"Come, Thou fount of every blessing,Tune my heart to sing Thy praise."
"Come, Thou fount of every blessing,Tune my heart to sing Thy praise."
and as he sung she saw the tears rolling down his face. So she turned her back on them and let them say their good-byes without her, though she had no notion how near the final parting was.
Forester was dressing—he and Effie had taken turns at church-going ever since mother's stroke—and he was surprised to find that Cousin Judd had gone off without him. Mother clung to him when he went to kiss her good-bye; she struggled with her impotence, but they made out that it was not because she wanted him to stay at home with her; and for the first time since her illness she wished not to be propped up at the window where she could sign to the neighbours going by, but seemed to want greatly to sleep. Effie wheeled her into the corner of the sitting room; and a little later she noticed that mother's head had slipped down on the pillow as it did sometimes, past her power to lift it up again. So my sister straightened the poor head with a kiss and went back to getting the dinner. She moved softly because mother seemed asleep, but at last when she went as usual to tell her that Forester was visible at the end of the street, on the way home, she saw that the head had slipped down again, and this time as she lifted it up there was no life in it at all.
One of the strange incidents of that morning, and yet not strange when you think how much they had been to one another, was that Cousin Judd, though he had started home directly after church, could not get there, but when he had driven a little way out of town, drawn by he knew not what unseen force, turned back and pulled up in front of our door just as the doctor who had been summoned hastily was saying that mother had been dead an hour.
It was Monday morning when I arrived, and the funeral could not be until Tuesday, to allow time for the news to penetrate to all the distant country places from which my mother's relatives would be drawn to it, moved and anxious to come, though many of them had not seen her for a matter of years. I think I realized at once how it would be about my getting back to Chicago, especially when I spoke to Effie about it. She cried out and clung to me in a way that made me see that I stood for something more to her than just sisterliness. Without saying anything I wrote to Mr. Coleman that I should be detained a week or longer, and that though I hoped he would be able to save my place for me, I didn't really expect that he would.
It was not in the Taylorville cemetery that we buried my mother, but in a little plot set aside from the old Judd place, along with the rest of the Wilsons, Judds, and Jewetts, those that had dropped back peacefully to their native sod, and those sent home from Gettysburg and Appomattox. It was a longish ride; from turn to turn of the country road, teams dropped into the procession that led out from town. On either side the woods blazed like the ranked Cherubim, host on host; great shoals of fiery leaves lay in the shallows of the burying ground. At the last, shaken by the light breeze that sprung up, little flamy darts from the oak whirled into the grave with her. They were to say in their own fashion that there was nothing more natural. I think my mother must have found it so.
We had scarcely got home again, still sitting about, veiled and voluminous, when I was drawn out of grief to meet Effie's emergency. It was Almira Jewett who brought me face to face with it. Almira had taken off her things and was getting tea for us in her brisk, capable way.
"Anyhow," she said, "I 'spose you'll stay with your sister until she gets sort of used to things." It flashed on me that what she was expected to get used to, was going on just as she had been without the excuse of my mother's needing her.
"Oh, I'll stay till the breaking up," I met her promptly.
"My land!" said Almira Jewett, "you talking of the breakin' up and your mother ain't hardly out of the house yet. They do say there's nothing like play-acting to make you nimble in your feelings." I knew of course that they would lay it to the defibricating influence of my profession that I should take the breaking up of my mother's home so lightly, but I had caught a brief hiatus in Effie's sobs and I realized that what the poor child was afraid of, was being hypnotized into a situation against which her natural good sense revolted. I was bracing myself against the tradition of filial obligation that I felt was going to be put in force against me, when suddenly help arrived from an unsuspected quarter.
"I 'spose you're going with a troupe yet?" Cousin Lydia interposed, for the first time in her life, I believe, delivering herself of a conclusion. "It's a pity, because if you was anyways settled you could take Effie with you. Forester was a good son;" she ruminated on that for a while. "He was what you call a real model son, but I don't know as I want to see Effie married to him the same as your mother was." It gave me a shock to think that all these years she must have been seeing how things were.
"She shan't," I assured her, "not if I have to stay with Forrie myself." I had thought a good many times what was to become of Effie. I couldn't take her with me, of course, but I wasn't in the least prepared to see her intrigued by the popular sentiment into becoming a mere figurehead for Forester'srôleof provider. "Keeping up a home" they called it in Taylorville, as though the house and furniture and the daily habit of coming back to it, were the pivotal facts of existence.
It almost seemed as if it might come to that. After the others were all gone and the night closed in on us three, the spirit of the dead came and stood among us. Effie wept in Forrie's arms and said that he should not be quite bereft, he should have her anyway.
"You poor child ... you've got a brother left; you too, Olivia. You shan't want for a home while I live." That of course was the sort of thing Taylorville expected of him. It began to seem as if I might have to make good my word about staying with my brother to let Effie free. I believe he would have accepted that without even a suspicion of what I surrendered by it. If anything, he would have seen in it only another dramatization of hisrôleof dutifulness. That a woman had any preferred employment beside cushioning life for the males of her family, had not impinged on the consciousness of Taylorville.
But the very next morning I awoke anew to the purpose of rescuing Effie, and to the recollection of an incident of the funeral, noted but not taken into the reckoning in the stress of more absorbing emotions.
"Effie, wasn't that Mrs. Jastrow I saw at the cemetery yesterday with her head done up in a black veil—crape, too? I have just recalled it." Effie nodded.
"One would have thought," I resented, "that she was one of the family."
"Ah, that's it; she thinks she is."
"One of the family? Oh! you don't mean that Forrie——Where was Lily then?" I demanded.
"She wouldn't come, of course, not being recognized as one of the family and yet counting herself one."
"But, explain ... how could she? I thought that was broken off long ago."
"When mother was first taken," Effie agreed, "but you see she made such a dead set at him, she had to keep it up somehow; she couldn't admit that Forrie hadn't wanted her. So they made it up between them, Lily and her mother, I mean, that she and Forrie had really been engaged, but it had been broken off because Forrie couldn't marry so long as mother——" She broke off with tears again, remembering how mother was now.
"That was two years ago; you don't mean to say they've kept it up all the time?"
"They've had to. You see Lily hadn't been careful about not getting herself talked about with Forester. Oh, not scandal, of course, but you know how it is when a girl is crazy after a man; everybody gets to hear of it. And then they had to make so much of the engagement never coming to anything on mother's account, it quite spoiled Lily's chances, and you know, Forester...."
"Oh, he was taken in by it, no doubt; it was something to sentimentalize over and be self-sacrificing about."
"Well, of course, he couldn't quite abandon the poor girl; and she reallyisfond of him."
"And perfectly safe to philander with. Well, now that he has no one depending on him I suppose he will marry her!"
