"Do you think," she hazarded suddenly, "that Forester really is engaged to her?"
"To Lily? Oh, no; Forester doesn't get engaged to girls, he just—dangles." It was characteristic of my mother's partiality that even damaging insinuations such as this, slid off from it as too far from the possibility to be even entertained. Perhaps a trace of my old exasperation with the whole situation, and the glimpse I had of Mrs. Jastrow letting herself out of our gate with her assumption of being as good as anybody still to the fore but a little awry, prompted me to add:
"And it is only natural for her mother to make the most of it. She's looking out for her own, just as you are."
"A mother has a right to do that;" she protested, "to keep them from making themselves miserable. It is no more than her duty."
"Yes," I said; the remark had the effect of a challenge.
"Young people don't know how to choose for themselves; they make mistakes." She revolved something in her mind. "You, now ... you're unhappy, aren't you, Olivia?"
"Yes; oh, yes." I had not thought of myself as being so particularly, but I did not see my way to deny it.
"I've been afraid ... sometimes ... since you wrote me about going on the stage, maybe you weren't exactly ... satisfied. But it isn't that, is it?"
"No, mother, it isn't that."
"There! You see!" She shook off her weakness with the conviction. "And you mightn't have been if I hadn't looked out for you a little."
"Why, mother, what could you possibly——" She triumphed.
"You remember that Garrett boy that was visiting at his uncle's? He called that night; the night you were engaged to Tommy."
"Yes, I remember. You sent him away?"
"He wasn't suitable at all ... smoking, and driving about on Sunday that way...." Her tone was defensive. "He left a letter that night——"
"Mother! You didn't tell me!"
"I was thinking it over ... I had a right ... you were too young!"
"Mother ... did you read it?"
"I ... looked at it. You hadn't met him but once and I had a right to know; and that night you were engaged. I took it for a sign."
"And the letter?" It seemed all at once an immeasurable and irreparable loss.
"I sent it back ... and, anyway, it turned out all right." I was possessed for the moment with the conviction that it was all dreadfully, despairingly wrong.
"I couldn't have borne for you to marry anybody but a Christian, Olivia!" I thought of Tommy's exceedingly slender claim to that distinction and I laughed.
"Tommy smokes," I said; "he says he has to do it with the customers."
"Oh, but not as a habit, Olivia." I overrode that.
"Tell me what became of him—of Mr. Garrett. Did you ever hear?"
"He went West," she recollected; "I asked his aunt. He quarrelled with them because his uncle wouldn't send him to school. At his age they thought it wasn't suitable. I wouldn't have wanted you to go West, Olivia."
I took her worn hands in mine. "It's all right, mother. I'm not going West. And I'm not going on the stage any more. I'm done with it." I felt so, passionately, at the time. We sat quietly for a time in that assurance and listened to Effie singing in the kitchen.
"Olivia," she began timidly at last, "aren't you ever going to have any more children?"
"Oh, I hope so, mother. I haven't been strong, you know, since the first one. We didn't think it advisable."
"Well, if you can manage it that way ..." There was a trace in her tone of the woman who hadn't been able to manage. I wished to reassure her.
"When I was in the hospital the doctor told me ..." I could see the deep flush rising over her face and neck; there were some things which her generation had never faced. I let them fall with her hands and sat gazing at the red core of the base burner, waiting until she should take up her thought again.
"I used to think those things weren't right, Olivia, but I don't know. Sometimes I think it isn't right, either, to bring them into the world when there is no welcome for them." She struggled with the admission. "You and I, Olivia, we never got on together."
"But that's all past now, mother." She clung to me for a while for reassurance.
"I hope so, I hope so; but still there are things I've always wanted to tell you. When you wrote me about going on the stage ... there are wild things in you, Olivia, things I never looked for in a daughter of mine, things I can't understand nor account for unless—unless it was I turned you against life ... my kind of life ... before you were born. Many's the time I've seen you hating it and I've been harsh with you; but I wanted you should know I was being harsh with myself ..."
"Mother, dear, is it good for you to talk so?"
"Yes, yes, I've wanted to. You see it was after your father came home from the war and we were all broken up. Forester was sickly, and there was the one that died. So when I knew you were coming, I—hated you, Olivia. I wanted things different. I hated you ... until I heard you cry. You cried all the time when you were little, Olivia, and it was I that was crying in you. I've expected some punishment would come of it."
"Oh, hush, hush mother! I shouldn't have liked it either in your place. Besides, they say—the scientists—that it isn't so that things before you are born can affect you as much as that." She moved her head feebly on the pillows in deep-rooted denial.
"They can say that, but we've never got on. There's things in you that aren't natural for any daughter of mine. They can say that, Olivia, but we—we know."
"Yes, mother, we know."
I took her hands again and nursed them against my cheek; after a time tears began to drip down her flaccid cheeks and I wiped them away for her.
"Don't, mother, don't! We get along now, anyway! And as for the things in me which are different, do you know, mother, I'm getting to know that they are the best things in me."
I honestly thought so; and after all these years I think so now.
I wheeled her into the bedroom presently, where she fell into the light slumber of the feeble, and seemed afterward hardly to remember, but I was glad then to have talked it all out with her, for though she lived nearly two years after, before I saw her again another stroke had deprived her of articulateness.
I went home to my husband after it began to seem certain that my mother's condition would not change for some time, but I knew in the going that neither Tommy nor Higgleston could ever present themselves to me again in the aspect of an absolute destiny. By the incidents of the past few weeks I had been pulled free from the obsession of inevitableness with which my life had clothed itself until now; I stood outside of it and questioned it in the light of what it might have been, what it might yet become. Suppose I had received Helmeth Garrett's letter; suppose my interest in Mr. O'Farrell had wavered a hair's breadth out of the community of work into that more personal and particular passion——?
I quaked in the cold blasts which blew on me out of unsuspected doors opening on my life.
