A Woman of Genius
Copyright© 2024 by Mary Austin
Chapter 9
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.
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