A Woman of Genius
Copyright© 2024 by Mary Austin
Chapter 6
It is a great mistake to suppose that assertiveness is the only mannish trait taken on by successful women, nor is pliability the only feminine mark they lose. By what insensible degrees it came about I do not know, but I found myself on the peak of popularity, very much of the male propensity to be beguiled. I was willing to be played upon, and so it was skilfully done, to concede to it more than the situation had a right to claim for itself. I pulled myself up afterward, or was pulled up by the sharp rein of destiny, but for the time, while my success was new, I was aware not only of the possibility of my being handled, but of my luxuriating in it, of demanding it as the price of my favour, and in particular, of valuing Polatkin for the way in which, by my own moods, my drops and exaltations he brought me to his hand.
How much of the fact of my private life he was really acquainted with, I never knew, but he understood enough of its reaction to make even my resistences serve to push me on to the assured position of a theatre and a clientele of my own. It stood out for me as he described it, not so much as a means of dividing me from my beloved, but as a new and completer way of loving. I wanted more ways for that, space and opportunity. I wished to lay my gift down, a royal carpet for Helmeth Garrett to walk on; I would have done anything for him with it except surrender it. Not the least thing that came of my condition was the extraordinary florescence of my art.
Every night as I drew its rich and shining fabric about me I was aware of all forms and passions, the mere masquerade of our delight in one another. Every night I embroidered it anew, I adored and caressed him with my skill. Polatkin went about wringing his hands over it.
“You are a Wonder, a Wonder! And you are wasting it on them swine.” That was his opinion of my support. “And to think you could have a theatre of your own, and what you like——”
“A theatre like me—Me spread over it, expressed, exemplified, carried out to the least detail?”
“You shall have it even in the box office!” he responded magnificently.
“How soon?”
“I will bring the plans this afternoon; I got ‘em ready in case you came around.” But he was much too intelligent to undertake to bind me to them at that juncture.
Things went on like this until the last week in November, then I had a telegram from Helmeth saying that he would be detained still longer. Every pulse of me had so been set to his coming on the twenty-seventh that I thought I should not be able to go on after that, I should go out like a light when the current is stopped. I had so little of him, not even a photograph, nothing but my ring and a few trinkets he had bought me in Italy. If I could have had a garment he had worn, a chair in which he had sat ... I went round and looked at the Astor House, because he told me that he had stopped there once, years ago.
I stood that for three days and then I went down to New Rochelle where he had written me earlier, his girls were at school; not on my own account, you understand, but as a possible patron of the school on behalf of my niece, who was, if the truth must be told, less than two years old. While I was being shown about, I had Helmeth’s children pointed out to me. They looked, as I had surmised, like their mother. If they had in the least resembled their father I should have snatched them to me. Everything might have turned out quite differently. They were, the principal said, nice girls and studious, but they did not look in the least like their father.
It was one of those dark, gusty days that come at the end of November, damp without rain, and of a penetrating cold. There had been a great storm at sea lately and you could hear the wash of its disturbances all along the Sound. There was no steady wind, but now and then the damp air gave a flap like an idle wing. It was like the stir in me of a formless, cold desire, not equal to the demand Life was about to make on it. As I turned into the station road after a formal inspection of the premises, I met the girls coming back from their afternoon walk with the teachers, two and two. The Garrett girls were next to the last, they were very near of an age; I waited half hidden by a tree to watch them as they passed.
They were well covered up from the weather in large blue coats with capes, and blue felt hats with butterfly bows to match at the ends of their flaxen braids. They looked like their mother ... I couldn’t see them growing up to anything that would fit with Sarah and Jerry and Polatkin. The wing of the wind shook out some gathered drops of moisture as they passed, the branches of the trees clashed softly together, and as they turned into the grounds I noticed that the older one had something in her walk that reminded me of her father.
I was pierced through with a formless jealousy of the woman who had borne them in her body. I was moved, but not with the impulse to draw them to my bosom. I felt back in the place where my boy had been, for the connecting link of motherliness and failed to find it. I had had it once, that knowledge of what is good to be done for small children and the wish to do it, but it was gone from me. It was as though I might have had a hand or a claw, any prehensile organ by which such things are apprehended, and when I reached it out after Helmeth’s children it was withered.
What I found in myself was the familiar attitude of the stage. I could have acted what swept through me then, I could have brought you to tears by it, but there was nothing I could do about it but act. I wrote Helmeth that night that I had seen the children and then I burned the letter.