And still I went back to Higgleston. There seemed nothing else to do. I think I deceived myself with the notion that there was something in Tommy's resistance to a more acceptable destiny, that could be resolved and dissipated by the proper stimulus. But I knew, in fact, that he and Higgleston suited one another admirably. To my husband, that he should keep a clothing store in a town of five thousand inhabitants was part of the great natural causation. The single change to which our condition was liable was that the business might take a turn which would enable us to move out of the store into a house of our own. It had not occurred to Tommy to take a turn himself. The Men's Tailors and Outfitters lay like most business in Higgleston, in the back water, rocking at times in the wake of the world traffic, but never moving with it. There was a vague notion of progress abroad which resulted in our going through the motions of the main current. The Live Business Men organized a Board of Trade and rented a room to hold meetings in, but I do not remember that when they had met, anything came of it. The great tides of trade went about the world and our little fleet rocked up and down. If I had ever had any hope that Tommy and I might out of our common stock, somehow hoist sail and make a way out of it, in that spring and summer I completely lost it.
I believe Tommy thought we were perfectly happy. Considering how things turned out, I am glad to have it so; but the fact is, there was not between us so much as a common taste in furniture. In the five years of married life, our home had filled up with articles which by colour and line and unfitness jarred on every sense. Tommy had what he was pleased to call an ear for music, and if the warring discords of our furnishings could have been translated into sound he would have gone distracted with it; being as it was he bought me a fire screen for my birthday. Miss Rathbone hand-painted it for the Baptist bazaar, and Tommy had bought it at three times what we could have afforded for a suitable ornament. It was his notion of our relations that we and the Rathbones should do things like that by one another. I suppose you can find the like of that fire screen at some county fair still in Ohianna, but you will find nothing more atrocious. Tommy liked to have it sitting well out in the room where he could admire it. He would remark upon it sometimes with complacency, evenings after the store was shut up, before he sat down in his old coat and slippers to read the paper. Occasionally I read to him out of a magazine or a play I had picked up, in the intervals of which I used to catch him furtively keeping up with his newspaper out of the tail of his eye.
Now and then we went out to a sociable or to the Rathbones for supper. Less frequently we had them to a meal with us. It was characteristic of business partnerships in Higgleston that they involved you in obligations of chicken salad and banana cake and the best tablecloth. Tommy enjoyed these occasions, and if he had allowed himself to criticise me at all, it would have been for my ineptitude at the happy social usage. Things went on so with us month after month.
And if you ask me why I didn't take the chance life offers to women to justify themselves to the race, I will say that though the hope of a child presents itself sentimentally as opportunity, it figures primarily in the calculation of the majority, as a question of expense. The hard times foreseen by Burton Brothers hung black-winged in the air. We had not, in fact, been able to do more than keep up the interest on what was still due on the stock and fixtures. Nor had I even quite recovered the bodily equilibrium disturbed by my first encounter with the rending powers of life. There was a time when the spring came on in a fulness, when the procreant impulse stirred awake. I saw myself adequately employed shaping men for it ... maybe ... but the immediate deterring fact was the payment to be made in August.
I went on living in Higgleston where human intercourse was organized on the basis that whatever a woman has of intelligence and worth, over and above the sum of such capacity in man, is to be excised as a superfluous growth, a monstrosity. Does anybody remember what the woman's world was like in small towns before the days of woman's clubs? There was a world of cooking and making over; there was a world of church-going and missionary societies and ministerial coöperation, half grudged and half assumed as a virtue which, since it was the only thing that lay outside themselves, was not without extenuation. And there was another world which underlay all this, coloured and occasioned it, sicklied over with futility; it was a world all of the care and expectancy of children overshadowed by the recurrent monthly dread, crept about by whispers, heretical but persistent, of methods of circumventing it, of a secret practice of things openly condemned. It was a world that went half the time in faint-hearted or unwilling or rebellious anticipation, and half on the broken springs of what as the subject of the endless, objectionable discussions, went by the name of "female complaints."
In all this there was no room for Olivia. Somehow the ordering of our four rooms over the store didn't appeal to me as a justification of existence, and I didn't care to undertake again matching the adventures of my neighbours in the field of domestic economy with mine in the department of self-expression. Let any one who disbelieves it try if he can assure the acceptance of his art on its merit as work, free of the implication of egotism. You may talk about a new frosting for cake, or an aeroplane you have invented, but you must not speak of a new verse form or a plastic effect.
All this time, in spite of my recent revulsion from it, I was consumed with the desire of acting. My new-found faculty ached for use. It woke me in the night and wasted me; I had wild thoughts such as men have in the grip of an unjustifiable passion. All my imaginings at that time were of events, untoward, fantastic, which should somehow throw me back upon the stage without the necessity on my part, of a moral conclusion. Sarah Croyden, to whom I wrote voluminously, could not understand why I resisted it; there was after all no actual opposition except what lay inherent in my traditions. Sarah had such a way of accepting life; she used it and her gift. Mine used me. I saw that it might even abuse me. She went, by nature, undefended and unharmed from the two-edged sword that keeps the gates of Creative Art, but me it pierced even to the dividing of soul and spirit. My husband stood always curiously outside the consideration. I think he was scarcely aware of what went on in me; if any news of my tormented state reached him, he would have seen, except as it was mollified by affection, what all Higgleston saw in it, the restlessness of vanity, a craving for excitement, for praise, and a vague taint of irregularity. He was sympathetic to the point of admitting that Higgleston was dull; he thought we might join the Chatauqua Society.
"Or you might get up a class," he suggested hopefully; "it would give you something to think about."
"Teach," I cried; "TEACH! when I'm just aching to learn!"
"Well, then," he achieved a triumph of reasonableness, "if you don't know enough to teach in Higgleston, how are you going to succeed on the stage?"
