by the dexterity with which he delivered the blow.
"A good many of the mothers thought they'd rather not have them exposed to ... er ... professional methods." As an afterthought he tried to give it the cast of a priestly remonstrance which he must have seen didn't in the least impose on me.
I suppose it was the fear of how I might put it to one of his best paying parishioners that led him to go around to the store the next morning and make matters worse by explaining to Tommy that though the children weren't to be contaminated by my professionalism, it could probably be arranged for me to "recite something." To do Tommy justice, he was as mad as a hatter. Being so much nearer to village-mindedness himself, I suppose my husband could better understand the mean envy of my larger opportunity, but his obduracy in maintaining that I had been offended led to the only real initiative he ever showed in all the time I was married to him.
"I'd just like toshowthem!" he kept sputtering. All at once he cheered up with a snort. "I'llshow them!" He was very busy all the evening with letters which he went out on purpose to post, with the result that when a few days later he made his contribution to the fireworks fund, he made it a little larger, as became a live business man, on the ground that he wouldn't be able to participate as his wife had "accepted an invitation to take charge of the programme at Newton Centre." Newton Centre was ten miles away, and though I couldn't do much on account of the difficulty of rehearsals, I managed to make the announcement of it in the county paper convey to them that what they had missed wasn't quite to be sicklied over with Mrs. Miller's asseveration of a notable want of moral particularity at Newton Centre. The very first time I went out to a Sunday-school social thereafter it was made plain to me that if I wanted to take up the annual Library entertainment, it was open to me.
"And I always will say," Mrs. Miller conceded, "that there's nobody can make your children seem such a credit to you as Mrs. Bettersworth."
"It's a regular talent you have," Mrs. Harvey backed her up, "like a person in the Bible." This scriptural reference came in so aptly that I could see several ladies nodding complacently. Mrs. Ross sailed quite over them and landed on the topmost peak of approbation.
"I've always believed," she asserted, "that a Christian woman on the stage would have an uplifting influence."
But by this time my ambition had slacked under the summer heat and the steady cluck of old Rathbone's machine and the mixed smell of damp woollen under the iron, and creosote shingle stains. There had been no loss of social standing in our living over the store; such readjustments in Higgleston went by the name of bettering yourself, and were commendable. But somehow I could never ask ladies to tea when the only entrance was by way of a men's furnishing store. The four rooms, opening into one another so that there was no way of getting from the kitchen to the parlour except through the bedroom, I found quite hopeless as a means of expressing my relation to all that appealed to me as inspiring, dazzling. Because I could not go out without making a street toilet, I went out too little, and suffered from want of tone. And suddenly along in September came a letter from O'Farrell offering me a place in his company, and a note from Sarah begging me to accept it. If up to that time I had not thought of the stage as a career, now at the suggestion the desire of it ravened in me like a flame.
"And you never seem to think I might notwantmy wife to go on the stage?"
I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me; but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself whirled about this attitude of his in the deep-seated passionate Why of my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things? What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any association with the stage.
Whatever attitude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands, the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me ... words, looks ... sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the general attitude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.
"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as far as that."
It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on, and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.
"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs. Bettersworth—Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."
Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning, afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was that it left too much over.
"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.
I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible attitudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.
"You dear, ridiculous child," she hovered over the point with indulgent patronage, "what will you think of next?"