"That's what is worrying me," protested Effie; "you see it all depends on whether I go on depending on him." She broke down over that. Mother hadn't wanted Forester to marry Lily Jastrow, and everybody by the mouth of Almira Jewett, had thought it was Effie's duty to keep him from it if she could.
"And I could, by just staying on. It's mother's money in the business, your's and mine as much as his, and this house ... it's partly ours ... if we stay in it."
"Well if youwantto...."
Effie came over and sobbed on my shoulder, "Oh, I don't," she said. "I suppose it is horrid and selfish. I'm fond of Forrie, but I want to do things in the world ... like you have ... and I want to marry and have babies. Oh, oh!" She was quite overwhelmed with the turpitude of it.
"You shall, you shall," I determined for her.
"Oh, Olivia, I havewantedyou so. I knew you'd understand. It was all right so long as mother lived; I could do anything for her, but now I want—I want to beme!" I understood very well what that want was. But first off I had to explain to Effie why I couldn't take her with me. It was wonderful how she entered into my feeling about my work, and my lack of success in Chicago.
"Of course, you ought to go to New York. You'll be a great tragic actress, Olive, I knowthat. You could go, too, if you could get your share out of the business. You could have mine and yours!" She glowed over it. But the fact was we couldn't get the money out of the business. As it stood we couldn't have sold the shop for what mother had put into it, and, besides, we should have had to deal first with Forester's conviction that he was taking care of our shares for us. I needn't have worried about Effie; she was too pretty and competent not to have arranged for herself. The principal and his wife drove over from Montecito to say that they would be glad to have her come back and finish the course interrupted within a few months of graduation by my mother's illness. And for her board and tuition she was to act as the principal's secretary. Within a year she wrote that she was engaged to their son.
In the meantime I undertook to stop the capacious maw of Forrie's need of being important; and the only way I saw to do it, involved my surrender of any hope I had of finding my own release in what my mother had left us of my father's hard won savings. I shouldn't have had any compunction, so fierce was my own need of success, about forcing my brother's hand, but I meant definitely not to leave any gap in his life for Effie to be drawn back into. Before we had come to this point, the second afternoon after the funeral in fact, circumstances had begun to work for me. Effie and I, looking out of the window, saw Mrs. Jastrow coming along by the front fence with all her gentility spread, as it were, by the feeling she had of her call on us being a diplomatic function.
"She's coming to see how we take it," Effie averred.
"Her coming to the funeral as one of the family? Well, how do we take it, Effie?"
"Mother couldn't bear the idea of it." Tears came into my sister's eyes; I could see the wings of self-immolation hovering over her.
"Look here, Effie, you go and take home Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons." There had been so many out of town connections dropping in for a meal that we had been obliged to fall back on our nearest neighbour.
"Lily's respectable, isn't she? and Forester has encouraged her. Well, you don't want to spoil the poor girl's life, do you?"
"Oh," said Effie, "oh, Olivia!" I could see she was torn between compunction and admiration for my way of putting it on high moral grounds. I heard her counting out the spoons in the kitchen as I went to let Mrs. Jastrow in.
I think she didn't know any more than Effie did, what to make of my manner of receiving her. She sat on the edge of a chair and snivelled a little into a handkerchief which was evidently her husband's, but it was chiefly, I could see, because she had come prepared to snivel and couldn't quickly adjust herself to my change of base.
"Poor Lily," she moaned, "she thought such a lot of Mr. Lattimore's mother; but I tell her she must bear up."
"She must indeed," I assured her. "Forester needs all the sympathy he can get just now." I could see her peeping over the top of her handkerchief, trying to guess what to make of that; but the sentimental was easy for her.
"That's what I tell her; they'll have to comfort each other. Them poor young things, they'd ought to be together. But Lily's so sensitive she couldn't bear to put herself forward."
"I'll tell Forrie you called," I assured her.
Mrs. Jastrow fanned herself with her damp handkerchief; her poor little pretence broke quite down under my friendliness.
"He's got to marry her," she whispered. "Lily's been talked about, and he'sgot to." I could guess suddenly what it meant to her to have reached up so desperately for something better for her daughter than she had been able to manage for herself, and to come so near not getting it. I was able to put something like sympathy into my voice when I spoke to Forester at supper.
"Mrs. Jastrow called to-day. She says Lily isn't bearing up as she might. I suppose you ought to go and see her!"
Effie's eyes grew round at me over the teacups, but after all Forrie didn't know what had passed between mother and me in regard to Lily. If I chose to take his relation to her as a matter of course, he couldn't object to it. We heard Forrie in his room changing his collar before he went back to the shop again.
"He'll go to her to-night after he closes up," Effie told me. "It will end with her getting him."
"So long as he doesn't get you——" But it was unfair to put ideas like that in Effie's head. "After all it is a very good match for him in some ways; she'll always look up to him, and that is what Forrie needs."
It was natural to Effie to judge every situation by what it had for those concerned; she wasn't troubled as I was by the pressure of an outside ideal. By the end of a month, when I thought of going back to the city, it was tacitly understood that as soon as convenient Forester was to marry Lily Jastrow. He meant, however, to be fair with us both about the property; he had given us notes for our share, and expected to pay interest. The note wasn't negotiable, as I learned immediately, and the interest wasn't any more than Effie would need for her clothing. I felt that the jaws of destiny which had opened to let Effie out, had closed on me instead. I returned to Chicago early in November; my place with the Coleman players had long been filled, and there was nothing whatever to do.
Jerry's play, which had had its premier while I was away, was going on successfully. One of the first items of news Sarah told me about him was that his wife was expecting another child, undertaken in the hope that, if she couldn't hold her husband's roving fancy, she could at least fix his attention on her situation. All that she had got out of it so far, was a reason for staying at home, which left Jerry the freer to bestow his society where it was most acceptable.
"Does she know—Miss Filette, I mean—about the child."
"Not unless Jerry has told her—which he'd hardly do." Sarah laughed a little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour. "Fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she inspired it. I imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of Mrs. McDermott to have intruded her condition on their relation. Of course it is understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...."
"It is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." I hadn't Sarah's reason for being lenient. "Somebody ought to speak to Jerry."
"You might—he would listen to you. It is just because there is so little in it that it is so hard to deal with."
I suppose I took to interfering in the McDermott's affairs because I had so little of my own to interest me. Besides, I was fond of Jerry and didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle.
"But after all," Sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own inspiration." It wasn't in me to tell her, even if I had understood it myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. I wanted, oh, I immensely wanted, what Jerry was getting out of his relation to Miss Filette, but I wanted it free of the implication that my abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything like the same case.
"The real trouble with you," Jerry told me, "is that you are trying to live in Chicago and Taylorville at the same time."