It was not Tommy, however, but a much worse man who made up my mind for me. He had been brought out from Chicago during my absence, to set up in Higgleston's one department store, that factitious air of things being done, which passed for the evidence of modernity. He had, in the set of his clothes, the way he made the most of his hair and the least of the puffiness about his eyes, the effect of having done something successfully for himself, which I believe was the utmost recommendation he had for the place. He preferred himself to my favour on the strength of having seen more than a little of the theatre. Very soon after my return, he took to dropping into my husband's store which, in view of its being patronized by men who were chiefly otherwise occupied during the day, was kept open rather late in the evenings. From sheer loneliness I had fallen into the habit of going down after supper to wait on a stray customer while Tommy made up the books. Mr. Montague, who went familiarly about town by the name of Monty, would come in then and loll across the counter chatting to me, while Tommy sat at his desk with a green shade over his eyes, and Mr. Rathbone, who never came more than a step or two out of his character as working tailor, clattered about with his irons in the back, half screened by the racks of custom made "Nobby suits, $9.98," which made up most of our stock in trade.
I had already, without paying much attention to it, become accustomed to the shifting of men's interest in me the moment my connection with the stage became known: a certain speculation in the eye, a freshening of the wind in the neighbourhood of adventure; but by degrees it began to work through my preoccupations that Mr. Montague's attention had the quality of settled expectation, the suggestion of a relation apart from the casual social contact, which it wanted but an opportunity to fulfill. It took the form very early, when Tommy would look up from his entries and adding up to make his cheerful contribution to the conversation, of an attempt to include me in a covert irritation at the interruption. If by any chance he found me alone, his response to the potential impropriety of the occasion, awoke in me the plain vulgar desire to box his ears. But no experience so far served to reveal the whole offensiveness of the man's assurance.
The week that Tommy went up to Chicago to do his summer buying, we made a practice of closing rather early in the long, enervating evenings, since hardly any customer could have been inveigled into the store on any account. I found it particularly irritating then, to have Mr. Montague leaning across the counter to me with a manner that would have caused the dogs in the street to suspect him of intrigue. The second or third time this happened I made a point of slipping around to Mr. Rathbone with the suggestion that if he would shut up and go home I would take the books upstairs with me and attend them.
I was indifferent whether or not Mr. Montague should hear me, but I judged he had not, for far from accepting it as a hint that I wished to get rid of him, that air he had of covert understanding appeared to have increased in him like a fever. He made no attempt to resume the conversation, but stood tapping his boot with a small cane he affected, a flush high up under the puffy eyes, the corners of his mouth loosened, every aspect of the man fairly bristling with an objectionable maleness. I made believe to be busy putting stock in order, and in a minute more I could hear old Rathbone come puttering out of his corner to draw the dust cloths over the racks of ready-made suits and, after what seemed an interminable interval, fumbling at the knobs of the safe.
"Oh," I snatched at the opportunity, "I changed the combination; let me show you." I was around beside him in a twinkling.
"Good-night," I called to Montague over my shoulder.
"Good-night," he said; the tone was charged. The fumbling of the locks covered the sound of his departure. I got Mr. Rathbone out at the door at last, and locked it behind him. I turned back to lower the flame of the acetylene lamp and in the receding flare of it between the shrouded racks I came face to face with Mr. Montague. He stood at the outer ring of the light and in the shock of amazement I gave the last turn of the button which left us in a sudden blinding dark. I felt him come toward me by the sharp irradiation of offensiveness.
"Oh, you clever little joker, you!" The tone was fatuous.
I dodged by instinct and felt for the button again to throw on the flood of light; it caught him standing square in the middle of the aisle in plain sight from the street; almost unconsciously he altered his attitude to one less betraying, but the response of his mind to mine was not so rapid.
"I'm going to shut up the store," I was very quiet about it. "You'll oblige me by going——"
"Oh, come now; what's the use? I thought you were a woman of the world."
I got behind the counter, past him toward the door.
"You an actress ... you don't mean to say! By Jove, I'm not going to be made a fool of after such an encouragement! I'm not going without——"
"Mr. Montague," I said, "Tillie Hemingway is coming to stay with me nights; she will be here in a few minutes; you'd better not let her find you here." I unbarred the door and threw it wide open.
"Oh, come now——" He struggled for some footing other than defeat. "Of course, if you can't meet me like a woman of the world——you're a nice actress, you are!" I looked at him; the steps and voices of passersby sounded on the pavement; he went out with his tail between his legs. I locked the door after him and double locked it.
I climbed up to my room and locked myself in that. The boiling of my blood made such a noise in my ears that I could not hear Tillie Hemingway when she came knocking, and the poor girl went away in tears. After a long time I got to bed and sat there with my arms about my knees. I did not feel safe there; I knew I should never be safe again except in that little square of the world upon which the footlights shone, from which the tightening of the reins of the audience in my hands, should justify my life to me. I was sick with longing for it, aching like a woman abandoned for the arms of her beloved. I fled toward it with all my thought from illicit solicitation, but it was not the husband of my body I thought of in that connection, but the choice of my soul.
People wonder why sensitive, self-respecting women are not driven away from the stage by the offences that hedge it; they are driven deeper and farther into its enfoldment. There is nothing to whiten the burning of its shames but the high whiteness of its ultimate perfection. It is so with all art, not back in the press of life, but forward on some over-topping headland, one loses behind the yelping pack and eases the sting of resentment. I did not agree in the beginning to make you understand this. I only tell you that it is so. All that night I sat with my head upon my knees and considered how I might win back to it.
I tried, when my husband came home, to put the incident to him in a way that would stand for my new-found determination. I did not get so far with it. I saw him shrink from the mere recital with a man's timorousness.
"Oh, come—he couldn't have meant so bad as that." His male dread of a "situation" plead with me not to insist upon it. "And he went just as soon as you told him to. Of course if he had tried to force you ... but you say yourself he went quietly."
He was seeing and shrinking from what Higgleston would get out of the incident in the way of vulgar entertainment if I insisted on his taking it up; by the code there, I shouldn't have been subject to such if I hadn't invited it.
"Of course," he enforced himself, "you did right to turn him down, but I don't believe he'll try it again."
"He won't have a chance. I'm going back on the stage so soon;" the implication of my tone must have got through even Tommy's unimaginativeness; he said the only bitter thing that I ever heard from him.
"Well, if you hadn't gone on the stage in the first place it probably wouldn't have happened."