Pauline herself was going through a phase at the time. They had moved out to a detached house at Evanston on account of its being better for the baby, and there was a visible diminution of her earlier effect of housewifely efficiency, in view of Henry's growing prosperity. You could see all Pauline's surfaces like a tulip bed in February, budding toward a new estimate of her preciousness in terms of her husband's income. When she took me by the shoulders, holding me off from her to give play to the pose of amused, affectionate bewilderment, I could see just where the consciousness of a more acceptable femininity as evinced by her being provided with a cook and a housemaid, prompted her to this gracious glozing of my not being in quite so fortunate a case. I was to be the Wonder, the sport on the feminine bush, dear and extenuated, made adorably not to feel my excluding variation; an attitude not uncommon in wives of well-to-do husbands toward women who work. It was an attitude successfully kept up by Pauline Mills for as long as I provided her the occasion. Just at first I suspect I rather contributed to it by my own feeling of its being such a tremendous adventure for me, Olivia Lattimore, with Taylorville, Hadley's pasture and the McGee children behind me, to be going on the stage. How I exulted in it all, the hall bedroom where I finally settled across from Sarah Croyden, the worry of rehearsals, the baked smell of the streets bored through by the raw lake winds, the beckoning night lights—the vestibule of doors opening on the solemn splendour of the world.
At the rehearsals I met Cecelia Brune, if anything prettier than before, and quite perceptibly harder, and Jimmy Vantine, still in love with her, still with his bald crown not quite clean and the same objectionable habit of sidling about, fingering one's dress, laying hands on one as he talked. I met Manager O'Farrell, not a whit altered, and Miss Laurine Dean. I liked and I didn't like her. She drew by a certain warm charm of personality that repelled in closer quarters by its odours of sickliness. There was a quality in her beauty as of a flower kept too long in its glass, not so much withered as ready to fall apart. She had small appealing hands, such as moved one to take them up and handle them, and served somehow to mitigate a subtle impression of impropriety conveyed by her slight sidewise smile. She was probably good-natured by temperament and peevish through excessive use of cigarettes. She made a point of always speaking well of everybody, but it was a long time before I learned that no sort of blame was so deadly as her commendation. "Such a beautiful woman Miss Croyden is," she would say, "isn't it a pity about her nose," and though I had never thought of Sarah's nose as mitigating against her perfection, I found myself after that thinking of it. You could see that magnanimity, which was her chosen attitude, was often a strain to her. I do not think she had any gift at all, but she had a perception of it that had enabled her to produce a very tolerable imitation of acting and kept her, in a covert way, inordinately jealous of the gift in others. She was jealous of mine.
It was not all at once I discovered it. In the beginning, because I never detected her in any of the obvious snatchings of lines and positions that went on at rehearsals, but even making a stand for me against incursions into my part which I was too unaccustomed to forestall, I thought of her as being of rather better strain than most of the company. I was probably the only member of it unaware of her deliberate measures not to permit me such a footing as might lead to my supplanting her with Manager O'Farrell, toward whom I began to find myself in what, for me, was an interesting and charming relation. It was a relation I should have been glad to maintain with any member of the company, but it was only O'Farrell who found himself equal to it. I was full and effervescing with the joy of creation; night by night as I felt the working of the living organism we should have been, transmitting supernal energies of emotion to the audience, who by the very communicating act became a part of us, I felt myself also warming toward my fellow players. I was so charged I should have struck a spark from any one of them when we met, but for the fact that by degrees I discovered that they presented to me the negative pole.
I was aware of such communicating fluid between particular pairs of them. I saw it spark from eye to eye, heard it break in voices; it flashed like sheet lightning about our horizons on occasions of great triumph; but I was distinctly alive to the fact that the medium by which it was accomplished was turned from me. At times I was brushed by the wing of a suspicion that among the men, there was something almost predetermined in their denial of what was for me, the sympathetic, creative impulse. I was a little ashamed for them of the gaucherie of withholding what seemed so important to our common success, and yet I seemed always to be surprising all of them at it, except Jimmy Vantine and the manager. I couldn't of course, on account of his propensity for laying hands on one, take it from Jimmy, but between Mr. O'Farrell and me it ran with a pleasant, profitable warmth. I was conscious always of acting better the scenes I had with him. The thrill of them was never quite broken in off-the-stage hours. I felt myself sustained by it. For one thing the man had genuine talent, and I think besides Sarah Croyden and Jimmy Vantine, no one else in the company had very much. Jimmy had a gift, besmeared and discredited by his own cheapness, but O'Farrell had a real flowing genius and a degree of personal vitality that sketched him out as by fire from the flat Taylorville types I had known. We used to talk together about my own possibilities and I had many helpful hints from him, but in spite of this friendliness I never made any way with him against Miss Dean. Not that I tried, but by degrees I found that suggestions made and favours asked, were granted or accepted on the basis of their non-interference with our leading lady. I was not without intimations, which I usually disregarded because I found their conclusions impossible to maintain, that she even triumphed over me in little matters too inconsiderable to have been taken into account except on the understanding that we were pitted in a deliberate rivalry. I was hurt and amazed at times to discover that we presented this aspect to the rest of the company. I felt that I was being judged by my conduct of a business in which I was not engaged.