Not being able to make any headway with him, I went to call on Miss Filette. I wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an assault on her confidence, I didn't know her well enough to call on her in any case, but I wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small as a breech of manners in doing it. It wasn't so much the offense of my undertaking it that counted, I found, as Miss Filette's determination not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. I had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the road before Christmas.
"I should hope so," I dropped squarely on her; "Jerry's wife needs him. There's a child coming in April."
"Yes," said Miss Filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "Have you seen what we have done with the second act lately?"
"Anyway," I said to myself as I went, "she knows. She can't skid over the facts as she has my telling her."
But it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with Jerry, that drove me back on Pauline and Henry Mills. I fled to them to be saved from what, in the only other society I had access to, fretted all my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.
What I should have done was to take my courage in my hands and have gone on from Taylorville to New York. But the most I was equal to was a fixed determination to accept anything which would take me nearer Broadway, which, even then, was to the player world all that the lamp is to the moth. In the meantime I had settled in two housekeeping rooms in a street that I wouldn't have dared to give to a manager as an address; one of those neighbourhoods where there are always a great many perambulators, and waste paper blowing about. There was never anything for me, in the frame of life called Bohemian, more than a picturesque way of begging the question of poverty. What I looked for in a lodging, was escape from the bedraggled professionalism which went on in what were called studios, by means of a cot bed, an oil stove, and a few yards of art muslin. That I hadn't managed it so successfully as I hoped, was made plain to me a few days after I had moved in, by the discovery of a card tacked on the opposite door, that read, "Leon Griffin, the Varieté." It was the same theatre at which Cecelia Brune was playing the chief attraction in song and dance. In the glimpses I had of Mr. Griffin in the dark hall going in and out, I was aware that he gave much the same impression of unprofitable use that was associated in my mind with the Shamrocks.
All this time I kept going through the motions of looking for an engagement. Now and then some shining bubble of opportunity seemed to float toward me, to dissolve in thin air as soon as I put my hand out to it. One of these brought me to Cline and Erskine's waiting room on the day that Cecelia Brune elected to register her complaint against what she considered a slight of her turn at the Varieté. She flounced about more than a little, not to let the rest of us escape the inference that she was not used to being kept waiting. When she had hooked and unhooked her handsome furs for the fourth time, she introduced me to Leon Griffin, who except for the name, I shouldn't have recognized for my hall neighbour. It was like being slapped in the face with my own hard condition to have him crowded on me in that character before the whole roomful. Life seemed so to have beggared him. In broad day he looked the sort of a man who has failed to sustain himself in the man's world, and must reinforce his value with the favour of women. Little touches of effeminacy about his dress failed to take the attention away from its shabbiness. His hair had the traditional thespian curl in spite of being cropped short, to allow of various make-ups, one surmised, and his very blue eyes were in a perpetual state of extenuating the meagreness of his other features. Being ashamed of my shame at meeting him there, I began to be very nice to him. Cecelia, in spite of her magnificent raiment, perhaps on account of it, had been disposed to graciousness. She drew us together with a wave of her hand.
"She ought to be doin'Opheliaon Broadway," she introduced me handsomely; "wouldn't that get you!"
"I saw you with the Hardings last year," Griffin assented, almost as though I might think it a liberty. "Where are you playing now?" He had the stamp of too many reverses on his face not to estimate mine at its proper worth. He had fine instincts too, for as soon as I told him that I was out of an engagement that season, he put himself on record quite simply. "My turn goes off next week—I'm trying to get Cline to put it on the circuit." When we came out of the office together he fell into step with me. One of the young women ahead of us made the shape of a bubble with her hands and blew it from her. "Pouff" she said. "There goes another of my chances." She laughed with a fine courage.
"They all go through with it," Griffin affirmed. "There's Eversley——" I have forgotten which of the well-known incidents he related.
"Eversley told me I might come to it. What made you think of him?" I demanded.
"I saw his name in the paper; he's to play here this winter. He's a wonder."
"He said wonderful things to me once." I had just recalled them.
"They'll come true then. Eversley never makes a mistake. Why, I remember once——" He broke off as though he had changed his mind about telling me. I was wondering if I couldn't get rid of him by stopping in at Sarah's, when he broke out again suddenly.
"To think of you being out of an engagement and a girl like Cecelia Brown—yes, I know her name is Brown, Cissy Brown of Milwaukee——"
"I've always suspected it," I admitted, "but it is her looks of course, and the clothes; Cecelia has lovely clothes."
"Well, so could you if...." He checked himself. "I don't mean to say anything against a lady...."
"I've always suspected that, too," I admitted, "but one doesn't like to say it."
"Well, you know what she gets—thirty-five a week. A girl doesn't wear diamond sunbursts on that."
"Mr. Griffin, I wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives diamond sunbursts to Variety girls: I've never seen any of them."
"You have probably, but you don't know it. You meet their wives in society."
"Henry Mills." I don't know what made me say it; the image of him came tripping along the surface of my mind and slid off my tongue without having more than momentarily perched there.
"Is he in business downtown, and has he got a perfectly proper family and too many dinners under his vest?"
"Mr. Mills's home life is ideal; but I didn't mean——"
"Neither did I, but that's the type. They mostly have ideal families, but they couldn't live up to them if they didn't have Cecelia Brunes on the side.... I beg your pardon."
He had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it wasn't on account of what he had intimated. I was blushing because of the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life I had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our conversation had suggested for Henry Mills. I was conscious in those days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation.
"You'll have to take a company out for yourself," was Jerry's solution. "I'll write you a play. I've got a ripping idea—a man, with a gift, and two women, good women both of them—that's where I score against the eternal triangle—each of them trying to save him from the other and breaking him between them." Jerry's plays were never anything more than dramatizations of his immediate experience. "You and Sarah Croyden, you set each other off; I'll write it for both of you." He walked up and down in my little room with his hands in his pockets and his shining black hair rising like quills.
"Jerry, how long will it take you to write that play? And how much will it cost to produce it?"
"Ten thousand dollars," he answered to the last question. "About eighteen months if I go right at it."
"And I've money enough to last me to the end of February. No," to his swift generous gesture. "You have to live eighteen months on yours—and another child coming." I made up my mind that I should have to speak to Pauline and Henry Mills.
Greater than any mystery of creative art to me, is the mystery by which the recipients of its benefits manage to keep ignorant of its essential processes. I have never been able to figure to myself how Pauline and Henry escaped knowing that the creative mood, the keen hunger of which is more importunate than any need of food or raiment, was to be had for very little more than they spent fattening their souls on its choice products. For it is always to be bought; it is the distinction of genius as against talent, always to know in what far, unlikely market the precious commodity is to be bought. How was it that Henry escaped knowing that the appealing femininity which plays so large a part in the success of an actress with an audience of Millses, is largely the result of having been the object of that solicitious protection which it is supposed to provoke? With what, since it was agreed between Pauline and me that I was not to pay down on that counter what Cecelia and Jerry parted with cheerfully, was I ultimately to pay for it? Now that I had on all sides of me the witness of desperation, I began to be irritated at the way in which, in view of our long friendship, they accepted it for me.
