A Woman of Genius
Copyright© 2024 by Mary Austin
Chapter 2
For a week, perhaps, I was content merely with being there, simply happy and human. I had brought letters and addresses which I neglected. In spite of the excuse I had made to Jerry about it, I did not even go to the theatres. I turned aside from the traditional goals, to ride on the top of omnibuses and walk miles down the Strand and Piccadilly, touching shoulders with the crowd. The thing that I had striven for in my art, what men paint and write and act for, was upon me. Answers to all the questions about it that I had not the skill to put to myself, lurked for me behind the next one of the Greek marbles and the next. The pictures were luminous with it. In the soft spring nights it took the streets and turned the voices happy. It danced with the maids in the alleyways to the tune of the barrel organs. Then all at once I had a scare. That-Which-Walked-Beside-Me seemed about to take flight. I would be smiling at it secretly. I would catch myself in the motion of saluting it, and suddenly it would be gone. Mornings I would wake up in Chicago to the old struggle and depression; I would have to go out in the streets and court back my joy; it fled from me and concealed itself in the crowd. I followed it by the trail of the first name I lighted on in my address-book. It happened to be Mrs. Franklin Shane; I wrote her a note and then walked out in Hyde Park to see the last of the rhododendrons, and regretted it. Mrs. Franklin Shane was Pauline Mills raised to the nth power, which I did not fail to perceive was due to Franklin Shane being Henry multiplied by a million. The acute sense of values, which had established Pauline at the centre of Evanston, had landed Mrs. Shane at the outer rim of English exclusiveness. What she would do with her time and energy when she had penetrated to its royal core, interested me immensely.
I had been entertained at her house the previous winter when I had been studying a play that made me perfectly willing to be exploited by Mrs. Franklin Shane, for the sake of what I got out of it to fatten my part. There in London she called for me in her car the afternoon of the day that brought her my note. I don’t remember that anything was expressly said about it, but it was in the air that Mrs. Franklin Shane had arrived, in her study of Exclusiveness, at knowing that the younger members of it were addicted to the society of ladies of my profession, and meant to make the most of me. I thought it might be amusing to see what, supposing with me as a tolerable bait, she could catch a younger son, she would do with him. She was clever enough not to put the use she was to make of me, too obviously. I was invited to an informal reception the next afternoon in which she found herself involved by her husband’s business exigencies; I gathered from her way of speaking of it that the guests were chiefly Americans and that she had made the best of the situation, extracting from it for herself a kernel of credit by not turning down her compatriots, now that she was assured of having the English aristocracy to play with.
The house in front of which a hansom deposited me the next day, was notable; one could guess that the Franklin Shanes had been made to pay a pretty penny for the privilege of occupying it. It was stuffed full of the treasures of four hundred years of the selective instinct.
“You must really see the Velasquez,” my hostess had confided to me as soon as I had shaken hands with her, and I judged from the fact of her not mentioning my name to any other of her guests, that she was saving me for a special introduction.
The Velasquez was very wonderful; there was also an early Holbein and a Titian so black with time that there was only one point in the room from which you could make out what it was about. I was slowly making my way to that point. I had been in the house half an hour and had met but one or two people whom I slightly knew, when I was aware of my hostess piloting toward me through the press, a black-coated male in whom I suspected one of the pegs upon which her social venture hung. It occurred to me that she had sent me to look at the pictures so that she might know where to find me. The room was packed with Americans, satisfying in the only way open to them, a natural curiosity as to the shell in which the only kind of society which wasn’t open to them, lived, and the man blocking out a passage through it with his shoulders, was so tall that it brought my eyes on a level with his necktie. There was an odd freedom about it that set me at once to correct my impression of him by his face, and the moment I raised my eyes to him I knew him.
I could hear Mrs. Franklin Shane mumbling the phrases of introduction, rendered unimportant by the radiant recognition that for the moment enveloped us, that burst around us as a flame in which our hostess seemed to shrivel and go out in a thin haze of silk and chiffon. I remember looking around for her presently, and wondering how she had got away from us. We began again at the point where we had left off.
“So you did go on the stage then, in spite of Taylorville?”
“And you,” I pressed my foot into the velvet pile of the carpet to make sure that I stood. “You are an engineer, I suppose?”
“In spite of my uncle!”
Somewhere in the next room some one began to sing. I did not hear the song nor see the Titian. I was back in Willesden pasture and the soft rain of dying leaves was on my face. I was conscious of nothing but his hand which he had laid upon my arm to steady me against the pressure of the crowd which swayed and turned upon itself to let Mrs. Shane through, to drag me to be presented to the singer who was even more of a notability than I was.
There was an interval then in which I appeared to be going through the forms of society, and going through them under an intolerable sense of injustice in the fact that having found Helmeth Garrett at last, now I had lost him. It was one of those occasions when the inward monitor is so bent on its own affairs that the habit of living goes on automatically, or does not go on at all. It went on so with me for half an hour. By degrees, what seemed an immense unbearable throbbing of the universe, resolved itself at the renewal of that electrifying touch on my arm, to the thrum of an orchestra in the refreshment room. I felt myself carried along by the pressure of the crowd in that direction, but just at the turn of the stair that went down to it I was drawn peremptorily aside.
“Come,” Mr. Garrett insisted, “come out of this. I want to talk to you.” There was the old imperiousness in his manner, exclusive of all other considerations. He seemed to know the house. We took a turn through the hall came out presently at the porte cochère where a line of carriages waited, supported by a line of skirt-coated figures like little wooden Noahs before an ark. I let him put me into a closed carriage without a word of protest. I had not taken leave of my hostess; I had not so much as thought of her. I suppose he had been arranging this in the interval in which I had not seen him. The moment the door of the carriage was shut, we clasped hands and laughed shamelessly.
“You had three little freckles high up on your cheek, what became of them?” he demanded. All at once his mood changed again. “All the years I’ve been without you! ... I saw a picture of you in a magazine three years ago in Alaska. I came near writing.”
“You should have. What were you doing there?”
“Promoting Engineer, Alaska, Russia, Mexico.” He began a gesture to include the whole round of the mining world, but left off to take my hand again. “The world is round,” he declared, as though he had somewhat doubted it. “It brings us back again to the old starting points.”
“They’re always the same, I suppose, the places we set out from; but we ... we are never the same.”
“Is that a warning?” He looked at me, checked for a moment.
“Only a platitude.” I had thrown it out instinctively against his engulfing manner, against everything that rose up in me to assure me that nothing whatever had changed, that it would never change. The life of the London streets streamed around us; crossing Piccadilly Circus we were held up with the traffic; the roar of the city islanded us like a sea.
“I suppose you know where we are going?” I suggested in one of the checked intervals.
“To your hotel; Mrs. Shane gave me the address. I told her we were old friends. You mustn’t be surprised if you find she expects us to have gone to school together. I wanted to get away where we could talk.” I gave him an assenting smile. Still neither of us showed any disposition to begin. He took off his hat in the carriage and ran his fingers through his hair. About the temples it had gone gray a little. Now and then he gave a short contented laugh as a man will, put suddenly at ease.
“I’m glad you kept the old name, Olivia Lattimore ... Olivia. I shouldn’t have found you without.”
“You knew I had lost my husband.”
“I read that in the magazine. There’s where I have the advantage of you.” He dropped his light banter for a soberer tone. “My wife died two years ago.” We were silent after that until the fact had been put behind us by a space of time.
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