The situation, however, had not developed to such a pitch by the time we played in Kincade, that it could affect my pleasure in the visit Tommy paid me there; I was overjoyed to have the arms of my own man about me again; I was proud of his pride in my success asPolly Eccles, and pleased to have him and Sarah pleased with one another. I thought then that if I could only have Tommy and my work I should ask no more of destiny; I do not now see why I couldn't, but I like best to think of him as he seemed to me then, wholesome and good, raised by his joy of our reunion almost to my excited plane, generous in his sharing of my triumphs. It seemed for the moment to put my feet quite on solid ground. I knew at last where I was.
It was about a month after this that I began to find myself pitted against Miss Dean in a struggle for some dimly grasped advantage, with the dice cogged against me. I saw myself in the general estimate, convinced of handling my game badly, and could form no guess even at the expected moves. I smarted under a sense that Manager O'Farrell was not backing up the friendliness of our relations, and I remember saying to Sarah Croyden once that I suspected Miss Dean was using her sex attraction against me, but I missed the point of Sarah's slow, commiserating smile. At the time we were all more or less swamped by the discomforts of our wintry flights from town to town, execrable hotels, irregular and unsatisfying meals. One and another of us went down with colds, and finally toward the end of February, I was taken with a severe neuralgia. It reached its acutest stage the first night we played at Louisville.
I had hurried home from the theatre the moment I was released from my part, to find relief from it in rest, but an hour or two later, still suffering and discovering that I had taken all my powders, I decided to go down to Sarah's room on the lower floor to ask for some that I knew she had. I slipped on my shoes and a thick gray dressing gown, and taking the precaution of wrapping my head in a shawl against the draughty halls, I went down to her. I was returning with the box of powders in my hand when I was startled by the sound of a door lifting carefully on the latch. The hotel was built in the shape of a capital T, with the stair halfway of the stem. I was almost at the foot of it facing the cross hall that gave me a view of the door of Miss Dean's room, and I saw now that it was slightly ajar. I shrank instinctively into the shadow of the recess where the stair began, for I was unwilling that anybody should see the witch I looked in my dressing gown and shawl. In the interval before the door widened I heard the tick of a tin-faced clock just across from me. Part of the enamel was fallen away from the face of it so that it looked as if eaten upon by discreditable sores; a chandelier holding two smoky kerosene lamps hung slightly awry at the crossing of the T, and cast a tipsy shadow. The door swung back slightly, it opened into the room, and a man came out of it and crossed directly in front of me, probably to his room in the other arm of the T.
Once out of the door it snapped softly to behind him, and the man fell instantly into a manner that disconnected him with it to a degree that could only have been possible to an accomplished actor. If I had not seen him come out of it, I should have supposed him abroad upon such a casual errand as my own.
But there was no mistaking that it was Manager O'Farrell. By the tin-faced clock it was a quarter past one. And he would have been home from the theatre more than an hour!
I got up to my room somehow; I think my neuralgia must have left me with the shock; I can't remember feeling it any more after that. You have to remember that this was my first actual contact with sin of any sort. Generations of the stock of Methodism revolted in me. I had liked the man, I had thought of our relation as something precious, to be kept intact because it nourished the quality of our art, and I had all the conventional woman's horror of being brought in touch with looseness. It was part of the admitted business of the men of my class to keep their women from such contacts, and Manager O'Farrell had allowed me to enter into a sort of rivalry with a shameless woman—with his mistress.