As the holiday season approached, without any change in my circumstances other than a steady diminution of my bank account, I came to the conclusion that the only possible move was toward New York and that I should have to ask Henry to advance me the money for it. In view of what came to me afterward it was a reasonable proposition, but I reckoned without that extraordinary blankness to the processes of art which is common to those most entertained by it.
It was a day or two after Christmas, from which I had been excused by my recent bereavement, that I went out to dinner there with the determination to bring something to pass commensurate with their usual attitude of high admiration for and confidence in my gift. We had gone into the library after dinner, at least it was a room that went by that name, though I don't know for what reason except that Henry smoked there and the furniture was upholstered in leather, as in Evanston it was indispensable that all libraries should be.
Here and there were touches that suggested that if Henry moved his income up a notch or two, Pauline's taste might not be able to keep pace with it. Henry warmed his back at the gas log and wished to know how things went with me.
"As well as I could expect themhere. I've made up my mind to try for New York as soon as I can manage it."
"What's the matter with Chicago?" Henry's manner implied that whatever you believed about it, you'd have to show him.
"Well, I'd have to be capitalized to do anything here the same as in New York, and the field there is larger." I went on to explain something of what the metropolis had to offer.
"I guess the worst thing about Chicago is that you're out of a job. People don't get sore on a place where they are doing well."
"No. They generally light out for a place where there are more jobs." I thought I should get on better if I took Henry in his own key, but he forged ahead of me.
"If there's anything the matter with your acting, why don't you ask somebody?"
"There's nobody to ask. Besides, there isn't anything the matter with it; the matter is with me."
"Well, I must say I don't see the difference."
"Oh!" I cried. I hadn't realized that they wouldn't just take my word for it. "It is because I am empty—empty!" I trailed off, seeing how wide I was of his understanding. I shouldn't have questioned Henry Mills's word about the capitalization of a joint stock company; and I resented their discounting my own statement of my difficulties. Pauline got hold of my hand and patted it. I wondered if it was because all her own crises were complicated with Henry Mills that she always thought that affectionateness was part of the answer.
"It is only that, with all your Gift, Henry can't understand how you need anything else," she extenuated.
"I need food and clothes," I blurted out; "pretty soon I shall need a lodging."
"Oh, my dear!" Pauline was shocked at the indelicacy. I don't know if she didn't understand how poor I was, or if it was only the general notion of the sheltered woman, to find in complaint a kind of heresy against the institution by which they are maintained. "After all," she caught up with her accustomed moral attitude, "there's a kind of nobility in suffering for your art. It's what gives you your spiritual quality." I thought I recognized the phrase as one that was current in the women's clubs of that period. I took hold of my courage desperately.
"Well, I'm offering you a chance to suffer two thousand dollars' worth." Pauline's tact was proof even against that.
"You Comedy Child!" she laughed indulgently.
"You're getting ideas," Henry burbled on cheerfully; "all these long-hairs and high-brows you've been associating with, they've filled you up. That friend of yours, McDermott, somebody had him to the club the other day, talking about the conservation of Genius. Nothing in it. Let them work for their money the same as other people, I say."
"You know you didn't have any money to begin with," Pauline reminded me. I was made to feel it a consideration that she hadn't pressed the point that if I couldn't do again what I had done then, there was something lacking in the application. They must have taken my gesture of despair for surrender.
"I guess you were just getting it out of your system," Henry surmised comfortably.
It was not the first nor the last time that I was to come squarely up against the lay conviction that whatever might be known about the processes of art, it wasn't the artist that knew it. Later, when Henry took me out to the car, he came round to what had been back of the whole conversation.
"I suppose you could use more money in your business; most of us could," he advised me, "but you don't want to let people find it out. There's nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking about money."
It was a very cold night as I came down the side street to my door, deserted as a country road. The narrow footpath trodden in the pavement looked like the track of desolation, the cold flare of the lamps was smothered in sodden splashes of snow. There had been the feeling of uneasiness in the air that goes before a storm all that forenoon, and in the interval that I had been revaluing a lifelong friendship in terms of what it wouldn't do for me, it had settled down to a heavy clogging snow. I was startled as I turned in at the entry to find a man behind me. He had come up unsuspected in the soft shuffle and turned in with me.
By the light that filtered through the weather-fogged transom I saw that he was Griffin of the Varieté. Now as I fumbled blindly at the latch he came close to me.
"Beg pardon!" He had put out his hand over mine and turned the key for me.
"My fingers are so cold," I apologized. I turned my face toward him with the stiffness of cold and tears upon it and there was an answering commiseration in his eyes. I reached out for the key and he took my hand in his, holding it to his breast with a movement of excluding human kindness. If the gesture was at all theatrical I did not feel it. I let him hold it there for a moment before I went in and shut the door.
Depression, as well as the storm which held on heavily all night and the next day, kept me close, and the state of my coal bin kept me in bed most of the next day. Along late in the afternoon I was aroused from a lethargy of cold and crying, by Leon Griffin tapping at the door to know how I did. The snow by this time had settled down to a blinding drift, and the thermometer had fallen into an incalculable void of cold. Griffin was in his overcoat as though he had just come in or was just going out, though I learned later he had been sitting in it all day in his room. The impression it created of his being in the act of passing, led me to open my door to him, as I otherwise might not have done. A terrible, cold blast came in with him and a clattering of the shutters on the windward wall of the house. Outside, the day was falling dusk; there was no light in the room but the square blank of the window curtained by the sliding screen of snow, and my little stove which glowed like a carbuncle in its corner.
"You're cozy here"—he put it as an excuse for lingering, for I hadn't asked him to have a chair—"you hardly feel the wind. On my side there's a trail of snow half across the room where the wind whips it in between the casings."
Though he had come ostensibly to offer me a neighbourly attention, he was plainly in need of it himself; it was his last night at the Varieté and, between the storm and the depression of having nothing to turn to, he was coming down with a cold. I had him into my one easy chair and suggested tea.
"I hardly slept any last night," he apologized over his second cup, "the shutter clacks so." I could hear it now like the stroke of desolation.