He came round to the situation in another frame when he learned that I had written to Sarah putting matters in train for an engagement.
"You will probably be away all winter," he said. "It seems to me, Olivia, that you don't take any account of the fact that I am fond of you." We were sitting on a little shelf of a back balcony we had, for the sake of coolness, and I went and sat on his knee.
"I'm fond of you, Tommy, ever so. But I can't stand the life here; it smothers me. And we don't do anything; we don't get anywhere."
"I don't know what you mean, Olivia; we're building up quite a business; we'll be able to make a payment this year, and as the town improves——"
"Oh, Tommy, come away; come away into the world with me. Let us go out and do things; let us be part of things."
"Higgleston's good enough for me. We're building up trade, and everybody says the town is sure to go ahead——"
"Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what do I care about a business here if we lose the whole world—and we'll be old and gray before we get the business paid for. Oh, it isn't because I don't care about you, Tommy, because I am not satisfied with you; it is the glory of the world I want, and the wonder of Art, and great deeds going up and down in it! I want us to have that, Tommy; to have it together ... you and I, and not another. It's all there in the world, Tommy, all the colour and the splendour ... great love and great work ... let us go out and take it; let us go...." I had slipped down from his knees to my own as I talked, pleading with him, and I saw, by the light of the lamp from within, his face, charged with pained bewilderment, settle into lines of habitual resistance to the unknown, the unknowable. My voice trailed out into sobbing.
"Of course, Olivia, I don't want to keep you if you are not happy here, but I have to stay myself." His voice was broken but determined, with the determination of a little man not seeing far ahead of him. "I have to keep the business together."
I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September. Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction.
The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it very aptly.
"I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me.
We had the good fortune that year, Sarah and I, to be with a manager who redeemed many O'Farrells. The Hardings—for his wife, under her stage name of Estelle Manning, played with him and was the better half of all his counsels—were of the sort of actor-managers to whom, if the American stage ever arrives at anything commensurate with its opportunity, it will owe much. They were not either of them of the stripe of genius, but up to the limit of their endowment, sound, sincere and able to interpret life to the people through the virtue of being so humanly of the people themselves. It was very good for me to be with them, not only for the stage craft they taught me, but for the healing of my mind against the contagion of irresponsibility. The Hardings taught me my way about the professional world, the management of my gift, its market value, but I am not sure I do not owe much more to the fact that they loved one another quite simply and devotedly, and to the certainty which they seemed to make for us all that loyalty, truth, and forbearance were part of the natural order of things.
I was aware, when I was with the Shamrocks, of a subconscious current against which any mention of my husband appeared a kind of gaucherie; it was wholesome for me then, to find it expected of me by the Hardings that I should act better after I had received a long, affectionate letter from Tommy, and to be able to refer to it quite unaffectedly. Everybody in the company took the greatest interest in his coming on at Christmas to spend four days with me.
We had a carefully chosen company, and clean, straightforward plays which met with gratifying success. At the end of February, when traffic was tied up during the great ice storm, I was near enough to get home to Taylorville and spend a week there.
Tommy came to meet me and we were all happy together, mother sitting nearly inarticulate in her chair, pleased as a child to see me doing all the parts in our repertory, and Effie reading my press notices to whoever could be got to listen to them. I seemed to have found the groove in which the wheels of my life went round smoothly; I was justified of much that in my girlhood I had been made to feel so sorely, set me reprehensibly apart. I remember Forester telling how he had heard Charlie Gowers retailing the incident of my having slapped him when he tried to kiss me, getting a kind of reflected glory out of the incident being so much to my credit.
I went back to Higgleston in May and was happier than I had been in the six years of my married life. I had my work and my husband; all that I wanted now was to bring the two into closer relation; it seemed not unlikely of accomplishment. With what I had saved of my salary, Tommy was able to make quite a payment on the business, and with the release of that pressure the whole grip of Higgleston seemed to be loosed from him. When I suggested that I might get permanent engagements in Chicago or St. Louis, where he could establish himself, he was disposed to view it as not unthinkable in connection with what might be expected from a live business man.
I had to leave home early in the autumn for rehearsals, and to leave Tommy, by some chance of the weather a trifle under it. I felt I shouldn't have been able to do so if my husband and Miss Rathbone hadn't been eminently on those terms that fulfilled Tommy's ideal in respect to the womenfolk of his partner. Very likely, as she maintained, it was a feeling of caste that rendered her professional affectionateness offensive to me. One had to admit that when she applied it to her shuffling, peering old father, with red-lidded eyes and a nose that occasionally wanted wiping, it was every way commendable. At any rate I was glad on this occasion to take what she did for old Rathbone as an assurance that if Tommy fell ill, or anything untoward, he wouldn't lack for anything a woman might do for him.
That winter Mr. Harding starred me, and what a wonderful winter it was! Sarah says, taking account of the cold and the condition of the roads, it was rather a hard one, but I was floated clear of all such considerations on the crest of success. Nothing whatever seemed to have gone wrong with it except that Tommy failed me at Christmas. He was to have spent a week, but wired me at the last moment that he could not leave before Wednesday, and then when he came stayed only until Saturday. He had something to say about the pressure of the holiday trade in neckties and cuff links such as the ladies of Higgleston habitually invested in, on behalf of their masculine members, and all the time he was with me, wore that efflorescence of appreciation which I have long since learned to recognize as the overt sign of male delinquency.
If I thought of it at all in that connection, it was clean swept out of my mind by meeting early in January with Mr. Eversley and hearing him first apply to myself that phrase which I have chosen for the title to this writing. Mark Eversley, the greatest modern actor! So we all believed. He had been an old friend of Mr. Harding's; they had had their young struggles together; we crowded around our manager to hear him tell of them; struggles which, in so far as they identified themselves with our own, seemed to bring us by implication within reach of his present fame. Eversley played in St. Louis while we were there, and having an evening to spare, in spite of all the eager social appeal, chose to spend it with the Hardings. They had had dinner together, and as Mr. Harding did not come on until the second act, the great tragedian sat with him in his dressing room, visiting together between the cues like two boys in a dormitory. That was how Eversley happened to be standing in the wings in my great third act, and as I came out between gusts of applause after it, he was very kind to me.