I have always been what the country people in Ohianna call a knowledgable woman, I have not much faculty of getting news of a situation through the facts as they present themselves, but I have instincts which under the stimulus of emotion work with extraordinary celerity and thoroughness. Now suddenly the half-apprehended suggestion of the last few months took fire from the excitement of my mind, and exploded into certainties. I sensed all at once intolerable things, the withholden eyes, the covert attention fixed on my relations with the manager and Miss Dean. I lay on the bed and shuddered with dry sobs; other times I lay still, awake and blazing. About daylight Sarah came up to inquire how my neuralgia did. She found me with the unopened box clutched tightly in my hand. She turned up the smoky gas and noted the dark circles under my eyes.
"What has happened? Something, I know," she insisted gently. I blurted it out.
"Mr. O'Farrell ... I saw him come out of Miss Dean's room ... at a quarter of one. He was ... oh, Sarah ... he was!..." I relapsed again into the horror of it.
"Oh!" she said. She turned out the light and came and forced me gently under the covers and got into bed beside me.
"Didn't you know?" she questioned.
"Did you?"
"No one really knows these things. I didn't want to be the first to suggest it to you."
"Do the others know?"
"As much as we do. It has been going on a long time."
"And you put up with it—you go about with them?" I was astonished at the welling up of disgust in me. Sarah felt for my hand and held it.
"My dear, in our business you have to learn to take no notice. It is not that these things are so much worse with actors, but it is more difficult to keep them covered up. You must know that a great many people do such things."
"I know—wickedpeople. I never thought of its being done by anybody you liked."
"Oh, yes;" she was perfectly simple. "You can like them, you can like them greatly." I remembered that I oughtn't to have said that to Sarah Croyden.
"You mustn't think Mr. O'Farrell such a bad man. He is probably fond of her. In some respects he is a very good man. When I was—left, without a penny, he might have made terms with me. Some managers would. But he gave me a living salary and left me to myself. He has been very kind to me."
"But she——" I choked back my sick resentment to get at what had been tearing its way through my consciousness for the last three hours. "She must have thought thatthatwas what I wanted of him...."
"Well, it is natural she should be anxious, with other women about. She is in love with him."
"Did you think so? About me, I mean?"
"No," said Sarah. "No, I didn't think so."
It was light enough now to show the outline of the drifts along the sills and the fine gritty powder which the wind dashed intermittently against the panes; the filter of day under the scant blinds brought out in the affair streaks of vulgarity as evident as the pattern of the paper on the wall. It seemed to borrow cheapness from the broken castor of the bureau, as from my recollection of the eaten face of the clock and the leaning chandelier. I sat up in the bed and laid hold of Sarah in my eagerness to get clear of what by my mere knowledge of it, seemed an unbearable complicity.
"I had a feeling for him," I admitted. "I could act better with him; but it was different from that—you know it was different."
"Yes," said Sarah, "I know. I know because I am that way myself; it islikethat, but it isn't that." I was still, holding my breath while she considered; we were very close upon the twined roots of sex and art.
"There's a feeling that goes with acting, with other sorts of things, painting and music, maybe, a feeling of your wanting to getthroughto something and lay hold of it, and your not being able to leaves you ... aching somehow, and you think if there's a particular person ... I think O'Farrell would understand ... it is being able to act makes you know the difference I suppose. He really can act you know, and you can, but Dean wouldn't understand, nor the others. My—Mr. Lawrence didn't understand!" It was the first time she had ever mentioned him to me. "Sometimes I think they might have felt the difference just at first, but nobody told them and they got used to thinking it is ... the other thing." She drew me down into the bed again and covered me. "You mustn't take it to hard ... we all go through it once ... and you are safe so long as you know."
"But I can't go on with it." I was positive on that point. "Sarah, Sarah, don't say I have to go on with it."