That night when I heard him stamping off the snow in the hall, I had a hot drink for him, but when I saw him, by the rakish light of the hall lamp, wringing his hands with the cold before taking it, I insisted he should come on into my still warm room. I had to turn back first to light my own lamp and, in respect to my being in my dressing gown with my hair in two braids, to slip into my bedroom and experience, as I looked back at him through the crack in the door, the kind of softening a woman has toward a man she has made comfortable. The light of my lamp, which was shaded for reading, like a miniature calcium, brought out for me the frayed edge of his overcoat and all the waste and misuse of him, the kind of faded appeal that sort of man has for a woman; forlorn as he was, as he put the bowl back on the table, I was so much more forlorn myself that I was glad to have been femininely of use to him.
Pauline wrote me to come out and stay with her during the protracted cold spell, but owing to the difficulty in delivery, the invitation failed to reach me until the severity of the weather was abated. In any case I was still too sore at what seemed to me the betrayal of my long confidence, to have been willing to have subjected myself to any reminders of it. And whatever kindness Pauline meant, it could hardly have done so much for me as Leon Griffin did by just needing me. It transpired that he had no stove in his room, and the heat from the register for which we were definitely charged in the rent, scarcely modified the edge of the cold. For the next two or three days we spent much of the time huddled over my stove. Snow ceased to fall on the second day, and nothing moved in our view except now and then the surface of it was flung up by the wind, falling again fountain-Pwise into the waste of the untrampled housetops that stretched from my window to the icy flat of the lake darkening under a dour horizon. Somehow, though I had never been willing to confess to my friends how poor I was, I made no bones of it with Griff, as I had heard Cecelia call him, a name that seemed somehow to suit the inconsequential nature of our relation better than his proper title. We frankly pooled our funds in the matter of food, which one or another of us slipped out to buy, and cooked on my stove. I took an interest in preparing it, such as I hadn't since the times when I imagined I was helping Tommy on the way to growing rich, and when the room was full of a warm savoury smell and the table pulled out from the wall to make it serve for two, we felt, for the time, restored to the graciousness of living. We fell back on the uses of domesticity, by association providing us with a sense of life going on in orderliness and stability. It came out for me in these moments that it is after all life, that Art needs rather than feeling, and that, to a woman of my capacity, was to be supplied not by innocuous intrigues like Jerry's but by the normal procedure of living. I believe I felt myself rather of a better stripe, to find it so in the domestic proceeding, though I do not really know that my necessity was any whit superior to Miss Filette's, except in offering the minimum possibility of making anybody unhappy by it. But because I knew my friends would think it ridiculous that I could lay hold of power again by so inconsiderable a handle as Leon Griffin, I suffered a corroding resentment. Griffin was getting up a new act for himself, and evenings as I helped him with it, I felt a faint stirring of creative power. When he had finished, I would take the shade off the lamp and render scenes for him from my favourite Elizabethan drama; and in the face of his unqualified admiration for me, I could almost act.
Toward the end of the week as the cold abated, Mr. Griffin asked me to see a play in which some of his friends were playing; and Jerry being prodigal of favours, I responded with an invitation to "The Futurist." I hadn't mentioned Griff to Sarah, I never more than mentioned him to any of my friends, but I saw no reason why I should not speak of them to him, especially when they were so much upon the public tongue as Sarah was just then.
"Croyden?" he said; "isn't that an unusual name?" He appeared to be puzzling over it. "I seem to remember a town somewhere by that name."
"In New York," I told him. I was on the point of telling him how Sarah came by it, but an impulse of discretion saved me. I had seen "The Futurist" so many times now, that, once at the theatre, I occupied myself with looking at the audience and took no sort of notice of my escort until after Sarah's entrance near the close of the first act.
"Well?" I laid myself open to compliments for my friend. I was startled by what I saw when I looked at him. He had shrunk away into the corner of his seat farthest from me, like a man whose garment had fallen from him unawares. The stark naked soul of him fed visibly upon her bodily perfection; Sarah's beauty took men like that sometimes when they were able to see it—there were those who thought her merely nice-looking. I could see his tongue moving about stealthily to wet his dry lips. I couldn't bear to look at him like that; it seemed a pitiful thing for a man to ache so with the beauty of a woman he had long ceased to deserve; it was as though he had laid bare some secret ache in me.
Coming out of the theatre he surprised me with a knowledge of Sarah's affairs. He knew that she had begun with O'Farrell.
"I played with him myself," he admitted; "that was before Miss—Miss——"
"Croyden," I supplied; "that was the town she came from; I shouldn't have told you except that you seem to know."
"I was expecting another name. Wasn't she—wasn't she married once? A fellow by the name of Lawrence."
"Oh, well, you may call it married. He was a cur."
"You can't tell me anything about him worse than I know myself." From the earnestness of his tone I judged that he had suffered something at the hands of Lawrence. "But I'll say this for him, he didn't stay with the other woman; she followed him and found him, but he wouldn't stay with her."
"I don't see that that proves anything except that he was the greater scoundrel. The other woman was his wife."
"It proves that he loved Miss Croyden best—that he couldn't bear the other woman after her." I thought it was no use matching ethical ideals with him and I let the matter drop. It came back to me next day that if he had been with O'Farrell in Lawrence's time, he might have known something of the other Shamrocks. I meant to ask him about it in the morning, but put it off as I observed that the recollection of it seemed to have stirred him past the point of being able to sleep. He was pale in the morning, and the rings under his eyes stood out plainly; he had the whipped look of a man who has been so long accused of misdemeanour that he comes at last to believe he has done it. I could see the impulse to confess hovering over him, and the hope that I might find in his misbehaviours the excusing clue which he was vaguely aware must be there, but couldn't himself lay hands on. I suppose souls in the Pit must have movements like that—seeking in one another the extenuations they can't admit to themselves.
We didn't, however, strike the note of confidence until it was evening. Griffin kept up the form of looking for an engagement, which occupied his morning hours, and in the afternoon Jerry came in to see how I had come through the cold spell, and to win my interest with his wife to consent to his going as far as St. Louis with "The Futurist." I forget what reasons he had for thinking it advisable, except that they were all more or less complicated with Miss Filette.
"But, heavens, Jerry, haven't you ever heard of the freemasonry of women? How can you think my sympathies wouldn't be with your wife? Especially in her condition."
"It's only for a week; and, you know, except for her fussing, she is perfectly well. And look here, Olivia, you know exactly why I have to have—other things; why I can't just settle down to being—the plain head of the family." His tone was accusing.
"I know why youthinkyou have to. Honest, Jerry, is it so imperative as all that?"
"Honest to God, Olivia, unless I'm ... interested ... I can't write a word." His glance travelling over my dull little room and makeshift furniture, the cheap kerosene lamp, the broken hinge of the stove. "You ought to know," he drove it home to me. I felt myself involved by my toleration of Griffin in a queer kind of complicity.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Tell her you think it is to the advantage of the play for me to be there in St. Louis for the opening. It's always good for an interview, and that's advertising." After all I suppose I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't found his wife in a wrapper at four o'clock in the afternoon, when I went out there. If she wouldn't make any better fight for herself, who was I to fight for her? And as Jerry said, for him to be with the play, meant advertising.