"You will go far, little lady," said he, his lean face alive with kindliness, "you will go farther and have to come back and pick up some dropped stitches, but in the end you will get where you are bound." It was not for me to tell him how the mere consciousness of his presence had carried me that night to the utmost pitch of my capacity; I stood and blushed with confusion while he fumbled for his card.
"I will hear of you again," he said; "I am bound to hear of you; in the meantime here is my permanent address. It may be that I can be of use to you when you come to the bad places."
"Oh," said Mrs. Harding, whose failure to win any conspicuous distinction for herself had not embittered her, "she seems to have cleared most of the hard places at a bound."
"My dear young lady," Eversley appealed to me with a charming whimsicality, "whatever you do, don't let them put that into your head; you will indeed need me if you get to thinking that. You are, I suspect, a woman of genius, and in that case there will always be bad places ahead of you—you are doomed, you are driven; they will never let up on you."
Well, he should know; he was a man of genius. I hope it might be true about me, but I was afraid. For to be a genius is no such vanity as you imagine. It is to know great desires and to have no will of your own toward fulfilment; it is to feed others, yourself unfed; it is to be broken and plied as the Powers determine; it is to serve, and to serve, and to get nothing out of it beyond the joy of serving. And to know if you have done that acceptably you have to depend on the plaudits of the crowd; the Powers give no sign; many have died not knowing.
There is no more vanity in calling yourself a woman of genius if you know what genius means, than might be premised of one of the guinea pigs set aside for experimentation in a laboratory; but the guinea pigs who run free in the garden impute it to us. I wrote my mother and Tommy what Eversley had said, but I knew they would see nothing more in it than that he had paid me a compliment which it would not be modest to make much of in public.
The successes of that year prolonged the season by a month, and by the time I got home to Higgleston the leaves were all out on the maples and the wide old yards smelled of syringa. I came back to it full of the love of the world, alive in every fibre of my being, and the first thing I noticed was that it caused my husband some embarrassment. There was a shyness in his resumption of our relations more than could be accounted for by the native Taylorvillian gaucheries of emotion.
"My dear," I protested, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me."
"You are away so much," he excused. "You're getting to seem almost a stranger."
"Getting? I should say I am. This morning it seemed to me almost as if I waked up in another woman's house." I meant no more than to suggest how little the walls of it, the furniture, the draperies, expressed my new mood of creative power, but suddenly I saw my husband colour a deep, embarrassed red.
"You never did take any interest in our life here ... in the business ... in me." He seemed to be making out a case against me.
"Don't say in you, Tommy; but the life here, yes; there is so little to it. Another year and Mr. Harding says I could hope to stay in Chicago." My husband pushed away his plate; we were at breakfast the second morning.
"Higgleston's good enough for me," he protested. He got up and stood at the window with his back to me, looking out at the side street and the tardy traffic of the town beginning to stir in it. "When you hate it so," he said, "I wonder you come back to it." But my mood was proof against even this.
"Oh, Thomas, Thomas!" I got my hands about his arm and snuggled my head against it. "And you can't even guess why I come back?" He looked at me, vaguely troubled by the caress, but not responding to it.
"Do you care so much?"
"Ever and ever so." I thought he was in need of reassurance.
I hardly know when I began to get an inkling of what was wrong with him; it trickled coldly to me from dropped words, inflections, sidelong glances. Whenever I went out I was aware of all Higgleston watching, watching like a cat at a mouse-hole for something to come out. What? Reports of my success had reached them through the papers. Were they looking for some endemic impropriety to break out on me as a witness to what a popular actress must inevitably become? By degrees it worked through to me that all Higgleston knew things about my situation that were held from me. What they expected to see come out in my behaviour was the stripe of chastisement.
When I had been at home four or five days it occurred to me Miss Rathbone had not yet run in to see me with that quasi-familiarity which had grown out of the business association of our men. Old Rathbone had said that she had the trousseau of one of the Harvey girls in hand, but I knew that if the courtesy had been due from me, I couldn't have neglected it without the risk of being thought what Miss Rathbone herself would have called uppish. So the very next afternoon, having fallen in with some Higgleston ladies strolling the long street that led through the town from countryside to countryside, passing her gate, it struck me that here was an excellent opportunity to run in and exchange a greeting with her. I said as much to Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Harvey, as I swung the picket gate out across the board walk; there was something in their way of standing back from it that gave them the air of sheering off from any implication in the incident. They looked at the sidewalk and their lips were a little drawn; I should have known that look very well by that time. I threw out against it just that degree of impalpable resistance that was demanded by my official relation to the women of my husband's business partner, and clinched it with the click of the gate swinging to behind me, but as I went up the peony-bordered walk I wondered what Miss Rathbone would possibly have done to get herself talked about.
I was let into the workroom by Tillie Hemingway, in the character of a baster, with her mouth full of threads; Miss Rathbone came hurrying from a fitting, and in the brief moment of crossing my half of the room to meet her I was aware that she had turned a sickly hue of fear. She must have seen me coming up the street with the other women, I surmised, and guessed that I knew. I felt a kind of compulsion on me to assure her by an extra graciousness that I did not know, and that it wouldn't make any difference if I did. She was not changed at all except perhaps as to a trifle more abundance of bosom and a greater insensibility to the pins with which she bristled. There was the same effect of modishness in the blond coiffure with the rats showing, and the well cut, half-hooked gown, but she seemed to know so little what to do with my visit that I was glad to cut it short and get away into the wide, overflowing day. I went on under the maples in leafage full and tender, following the faint scent of the first cutting of the meadows, quite to the end of the village and a mile or two into the country road, feeling the working of the Creative Powers in me, much as it seemed the sentiment earth must feel the summer, a warm, benignant process. I was at one with the soul of things and knew myself fruitful. At last when the dust of the roadway disturbed by the homing teams, collected in layers of the cooler air, and the bats were beginning, I tore myself away from the fair day as from a lover and went back to Tommy waiting patiently for his supper. While I was getting it on the table I recalled Miss Rathbone.