"I know you can't. But you just have to."
"I should never be able to face either of them again without showing that I know."
"And then the others will know and they will think ..."
I threw out my arms, seeing how I was trapped. I wanted to cry out on them; to despise the woman openly. "And they will think that I am jealous ... that I wanted it myself...."
I rolled in the bed and bit my hands with shame and anger. Sarah caught me in her arms and held me until the paroxysm passed. I was quieted at last from exhaustion.
"You can stay in your room to-day," she suggested. "I can bring your meals up to you; this neuralgia will give you an excuse, and you needn't see any one until you go to the theatre. That will give you one day. Maybe by to-morrow ..."
But I had no confidence that to-morrow would bring me any sensible relief. The moral shock was tremendous. All my pride was engaged on the side of never letting anybody know; to have been misunderstood in the quality of my disgust would have been the intolerable last thing. Sarah brought up my breakfast before she had her own; she reported nobody about yet except Jimmy Vantine who had inquired for me. About half an hour later she came softly in again with a yellow envelope open in her hand. I saw by her face that it was for me and that the news it contained put the present situation out of question.
"Is it from my husband?" I demanded. I hardly knew what I hoped or expected, a possibility of release flashed up in me.
"It has been forwarded." She sat down on the bed beside me. "My poor Olivia ... you must try to think of it as anything but a way out. Mr. O'Farrell will let you go for this...." If it had to happen it couldn't have happened better.
"Give it to me——"
"Remember it is a way out."
I read it hastily:
Mother had a stroke. Come at once.Signed:Forester.
Mother had a stroke. Come at once.Signed:Forester.
It was a common practice in Taylorville never to send for the doctor until you knew what was the matter with you. So long as the symptoms failed to align themselves with any known disorder, they were supposed to be amenable to neighbourly advice, to the common stock of medical misinformation, to the almanac or some such repository of science; and though this practice led on too many occasions to the disease getting past the curable stages before the physician was called, I never remember to have heard it questioned.
"You see," people remarked to one another at the funeral, "they didn't know what was the matter with her until it was too late," and it passed for all extenuation. It was natural then that my mother should have kept any premonitory symptoms of her indisposition even from Forester; close as they were in their affections she would have thought it indelicate to have spoken to him of her health. The first determinate stroke of it came upon her sitting quietly in her usual place at prayer meeting on a Wednesday evening.
It had been Forester's habit to close the shop a little early on that evening, going around to the church to walk home with her, getting in before the last hymn to save his face with the minister by a show of regular attendance. But on this evening customers detained him beyond his usual hour, so that by the time he reached the corner opposite the church, he saw the people dribbling out by twos and threes, across the lighted doorway, and noted that my mother was not with them. He thought she might have slipped out earlier and gone around to the shop for him as occasionally happened, but seeing the lights did not go out at once in the church, he looked in to make sure, and saw her still sitting in her accustomed place. The sexton and the organist, who were fussing together about a broken pedal, appeared not to have observed her there, and one of them was reaching up to put out the light when Forester touched her on the shoulder. She started and seemed to come awake with an effort, and on the way home she stumbled once or twice in a manner that led him, totally unaccustomed as he was to think of my mother as ill in any sort, to get a little entertainment out of it by gentle rallying, which was dropped when he discovered that it caused her genuine, pained embarrassment. The following Tuesday he came home to the midday meal to find her lying on the floor, inarticulate and hardly conscious. There must have been two strokes in close succession, for she had managed after falling, to get a cushion from the worn sitting-room lounge under her head and to pull a shawl partly over her. Effie, who was at Montecito, was summoned home, and that evening, by the doctor's advice, the telegram was sent which separated me so opportunely from the Shamrocks. By the time I reached her, speech had returned in a measure, and by the end of a fortnight she was able to be lifted into the chair which she never afterward left.