I talked it over with Griffin that evening, as we sat humped over my tiny stove before the lamps were lighted. Outside we could see the roofs huddling together with the cold, and far beyond, the thin line of the lake beaten white with the wind in a fury of self-tormenting. It made me think of poor little Mrs. Gerald under the lash of her husband's vagaries.
"I can't help think that she'd feel it less if she made less fuss about it," I protested. Griffin shook his head.
"It's a mercy she can do that; it's when you can't do anything it eats into you."
I reflected. "There was a woman I knew who looked like that. O'Farrell's leading lady; she was jealous and there was nothing she could do. She looked gnawed upon!"
"Miss Dean, you mean?"
"I forgot you said that you knew her." I wanted immensely to know how he came to be mixed up with her. "She was jealous of me, but there was no cause. How well did you know her?"
"I ... she ... I was married to her." His face was mottled with embarrassment; it occurred to me that his confusion must have been for his complicity in the fact of their not being married now, but he set me right. "I oughtn't to have told it on her, I suppose. She married me to go on the stage. I was boarding at her mother's and I couldn't have afforded to marry unless she had. You don't know how handsome she was. I knew she couldn't act.... I can't myself, but I know it when I see it. Her father had been an actor of a sort; he had taught her things, and I thought I could pull her along."
"Shehasgot on." I let the fact stand for all it was worth.
"Yes, she had something almost as good as acting ... she could get hold of people."
"She had O'Farrell. Was it on his account you separated?"
"Long before that. You see she could handle the managers in her own interest, but she didn't know what to do with me. So I—I got out of her way." Griffin's clothes were too loose for him, and his hair, which wanted trimming, disposed itself in what came perilously near to being ringlets, accentuating the effect of his having been shrivelled, and shrunk within the mark of his capacity. There was a certain shame about him as he made this admission, that made me feel that though to leave his wife free to seek her own sort of success had been a generous thing to do, it was all he could do; his moral nature had suffered an incurable strain.
"Griff, did they tell you when you were young, that love was all bound up with what you should do in the world and what you could get for it?"
"They never told me anything; I had to find it out."
"Jerry too; he thought he was going to have a graceful, docile creature to keep him in a perpetual state of maleness. I should have thought you'd have left the stage after that," I said, reverting to the personal instance.
"I ought to have, but somehow I kept feeling her; even when I wasn't thinking of her I could feel her somewhere pulling me. It was like living in the house where some one has died, and you keep thinking they're just in the next room and you don't want to go away for fear you'll lose them altogether."
"I understand."
The afternoon light had withdrawn into the bleak sky without illuminating it. I threw open the stove for the sake of the ruddy light, and the intimacy of our sitting there drew me on to counter confession.
"It's like that with me all the time," I said, "only there hasn't really been anybody. Sarah says there doesn't have to be anybody; that we only think so because we have felt it that way once. She thinks it is just ... Personality ... whatever there is that we act to."
"Well, I know you have to have it, anyway you can get it."
"O'Farrell used to call it feeling your job. I wonder where he is now." So the talk drifted off to the perpetual professionalism of the unsuccessful, to incidents of rehearsals and engagements. I believe it would have been good for me to have run my mind in new pastures, but there was nobody to open the gates for me.
I said as much to Sarah the very next time I saw her; it seemed a way of getting at what I hadn't yet told her, that I was within a week or two of the end of my means. I had the best of reasons for not calling my case to her attention, in the readiness with which she offered herself to my necessity.
"You must go to New York of course; I've three hundred dollars, and I could send you something every month——" I cut her off absolutely.
"I'd rather try Cecelia Brune's plan first," I assured her.
"Not while you have me;" she was firm with me. "Besides, you don't really know that Cecelia——"
"Didn't buy her diamond sunburst on thirty-five a week!" I told her all that Griffin had said. Sarah looked worried.
"I'll tell you about the diamonds. About a year ago, while you were with the Hardings, she got into trouble. Oh, she loved him as much as she was able! He gave her the diamonds; but Cecelia cared. And then when the trouble came, he deserted her. That's what Cecelia couldn't understand. She had never given anything before, and she didn't realize that that had been her chief advantage. It gave her a scare."
But in spite of Sarah's confidence in Cecelia's bitter experience keeping her straight, I could see that she had taken what Griffin had told me to heart. A day or two later she referred to the matter again.
"If she goes over the line once, and doesn't have to pay for it, she is lost." She was standing at my window looking out over the roofs and chimneys cased in ice, and she might, for all the mark her profession has left on her, been looking across the pasture bars. I was irritated at her detachment, and her interest, in the face of my own problem, in an affair so unrelated as Cecelia Brune's.
"Why do you care so much?"
"You'd care too, if you had seen as much of her; it's like watching a drowning man: you don't stop to ask if he's worth it before you plunge in!"
"I can't swim myself," I protested.
I didn't want to be dragged in, rescuing Cecelia; I had myself to save and wasn't sure I could do it. It was after this talk, however, that Griff, who still hung about the Varieté from habit, told me that Sarah had fallen into the way of stopping to pick up Cecelia on her way home from her own theatre. He thought it a futile performance.
"Nothing can stop that kind; they don't always know it, but that's what draws them to the stage in the first place. It's a kind of what-do-you-call-it, going back to the thing they were a long time ago."
"Atavism," I supplied; I thought it very likely. All the centuries of bringing women up to be toys must have had its fruit somehow. Cecelia was made to be played with; she wasn't serviceable for anything else. And what was more, I didn't care to be identified with her even in the Christian attitude of a rescuer. I said as much to Sarah one evening about a week later, when I had gone with Jerry to give my opinion of some changes in the cast, preparatory to going on the road with his play, and in the overflow of his satisfaction at the way the audience rose to them, he had asked me to go to supper with him. Then as Sarah joined us and the spirit of the crowd caught him, pouring along the street, bright almost as by day and with the added brightness of evening garments, Jerry, always open to the infection of the holiday mood, proposed that for once we stretch a point by going to supper at Reeves's. Sarah and I demurred as women will at such a proposal from a man whose family exigencies are known to them, but Sarah found a prohibitory objection in a promise she professed to have made, to go around for Cecelia on her way home, which Jerry promptly quashed by including her in the invitation. I protested.
"Supper at Reeves's is quite enough of an adventure for one time. Cecelia paints."
"Not really," Sarah protested. "It's only that she uses so little make-up that she doesn't think it necessary to take it off."
"All the better," insisted Jerry. "I never did take supper at Reeves's with a painted lady, and I'm told it is quite one of the things to do."