"What," I said, "has she been doing to get herself talked about?" Suddenly there whipped out on his face the counterpart of the flinching which I had noted in the dressmaker.
"Who said she had been talked about? What have they been telling you? A pack of lying old cats!"
"So shehasbeen talked about?" I put down a pile of plates the better to account to myself for his excitement.
"I might have known somebody would get at you. Why can't they come to me."
"Tommy! Has Miss Rathbone been talked about withyou? Oh, my dear!" I meant it for commiseration. Tommy went sullen all at once.
"I don't want to talk about it. I won't talk about it!"
"You needn't. And as for what the others say, you don't suppose I am going to believe it?" He turned visibly sick at the assurance.
"I'll tell you about it after supper," he protested. "I meant to tell you." I kept my mind turned deliberately away from the subject until it was night and I heard the last tardy customer depart, then the shutters go up, and after a considerable interval my husband's foot upon the stairs.
I hope I have made you understand how good he was, with what simple sort of goodness, not meant to stand the strain of the complexity in which he found himself. He wanted desperately to get out of it, to get in touch again with straight and simple lines of living. As he stood before me then his face was streaked red and white with the stress of the situation, like a man after a great bodily exertion. I was moved suddenly to spare him—after all what was the village dressmaker to us? Tommy flared out at me.
"She is as good as you are ... she's as pure ... as kind-hearted. It's as much your fault as anybody's. You were away; you were always away." His voice trailed out into extenuation. There fell a long pause in which several things became clear to me.
"Tell me," I said at last.
Tommy sat down on the red plush couch. He had taken off his coat downstairs, for the evening was warm. There was pink in his necktie and the freckles stood out across his nose. I was taken with a wild sense of the ridiculous. Miss Rathbone, I knew, was six years my husband's senior.
"I went there a good deal last winter," he began. "I never meant any harm ... my business partner ... it was lonesome here. Of course I ought to have known people would talk. Nobody told me. She was brave, she bore it a long time, and then I saw that something was the matter. I didn't know until she told me, how fond of her I was——"
"Tommy, Tommy!" Strangely, it was I crying out. "Fond of her? Fond ofher?"
"I was fond of her," he insisted dully. "She suffered a lot on account of me." The words dropped to me through immeasurable cold space. I believe there were more explanations, excusings. I was aware of being wounded in some far, unreachable place. I sat stunned and watched the widening rings of pain and amazement spread toward me. By and by tears came; I cried long and quietly. I got down on the floor at my husband's knees and put my arms about his body, crying. After a time I remember his helping me to undress and we got into bed. We had but the one. I know it now for the sign that I never loved my husband as wives should love, that I felt no offence in this; sex jealousy was not awake in me. We lay in bed with our arms around one another and cried for the pain and bewilderment of what had happened to us.
As if the attraction Miss Rathbone had for my husband had been a spell, the mere naming of which dissipated it, we spent the ensuing three or four days in the glow of renewal. It was Miss Rathbone herself who drew us out of that excluding intimacy; set us apart where we could feel the cold stiffness of our hurts and the injury we had inflicted each on the other.
Whatever there had been between them, and I never knew very clearly what, they had failed to reckon on the recrudescence of the interest I had always had for my husband, and the tie of association. At any rate Miss Rathbone failed. I must suppose that she loved Tommy, that she was hungering for the sight of him, needing desperately to feel again the pressure of whatever bond had been between them. She came into the store on the fourth evening after my husband's admission of it, on one of the excuses she could so easily make out of her father's being there. I was sitting upstairs with some sewing when she came and neither saw nor heard her, but the unslumbering instinct, before I was half aware of it, had drawn me to the head of the stair.
As I came down it, still in the shadow of the upper landing, I saw her leaning across the counter with that factious air of modishness which was so large a part of her stock in trade with Higgleston. She had on all her newest things, and I think she was rouged a little. Even with the width of the counter between them she had the effect of enveloping my husband with that manner of hers as with a net; to set up in him the illusion of all that I was in fact; mystery, passion, the air of the great world. I was pierced through with the realization that with men it is not so much being that counts, as seeming. There was a touch of the fatuous in the way Tommy submitted to the implication of her attitude as she took a flower from her breast and pinned it in his coat. The foot of the stair came almost to the end of the counter where they stood, and a trick of the light falling from the hanging lamp threw the upper half of it in shadow. I stood just within it with my hand upon the rail. Something in the avidity of yielding in my husband's manner was like a call in me; I moved involuntarily a step downward.
They heard and then they saw me; they stopped frozen in their places and the thing that froze them was the consciousness of guilt. They stood confessed of a disloyalty. I turned full in their sight and walked back up the stair. It was very late that night when Tommy came up to me.
"If that is going on in the house," I notified him, "you can't expect me to stay."
"I dare say you'd be glad of a chance to leave."
"Is that why you are offering it to me?"
It was by such degrees we covered the distance between our situation and the open question of divorce. But there were lapses of tenderness and turning back upon the trail.
"I don't want anybody but you, Olivia," Tommy would protest. "If you would only stay with me!"
"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"
If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming caused my husband some embarrassment, and, manlike, he made her pay for it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an unconquerable passion. In any case she had imagination enough to see that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis, she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour—some criticism which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an occasional scraping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. Nobody in Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of romance.
"I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me." He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot."
"What do you owe her that you can't pay?"
"Well, I couldn't marry as long as you——"
"You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marryher?"
"I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again; "you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter.
"You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a great space out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world, but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things.
"We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want anybody but you; just stay with me!"
"You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higglestonforever?" The unfairness of this overcame me.
"Well, why not, if you're married to me?"