I remember as if it were yesterday, the noble outline of her face and of her head against the pillows, the smooth hair parted Madonna-wise and brought low across her ears, the blue of her eyes looking out of the dark, swollen circles, for all her fifty-two years, with the unawakened clarity of a girl's. Stricken as I was from my first realizing contact with sin, and my identification with it through the assumed passions of the stage, it grew upon me during the days of my mother's illness that there was a kind of intrinsic worth in her which I, with all my powers, must forever and inalienably miss. With it there came a kind of exasperation, never quite to leave me, of the certainty of not choosing my own values, but of being driven with them aside and apart.
It was responsible in part for a feeling I had of being somehow less related to my mother's house than many of her distant kin who were continually arriving out of all quarters, in wagons and top buggies, to express a continuity of interest and kind which had the effect of constituting me definitely outside the bond.
The situation was furthered no doubt, by the whisper of my connection with the stage which got about and set up in them an attitude of circumspection, out of which I caught them at times regarding me with a curiosity unmixed with any human sympathy. Yet I recall how keen an appetite I had for what this illness of my mother's had thrown into relief, the web of passionate human interactions, bone and body of the spirituality that went clothed as gracelessly in the routine of their daily lives as the figures of the men under the unyielding ugliness of store clothing. It came out in the talk of the women sitting about the base burner at night with their skirts folded back carefully across their knees, in the watches we found it necessary to keep for the first fortnight or so. I remember one of these occasions as the particular instance by which my mother emerged for me from her condition of parenthood, to the common plane of humanity, by way of an old romance of her's with Cousin Judd. Cousin Lydia sat up with her that night and Almira Jewett, a brisk, country clad woman of the Skaldic temperament who from long handling of the histories of her clan had acquired an absolute art of it. She was own sister to the woman who married my mother's half-brother, and the Saga of the Judds and the Wilsons and the Jewetts and the Lattimores ran off the points of her bright needles as she sat with her feet on the fender, with a click and a spark. Cousin Lydia never knitted; she sat with her hands folded in her large lap and time seemed to rest with her.
"It will be hard on Judd," Almira offered to the unspoken reference forever in the air, as to the possible fatal termination of my mother's illness.
"Yes, it'll be hard on him." A faint, so faint nuance of assent in Cousin Lydia's voice seemed to admit the succeeding comment, shorn of impertinence. I guessed that the several members of the tribe were relieved rather than constrained to drop their intimate concerns into Almira Jewett's impartial histories.
"I never," Almira invited, "did get the straight of that. Sally was engaged to him, warn't she?"
"Not to say engaged," Cousin Lydia paused for just the right shade of relation, "but so as to want to be. Judd set store by her; he'd have had it that way anyway, but Sally couldn't make up her mind to it on account of their being own cousins."
"I reckon she had the right of it; the Lord don't seem no way pleased with kin marrying."
"I don't know, I don't know;" Cousin Lydia dropped the speculation into the pit of her own experience. "It looks like He wouldn't have made 'em to care about it then. But being as she saw it that way, they couldn't have done different. Not that Judd didn't see it in the light of his duty, too." There was evidently nothing in the annals of the Judds and the Lattimores which allowed a violation of the inward monitor.
"Well, I must say, he has turned it into grace, if ever a man has. Not to say but what you've helped him to it." It was in the manner of Almira's concession of not in the matter, that Cousin Judd had chosen Lydia chiefly for her capacity not to offer any distraction to his profounder passion, and nothing in Cousin Lydia's comment to deny it. From the room beyond we could hear the inarticulate, half-conscious notice of my mother's pain. Cousin Lydia moved to attend her.
"All those years," I whispered to Almira, "she has loved him and he has loved my mother!" I was pierced through with the pure sword of the spirit which had divided them. But Almira was more practical.
"She was better off," Almira insisted. "Lydia hadn't no knack with men folk ever. She knew Judd wouldn't have loved her, but so long as he loved your mother she was safe. They got a good deal out of it, her knowing and sympathizing. She could sympathize, you see, for she knew how it was herself, loving Judd that way. It was no more than right they should get what they could out of it. It was the only thing they had between them."