I let it pass rather than spoil his high mood. It was not more than three blocks to the Varieté, and at the stage door Sarah insisted on getting out herself.
"Why did you let her?" I protested to Jerry.
"Because it will please her, and Miss Brune will be gone; Sarah doesn't realize how late we are." I could see her returning through the fogged glass of the stage door.
"Cecelia's gone! The man said she was going to Reeves's too; we can pick her up there."
"Oh," I objected, "I can stand Cecelia, but I draw the line at her gentleman friends. She didn't go there alone, I fancy."
"We'll have a look at him, anyway, before we give him the glad hand," Jerry temporized.
The cab discharged us into the press of black-coated men and bright-gowned women that at that hour poured steadily into the anteroom of Reeves's, which was level with the pavement, divided from it by a screen of plate glass and palms. Beyond that and raised by a few steps, was the palm room, flanked on either side by dressing rooms; and opening out back, the great revolving doors, muffled with crimson curtains, that received the guests and sorted them like a hopper, according to the degree of their resistance to the particular allurements of Reeves's. There was a sleek, satin-suited attendant who swung the leaves of the door at just the right angle that inducted you to the public café, or to the corridor that led to private rooms, and was famed never to have made a mistake. Jerry dared us hilariously as we went up the steps, to put his discrimination to the test.
"You and I alone then; Olivia's black dress would give us away," Sarah insisted.
"I want you to stay here and watch for Cecelia," she whispered to me; "I must see her; Imust."
Her going on with Jerry would give her an opportunity to look through the café; if Cecelia hadn't already arrived, I would be sure to see her come in with the crowd that broke against the bank of palms into two streams of bright and dark, proceeding to the dressing rooms, and returning by twos and threes to be swallowed up by the hopper turning half unseen behind its velvet curtains. I slipped behind a group of bright-gowned women waiting for their escorts under the palms. I was hypnotized by the movement and the glitter; I believe I forgot what I was looking for; and all at once she was before me.
The theatrical quality of Cecelia's prettiness and the length of her plumes would have picked her out anywhere even without the blackened rim of the eyelids and the air she had always of having just stepped into the spot light.
She had stationed herself, with her professional instinct for effect, just under the Australian fern tree, waiting for her escort, and in the moment it took me to gather myself together he joined her. I had come up behind Cecelia and was brought face to face with him; it wasn't until he had wheeled into step with her that he saw me and his face went mottled all at once and settled to a slow purple. Cecelia was magnificent.
"Oh, you here! How de do!" She slipped her hand under her escort's arm and sailed out with him. I caught the glint of the brass-bound door under the curtains. I don't know how long I stood staring before I started after her, to be met by the leaves of the revolving door which, reversing its motion, projected Sarah and Jerry into the palm room beside me.
"I have been all over the café——" Sarah began.
"Didn't you meet her?"
"In the café? I was just telling you ..."
"No, no. In the corridor, just now; they went through."
"But they couldn't," urged Sarah. "I was standing at the door of the café with Jerry ..." The truth of the situation began to dawn on her.
"There's such a crowd, of course you missed her." Jerry began to build up a probability by which we could sustain Sarah through the supper which followed. We all of us talked a great deal as people will when they are anxious not to talk of a particular thing. When we were in the dressing room again, putting on our wraps, Sarah turned on me.
"She wasn't in the café at all," she declared.
"I never said she was. I said she went through into the corridor." In the silence I could feel Cecelia dropping into the pit.
"Did you know the man?"
I nodded. "It was Henry Mills!"
Before I had an opportunity to talk the incident over with Sarah, she had seen Cecelia.
"She is perfectly furious with you," she reported. "She hasn't heard from Mr. Mills since, and she thinks it is on your account; that you have taken steps for breaking it off."
"Well, if she admits there was something to break off ... I tell you, Sarah, you are fretting yourself to no purpose, the girl had been there before."
"I'm afraid so." Sarah's taking it so much to heart was a credit to her, but I was more curious than commiserating.
"Tell me, what is in the mind of a girl when she does things like that? What does she get out of it?"
"Excitement, of course; the sense of being in the stir, and the feeling of being protected. She says Mr. Mills has been kind to her. It is odd, but she seems to think it is all right so long as it is going on; it is only when it is broken off she can't bear it. That is why she is so angry at you."
"There might be something in that," I conceded. "When it is broken off she is able to realize how cheap and temporary it has been; while it is going on she can justify it on the ground that it is going on forever. Thatwouldjustify it, I suppose." I did not know how I knew this, but lately I had discovered in myself capacities for understanding a great many things of which I had had no experience. What concerned me was not Cecelia's relation to the incident.
"Whatever am I going to do about going there again, to Pauline's, I mean?"
"You can't tell!"
"And I can't go there and not tell. I've got to choose between deceiving Pauline and condoning Henry, and I've no disposition to do either." Sarah thought it over.
"There is only one thing you can do. You'll simply have to go to New York."
"For a great many reasons besides. You needn't tell me that. But how? How?"
"You know what I offered——"
"What I refused. It is out of the question. Don't speak of it."
"I suppose after this you couldn't ask the Millses?"
"Sarah ... I did ask."
"Well?" All her interest hung upon the interrogation.
"They told me it was good for my spiritual development to suffer these things." We faced one another in deep, unsmiling irony. "Sarah, what do you suppose it costs a man for supper and a private room at Reeves's?"
"Don't!" she begged. "It's only a step from that to Cecelia."
"Yes; I remember she said that men never afforded protection to women except for value received."
"You must go to New York," Sarah reiterated. "You must!"
The truth was I had never told Sarah exactly how poor I was.
In the end I let her go away without telling; at the worst I thought I might borrow from Jerry, who had given up the notion of going to St. Louis, largely no doubt because I had failed to back him up in it completely, and then just at the end changed his mind and went anyway. I knew nothing about it until Jerry wrote me from Springfield, for I had grown shy of going there where all Mrs. McDermott's conversation was set like a trap to catch me in something that would convict Jerry of misdemeanour. Jerry asked me to visit her in his absence, but I put it off as long as possible. I had to settle first about going to Pauline's. I arranged to spend the afternoon there, meaning to come away before dinner and so by leaving Henry to discover my attitude in the circumstance of my having been there without destroying his home, open the way to my meeting him again without embarrassment. To do that I should have left the house before the persuasive smell of the dinner began to creep up the stairs into the warm, softly lighted rooms, but from the beginning of my visit, Pauline, in order that I might not feel her failure to put her affection more cogently, had wound me about as with a cocoon of feminine devices, from which I hadn't been able to extricate myself earlier. I am not blaming her, I am not sure, indeed, seeing how completely she justified herself to Henry Mills by what she had to offer, that I had any right to expect her to understand how completely her playful and charming affectionateness failed of any possible use to me. But I felt myself so far helpless in the presence of it, that I stayed on until the smell of the roast unloosened all the joints of my resolution. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I found myself at a point where what Henry might think of me became inconsiderable before the possibility of my being put out of the house before dinner was served.