I believe he would have done it. He would have wasted me like that and thought little of it. I was married, and not altogether to Tommy, but to Higgleston and the clothing business. The condition he demanded of me was not of loving and being faithful, but of living over the store. Until now, though I knew I did not love my husband as life had taught me men could be loved, I had never given up expecting to. Somewhere, somehow, but I was certain it was not in Higgleston, the transmuting touch should find him which would turn my husband into the Lord of Life. Now I discovered myself pulled over into another point of view. He had become a man capable of being interested in the village dressmaker. The farther she drew him from me the more the stripe of Higgleston came out in him.
I had planned to go up to Chicago for a week in August; to consult with Mr. Harding about the plays he was to produce the next season. I had not signed with him yet, but I knew that I should, that I could no more dissever myself from that connection than I could voluntarily surrender my own breath; I might try, but after the few respirations withheld, nature would have her way with me. It was not that I came to a decision about it; the whole matter appeared to lie in that region of finality that made the assumption of a decision ridiculous. I do not know if I expected to divorce my husband or if he or Miss Rathbone expected it. I think we were all a little scared by the situation we had evoked, as children might be at a dog they let loose. We felt the shames of publicity yelping at our heels.
The day before I left, I went to see Miss Rathbone; I had to have a skirt shortened. It was absurd, of course, but there was really no one else to go to. If there had been I shouldn't have dared; all Higgleston would have known of it and drawn its own conclusion. As it was, Higgleston was extremely dissatisfied with the affair. It did not know whom properly to blame, me for neglecting my husband or Miss Rathbone for snapping him up; they felt balked of the moral conclusion.
I hardly know what Miss Rathbone thought of my coming to her. I think she had braved herself for some sort of emotional struggle sharp enough to drown the whisper of reprobation. My quiet acceptance of the situation left her somehow toppling over her own defences. Sometimes I think the emotionalism which the attitude of that time demanded to be worked up over a divorce, drew people to it with that impulse which leads them to rush toward a fire or hurl themselves from precipices. Miss Rathbone must have been aching to fling out at me, to justify her own position by abuse of mine, and here she was down on the floor with her mouth full of pins squinting at the line of my skirt. It was then that I told her what I was going to Chicago for. "You'll be away from home all winter, then?" The question was a challenge.
"I don't know, I haven't signed yet." For the life of me I couldn't have foreborne that; it was exactly the kind of an advantage she would have taken of me. If I chose not to sign for the next winter, where was she? She stood up blindly at last. "I guess I can do the rest without you," she said. Some latent instinct of fairness flashed up in me.
"But I think I shall sign," I admitted. "I couldn't stand a winter in Higgleston." I was glad afterward that I had said that; it gave her leave for the brief time that was left to them, to think of him as being given into her hands.
I was greatly relieved to get away, even for a week, from the cold curiosity of Higgleston which, without saying so, had made me perfectly aware that I showed I had been crying a great deal lately. But no sooner was I freed from the pull of affection than I began to feel a deep resentment against Tommy. His attempt to charge his lapse of loyalty, on my art, on that thing in me which, as I read it, constituted my sole claim upon consideration, appeared a deeper indignity than his interest in the dressmaker. It was all a part of that revelation which sears the path of the gifted woman as with a flame, that no matter what her value to society, no man will spare her anything except as she pleases him. At the first summer heat of it I felt my soul curl at the edges. His repudiation of me as an actress began to appear a slight upon all that world of fineness which Art upholds, a thing not to be tolerated by any citizen of it. In its last analysis it seemed that my husband had deserted me in favour of Higgleston quite as much as I had deserted him, and it was for me to say whether I should consent to it. In that mood I met Mr. Harding and signed with him for the ensuing season, and then quite unaccountably, ten days before I was expected, I found myself pulled back to Higgleston. I had wired Tommy, and was surprised to have Mr. Ross meet me at the station.
"Mr. Bettersworth is not very well," he explained, as he put me into Higgleston's one omnibus. "It came on him rather suddenly. Some kind of a seizure," he admitted, though I did not gather from his manner that it was particularly serious until the 'bus, instead of stopping at our store, drove straight on up the one wide street.
"I thought you'd want to see him immediately," the attorney interposed to my arresting gesture. "You see he was taken at his partner's house." He seemed to avoid some unpleasant implication by not mentioning Rathbone's name.
I scarcely remember what other particulars he gave me at the time; my next sharp impression was of my husband lying white and breathing heavily in the bed in the Rathbone's front room, the drapery of which had been torn hastily down to make room for him, regardless of the finished pieces of Miss Harvey's trousseau still crowding the chairs upon which they had been hastily thrust. Empty sleeves hung down and vaguely seemed to reach for what they could not clasp; strangely I was aware in them of an aching lack and loss which must have sprung in my bosom. I took my husband's hand and it dropped back from my clasp, waxlike and nerveless. I think I had been kneeling by the bed for some time, talk had been going on whisperingly around me; finally the light faded and I discovered that the doctor had gone. The beribboned bridal garments hung limply still on the chairs and mocked me with their empty arms. Presently I was aware that Miss Rathbone had come in with a lamp. She stood there on the other side of the bed and we looked at him and at one another.
"How long?" I asked her.
"Two or three days maybe, the doctor says."
"Will he know me again."
"The doctor says not."
"Oh, Tommy, Tommy!" I began to shake with suppressed sobbing. Miss Rathbone looked at me with cold resentment.
"You can cry as much as you like, it won't disturb him," she said.
She seemed to have taken the fact that she wasn't to cry herself, as final. In a few minutes old Rathbone shuffled in from the shop and stood peering at Tommy with his little red-lidded eyes, wiping them furtively. I believe the old man was fond of his partner and it was not strange to him that Tommy should be lying ill at his home. Miss Rathbone came and took him by the shoulders as one does to a grieving child and turned his face to her bosom. She was a head taller than he, and as she looked across him to me there was compulsion in her look and pleading.
"He is never to know," the look said, and I looked back, "Never."
It was then that I realized how genuine her affection was for the feeble, snuffling old man; she would suffer at being lessened in his eyes.
