Chapter 5

Understand that up to this time I had not yet thought of the stage as a career for myself. I hadn’t yet needed it. I had not then realized that the insight and passion which have singled me out among women of my profession couldn’t be turned to render the mere business of living beautiful and fit. I hardly understand it now. Why should people pay night after night to see me loving, achieving, suffering, in a way they wouldn’t think of undertaking for themselves? Life as I saw it was sufficiently dramatic: charged, wonderful. I at least felt at home in the great moments of kings, the tender hours of poets, and I hadn’t thought of my participation in these things rendering me in any way superior to Higgleston or even different. If I had, I shouldn’t have settled there in the first place. If I had glimpsed even at Tommy’s exclusion from all that mattered passionately to me, I shouldn’t have married him. It was because I had not yet begun to be markedly dissatisfied with either of them that I presently got myself the reputation of having trampled both Tommy and Higgleston underfoot. I must ask your patience for a little until I show you how wholly I offered myself to them both and how completely they wouldn’t have me.

The point of departure was of course that I didn’t accept the Higglestonian reading of married obligations to mean that my whole time was to be taken up with just living with Tommy. It was as natural, and in view of the scope it afforded for individual development, a more convenient arrangement than living with my mother, but not a whit more absorbing. I couldn’t, anyway, think of just living as an end, and accordingly I looked about for a more spacious occupation; I thought I had found it in the directing of that submerged spiritual passion which I had felt in the sustaining drama of the war. I had a notion there might be a vent for it in the shape of a permanent dramatic society by means of which all Higgleston, and I with them, could escape temporarily from its commonness into the heroic movement. It was all very clear in my own mind but it failed utterly in communication.

I began wrongly in the first place by asking the Higgleston ladies to tea. Afternoon tea was unheard of in Higgleston, and I had forgotten, or perhaps I had never learned, that in Higgleston you couldn’t do anything different without implying dissatisfaction with things as they were. You were likely on such occasions to be visited by the inquiry as to whether the place wasn’t good enough for you. As a matter of fact afternoon tea was almost as unfamiliar to me as to the rest of them, but I had read English novels and I knew how it ought to be done. I knew for instance, that people came and went with a delightful informality and had tea made fresh for them, and were witty or portentous as the occasion demanded. My invitations read from four to five, and the Higgleston ladies came solidly within the minute and departed in phalanxes upon the stroke of five. They all wore their best things, which, from the number of black silks included, and black kid gloves not quite pulled on at the finger tips, gave the affair almost a funereal atmosphere. They had most of them had their tea with their midday meal, and Mrs. Dinkelspiel said openly that she didn’t approve of eating between meals. They sat about the room against the wall and fairly hypnotized me into getting up and passing things, which I knew was not the way tea should be served. In Higgleston, the only occasion when things were handed about, were Church sociables and the like, when the number of guests precluded the possibility of having them all at your table; and by the time I got once around, the tea was cold and I realized how thin my thin bread and butter and chocolate wafers looked in respect to the huge, soft slabs of layer cake, stiffened by frosting and filling, which, in Higgleston went by the name of light refreshments. The only saving incident was the natural way in which Mrs. Ross, our attorney’s wife who visited East every summer and knew how things were done, asked for “two lumps, please,” and came back a second time for bread and butter. I think they were all tremendously pleased to be asked, though they didn’t intend to commit themselves to the innovation by appearing to have a good time. And that was the occasion I chose for broaching my great subject, without, I am afraid, in the least grasping their incapacity to share in my joyous discovery of the world of Art which I so generously held out to them.

It hadn’t been possible to keep my professional adventure from the townspeople, nor had I attempted it. What I really felt was that we were to be congratulated as a community in having one among us privileged to experience it, and I honestly think I should have felt so of any one to whom the adventure had befallen. But I suspect I must have given the impression of rather flaunting it in their faces.

I put my new project on the ground that though we were dissevered by our situation, there was no occasion for our being out of touch with the world of emotion, not, at least, so long as we had admission to it through the drama; and it wasn’t in me to imagine that the world I prefigured to them under those terms was one by their standards never to be kept sufficiently at a distance.

Mrs. Miller put the case for most of them with the suggestion thrown out guardedly that she didn’t “know as she held with plays for church members”; she was a large, tasteless woman, whose husband kept the lumber yard and derived from it an extensive air of being in touch with the world’s occupations. “And I don’t know,” she went on relentlessly, “that I ever see any good come of play acting to them that practise it.”

Mrs. Ross, determined to live up to her two lumps, came forward gallantly with:

“Oh, but, Mrs. Miller, when our dear Mrs. Bettersworth——”

“That’s what I was thinking of,” Mrs. Miller put it over her.