At the same time I could have wept at the indignity of wanting food so much. I remember to this day the wasteful heaping of the children's plates, and my struggle with the oblique desire to smuggle portions of my helping home to Griff, who looked even more of a stranger than I to soup and fish and roast, to say nothing of dessert.
It wasn't until we had got as far as the salad that I had leisure to observe Henry grow rather red about the gills as he fed, and speculate as to how far it was due to his consciousness that I could bring down the pillars of his home with a word, and didn't intend to.
There was nothing said during dinner about my prospects or the stage in general, but when Henry took me out to the car about nine o'clock, he cleared his throat several times as though to drag the subject up from the pit of his stomach, where it must have lain very uneasily.
"You know," he began, "I've been thinking about that scheme of yours of going to New York. I am inclined to think there is something in it."
"I haven't thought about it for a long time," I told him, which was only true in so far as I thought of it as a possibility.
"It would freshen you up a whole lot," Henry insisted. "Everybody needs freshening. I have been taking a little stir about myself." So that was the way he wished me to think of his relation to Cecelia!
"I've given it up," I insisted.
We were standing under the swinging arc light in a bare patch the wind had cleared of the fine, white February grit. Little trails of it blew up under foot and were lost among the wind-shaken shadows. I could see Henry's purpose bearing down on me like the far spark of the approaching trolley.
"I wouldn't do that," he advised. "It looks like pretty good business to me. You'd have to stay there some time to learn the ropes and if a few hundred dollars——"
"I've given it up," I said again. The car came alongside and Henry helped me on to it.
"If you were at any time to reconsider it, I hope you will let me know——" The roar of the trolley cut him off.
I knew I was a fool not to have accepted the sop to my discretion; I don't know for what the Powers had delivered Henry Mills into my hands, if it wasn't to get out of his folly what his sober sense refused me. Without doubt there are some forms of integrity that, persisted in, cease to be a virtue and become merely a habit; I could no more have taken Henry Mills's money than I could have gone to New York without it. I went home shivering to my fireless little room. I put on my nightgown over my underwear and my dressing gown over that, and cried myself to sleep.
It was a day or two later that I recalled that Jerry had asked me to go out and see his wife, and I thought if I must ask Jerry for help, it would be no more than prudent for me to do so, but I wasn't in the least prepared as I went up the path, from which the snow of the week before had never been cleared, to find the house shut and barred, and no smoke issuing from it. I made my way around to the kitchen door to try to discover some sign which would give me a clue to the length of time it had been deserted, if not the reason for it.
While I was puzzling about among the empty milk bottles and garbage cans, a neighbour woman put her head out of a nearby window and announced the obvious fact that Mrs. McDermott wasn't in.
"But in her condition——" I protested as though my informant had been in some way responsible for it.
"Well, if her own mother's isn't the best place for a woman in her condition!... Three days ago," she answered to my second question. Mrs. McDermott's mother lived in Peoria, and I knew that when Jerry left there had been no such understanding, but as lingering there ankle deep in the dry snow didn't seem to clear the affair, I undertook to rid myself of a sense of blame by writing all that I knew of it to Jerry within the hour. It was the third day after that he came storming in on me like a man demented. He had been to Peoria immediately on receipt of my letter and his wife had refused to see him. It hardly seemed a time for indirection.
"Jerry, what have you done?" I demanded.
"Nothing—not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was married."
"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.
"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.
"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always proud of you."
"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over. They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and by my sensibilities got the better of me.
"Would it do any good if I were to write?"
"You? Oh, they think you're in it ... a kind of general conspiracy. You know you said that—that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an artist was the source of his inspiration."
"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production. "Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."
"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.
"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and having children take that out of a woman."
"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."
I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram. Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn away the young life that nestled there.
Jerry wrote me later that the baby had breathed and died and that his wife was likely to be ill a long time. In view of the extra expense incurred, I didn't feel that I ought to ask him for the loan I was now so desperately in need of.
It was about this time that Griffin and I began to avoid one another about meal time. I have read how wild animals in sickness turn their backs on one another; one must in unrelievable misery ... we dodged in and out of our hall rooms like rabbits in a warren. And then suddenly we would meet and walk along the streets together, mostly at night when the alternate flare of the lamps and the darkness and the hurrying half-seen forms, numb the sense like the flicker of light on a hypnotist's screen, and we moved in a strange, incommunicable world out of which no help reached us. We saw women go by with the price of our redemption flashing at their breasts or in their hair. We saw men hurried, overburdened with work, and there was no work for us. In our own land we were exiled from the community of labour and we sighed for it more than the meanest Siberian prisoner for home. And then suddenly communication seemed to be reëstablished. Effie for no reason sent me half of the rent money. "I don't need it here, and I think maybe I shall get more out of it by investing it in you," she wrote. She had always such a way of making the thing she did seem the choice of her soul. I bought meat and vegetables and invited Griff to dinner. He took me that night to that sort of dreary entertainment known as musical comedy. He could often get tickets and it was a way of spending the evening that saved fuel. As we tramped back through the chill, trying for an effect of jocularity in his voice, so that he might seem to have made a joke in case I shouldn't like, Griff said to me.
"I suppose you wouldn't go with a musical comedy?"
"My dear Griff," I answered him in the same tone, "I'd go with a flying trapeze if only it paid enough."
"I'm acquainted with Lowe, the tenor. I've been thinking I'd ask him——" We were as shy of speaking of an engagement as though it were wild game to be scared away by the mere mention of it.
There was no reason why Griffin shouldn't have succeeded in musical comedy, he had a fairish voice and had turned his gift as many times as the minister's wife in Higgleston used to turn her black silk. It was not more than two days or three after that, as I was coming back to my cold room in the twilight—I had spent the day in the public library on account of the heat—and as I was fumbling at the lock as I had been that first evening he had spoken to me, I heard Leon Griffin come up the stair three steps at a time, and I knew before I heard it in his voice, that the times had turned for him. I struck out fiercely against a sudden blankness that seemed to swim up to the eyes and throat of me.
He was trembling too as he came into the room.
"Olive," he cried, "Olive, I've turned the trick. I'm going with the 'Flim-Flams.'" That was the wretched piece we had seen together. He had never called me by my name before, and I had no mind to correct him. In the dusk he ran on about his engagement; they would go on the road presently and settle for the summer in some city. I heard him speak far from me. I was down, down in the pit of the cold room with the shabby furniture and the bleak light that disdained it from the one high window.