Some one came and took me away for a while, and by degrees I got to know the story. It had been the night before, just about the time I was taken with that strange impulse to return, that Tommy had shut up the store and gone over to the half-furnished room belonging to the Board of Trade, which had become a sort of club for the soberer men of the community. A great deal of talk went on there which gave them the agreeable impression of something being done, though there must have been much of it of the character of that which was going on in a group around Montague when Tommy came in at the door. He came in very quietly, blinded by the light, and they had their backs to him, shaking with the loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description. Then Montague's voice took it up again.
"Rathbone'll get him," he said. "She's got the goods. The other one has probably got somebody on the side; these actresses are all alike."
There was a word or two more to that before Tommy's fist in his jaw stopped him. Montague struck back, he was a heavier man than my husband, but in a minute the others had rushed in between them. They were drawn back and held; Tommy's nose bled profusely, he appeared dazed, and accepted Montague's forced apology without a word. The men were all scared and yet excited; some of them were ashamed of themselves. They suspected it was not the sort of thing that should go on at a Board of Trade, and agreed it ought to be kept out of the papers. Some one walked home with my husband, and on the way he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting.
"Who was it hit me?" he asked at the door, and seemed but vaguely to remember what it was about. The next morning he opened the store as usual and appeared quite himself to old Rathbone, who came shuffling and sidestepping in to his nest at the accustomed hour. About half-past ten the tailor was made aware by the rapping of a customer on the deserted counter, that Tommy had gone out without a word. He must have gone straight to Miss Rathbone; those who met him on the street recalled that his gait was unsteady. She must have been greatly concerned to have him there at that hour, for people were moving about the streets and customers beginning to come in, and in the presence of Tillie Hemingway he could offer her no adequate explanation.
She was desperately revolving the risk of taking him into the front room to have out of him what his distrait presence half declared, when he was taken with a momentary retching; she went into the next room to fetch him a glass of water and a moment after her back was turned she heard him pitch forward on the floor.
When Rathbone had sent for me by the wire that passed me on the way home, he sent also to Tommy's father, who got in before noon the next day. I remember him as a quizzical sort of man always with his hands in his pockets, and a bristling brown moustache cut off square with his upper lip, and a better understanding of the situation than he had any intention of admitting. I had by some unconscious means derived from him that though he was fond of Tommy, he never had much opinion of his capacity. I think now it must have been his presence there and his manner of being likely to do the most unexpected thing, that pulled those same live business men who had stood listening in loose-mouthed relish of Monty's ribaldry, out of the possibility of entertainment in the case that might be made out of his implication in my husband's death, to the consideration of the town's repute as a place where such things could not possibly happen. By the time Forester came on, a covert discretion had supplied the event with its sole consoling circumstance of secrecy. Not even my family got to know what led up to that blow which had precipitated an unsuspected weakness. It was quite in accordance with what they believed of the life I had chosen, that my husband's death in a brawl should be among its contingencies. Poor Tommy's end took on a tinge of theatricality.
It was toward the end of the second day that he began to respond to the stimulants the doctor had been pouring into him. He opened his eyes and looked at us, conscious, but out of all present time. Feebly his glance roved over the figures by the bed, and fell at last on me.
"Ollie," he whispered, "Ollie!" It was a name he had not called for a long time.
"Oh, my dear, my dear!" I took his hand again and felt a faint pressure. Miss Rathbone hardly dared to look at him with the others standing about. I whispered her name to him, and his partner's, but he did not so much as turn his eyes in their direction. I could see him studying me out of half-shut glances; there would be an appreciable interval before the sense of what he saw penetrated the dulled brain; I thought I knew the very moment when the significance of our standing all about his bed crying, took hold of him. All at once he spoke out clearly:
"Is my father here?" I fancied he must have hit on that question as a confirmation; but before there could be any talk between them he slid off again into the deeps of insensibility. At the end of half an hour or so he started up almost strongly.
"Ollie!" he demanded, "where is the baby?"
"Asleep," I told him.
"Then I will sleep too," and in a little while it was so.
The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my crape for me. I believe it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been Christian to forgive her.
I did see her, however, the night before I went away. It was the dusk of the first of September. There was a moon coming up, large and dulled at the edges by the haze, and that strange earthy smell with the hint of decay in it, kept in by the banded mists that lay below the moon. The darkness crept close along the earth and spread upward like an exhalation into the sky where almost the full day halted. I had slipped out down a side street and across an open lot to the cemetery. I would have that hour with my dead free from observation.
I went between the white head stones and the flower borders. As I neared my husband's grave, something moved upon it. It arose out of the low mound as I approached; for one heart-riving second I stopped, speechless; it moved again and showed a woman.
"Miss Rathbone!" I called. "Henrietta!" I had not used her name before; I have just now remembered it.
"You might have left me this," she said. I saw that she had covered the mound with flowers, and I was glad I had not brought any.
"I am leaving," I answered. "I am going to-morrow ... where my work is."
"Yes,youcan go. But I have to stay ... where my work is. I stay with him. You can go ... you always wanted to go. And I, I have been talked about and I daren't even cry for him, not even at night, for my father hears me." She was crying now, deeply, bitterly. "You never cared for him," she insisted, "and now he knows it; he knows and has come back to me ... tome."
"He comes back," I admitted. I was stricken suddenly with the futility of all human conviction. Moving about the house that day I had been conscious of him beside me then, and now, lying there beside my boy, touching him ... mine ... sealed to me in the certainty of death. And he had come back toher. I did not know even now what she and my husband had been to one another.
It swept over me somehow, drowningly, that this was the secret that the dead know, how to belong to all of us. They had no bond, how could they be unfaithful? For a moment I was caught up by the thought to nobility.
"Look here, Henrietta, if you feel that way, I'll leave it to you. I'll not come here any more." I did not know what else I could do about it.
"It's the least youcando." She was accepting it as her right. Any woman will understand how I wanted to lay my hand there, above his breast. She must really have believed I did not love him. I turned back across the borders.
"Good-bye, Henrietta." She made a nearly inarticulate sound. The last I saw of her in the dusk she was tucking her flowers into the fresh sod as one tucks a coverlet about a child. He had been, I suppose, both man and child to her.