"All those years!" I said again. I felt myself immeasurably lifted out of the mists and mires of the Shamrocks into clear and aching atmospheres.
"I will say this for Lydia," extenuated the Skald, "that though she hadn't no gift to draw a man to her, she knew how to hold her hand off and let him go his own thought. It was religion kept your mother and Judd apart, and yet it was in religion they comforted one another. Lydia never put herself forward like she might, claiming it was her religion too. And she was one that appreciated church privileges."
But I wondered where my father came in. It had been, I knew, a passionate attachment.
"Like a new house," said Almira, "built up where the old one has been, but the cellars of it don't change. Real loving is never really got over." I felt the phrase sounding in some subterranean crypt of my own.
With this new light on it, it came out for me wonderfully in my mother's face, as I watched her through the anxious days, how much her life had been stayed in renunciations. I suppose my new appreciation must have shone out for her as well, for I could see rising out of her disorder, like a drowned person out of the sea, a bond of our common experience. We were two women, together at last, my mother and I, and could have speech with one another.
Something no doubt contributed to this new understanding by an affair of Forester's which, as I began to be acquainted with the incidents preceding it, I believed to be partly responsible for my mother's stroke. I have already sketched to you how Forester had grown up in the need of finding himself always at the centre of feminine interest without the opportunity of satisfying it normally by marriage, and how the too early stimulation of sentiment and affection had led to his being handed about from girl to girl in the attempt to gratify his need without transgressing any of the lines marked out by his profession as an eminently nice young man. It came naturally out of the mere circumstance of there being a limited number of girls at hand whom he might conceivably court without the intention of marrying, for him to fall into the society of others whom he might not court but who might nevertheless find it much to their advantage to marry him.
I do not know how and when it came to my mother's ears that he was calling frequently at the Jastrows; very likely they brought it to her notice themselves. They were a poor, pushing sort, forever exposing themselves to the slights arising from their own undesirability, which they forever tearfully attributed to an undeserved and paraded poverty. They paraded it now as the insuperable bar to all that they might have done for my mother, all that they actually had it in their hearts to do on their assumption of a right of being interested, an assumption which, even in her weakness, before she could trust herself to talk very much, I felt her dumbly imploring me to deny. The girl—Lily they called her—was not without a certain appeal to the senses; and knowing rather more of my brother's methods, I did not find Mrs. Jastrow's pretension to a community of interest in what might be expected to come of his attention, altogether unjustified. But in view of mother's condition and what Effie told me of the way business was going—rather was not going at all—any kind of marriage would have been out of the question. It was the way I put the finality of that into my dealings with Mrs. Jastrow, that drew mother over into the only relation of normal human interdependence I was ever to have with her. Whenever Mrs. Jastrow would come to call with that air she had, in her dress and manner, of being pulled together and made the best of, I could see my mother's fears signalling to me from the region of tremors and faintness in which she had sunk, and I would set my wits up as a defence against what, considering all there was against her, was a really gallant effort on Mrs. Jastrow's part to make out of Forester's philanderings a basis for a family intimacy. It was plain that neither my mother nor Mrs. Jastrow dared put the question to Forester, but rested their case on such mutual admissions of it as they could wring from one another.
I could never make out on my mother's part, whether she was really afraid of the issue, or if in the preoccupation of their affection both she and Forester had overlooked his young man's right to a woman and a life of his own. Through all her dumb struggle against it, never but once did my mother openly face the ultimate possibility of his marriage with Lily Jastrow.
It was about the third week of her illness, and Mrs. Jastrow, making one of her interminable calls, had been brought so nearly to the point of tears by my imperiousness, that Effie had been obliged to draw her off into the kitchen to have her opinion about a recipe for a mince meat such as she knew the Jastrows couldn't afford to be instructed in, and so had gotten her out of the side door and started down the walk before the situation could come to a head. My mother watched her go.