He came at last. He was greatly concerned about his enterprise which was not yet established on that footing which he would like to have for it, and I think it was a relief to him to have me without the conventions and readjustments of marriage. It was tacitly understood between us that things were better as they were until that business was settled. I think he could not have had a great deal of money at the time; all that racing to and fro between London and Mexico must have cost something. His anxiety about the girls, which occasioned his sending them to the most expensive schools, and his affection for them, which led to their being carted about by their aunt to meet him occasionally at far-called places, was an additional drain.
We were very happy; there is nothing whatever to tell about it. We met in brief intervals snatched from our work and did as other lovers do. Sometimes he would come for me at the theatre—the freshness of my acting never palled on him. Other times I would find him waiting for me in the little flat I had expressly chosen and furnished to be loved in. The pricking warmth of his presence would meet me as I came up the stair. Not long ago I found myself unexpectedly in a part of the city where we used to walk because we were certain not to meet any of our friends there. There was a tiny café where we used often to dine, and the memory of it swept over me terrifyingly fresh and strong.
With all this, it was plain that we got on best when we were most alone. It was not that I did not every way like and was interested in the friends he introduced to me, outdoor men most of them, and their large-minded, capable wives. I got on with them tremendously, and found them as good for me as green food in the spring, sated as I was on the combined product of professionalism and temperament. It was chiefly that the simplicity and openness of their lives brought out for him the duplicity that lay at the bottom of ours. For it was plain that they wouldn’t have understood, wouldn’t have thought it necessary. They could have faced, those women, strange lands and untoward happenings, had many of them faced sterner things for the sake of their husbands, with the same courage and selflessness with which they would in my circumstances, have faced renunciation.
It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and known, that checked and harassed Helmeth; he wished to be at one with them, to be felicitated on my success and my charm, to include me if only by implication, in that community of adventure with which these mining and engineering folk had ringed the earth. And the necessity of holding our relation down to the outward forms of friendship established on the supposition of our having grown up together, fretted him.
“It isn’t honest,” he broke out once after he had tried to persuade me to let him tell his friends that we were engaged. “It’s all right between us; you are my wife in the sight of whatever gods there are, but that isn’t what other people would call you.”
“Somehow, Helmeth, so long as it is with you, I don’t care much what they call me.”
“Well, I care; I care a lot. You don’t seem to remember you are going to be my girls’ mother—sons’ too, I hope. We ought to have some more children; Sanderson’s got four.” Sanderson had been our host at luncheon that day.
Helmeth was knocking out the ashes of his pipe on my hearthstone; he paused in the occupation of refilling it to look down at me in a moody kind of impatience that was the worst I knew of him. There was the suggestion of a cleft in his strong, square chin which came out whenever he bit hard on a difficult proposition. The play of it now was like the tiny shadow of disaster.
“I was down in old Brownlow’s office the other day,” he went on, “talking this Mexican scheme to him, and he had to break off in the middle of it to telephone to some chorus girl he had a date with. God! it made me hot to think of it!”
“Because I’m in the same——” He cut me off with a sound of vexation.
“Don’t say it; don’t even think of it! How long does this contract of yours last?”
“To the end of the season,” I told him.
“Well, you chuck it just as soon as you can. I’ll put this thing through somehow. We’ll clear out of here.” He had his pipe alight by now and began puffing more contentedly. “I don’t think much of this burg anyway,” he laughed as he settled himself in one of my chairs. “A man doesn’t have a chance to get his feet on the ground.”
There were times when he almost made me share in his distaste for it. That was when I had drawn him into the circle of my professional acquaintances which somehow shrivelled at his touch like spiders in the heat. Understand that I hold by my art, that I have poured myself a libation on that altar, that I value it above all other means of expressing the drama of man’s relation to the Invisible, and that I do not think you do enough for it, prize it enough, or use it rightly. But I suppose there is a yellow streak in me, or I wouldn’t sicken so as I do at what it brings to pass in the personalities by which it is most forwarded. For since it must be that art cannot be served to the world, except by a cup emptied of much that is most desirable in the recipients, it ill becomes them as long as they fatten their souls at it, to take exception to the vessel from which it is drunk. Nevertheless I used to find myself, when Helmeth was with me, sniffing at the spiritual garments of my friends for the smell of burning. I resented Mr. Lawrence the most; it was not altogether for the incongruity of his possessing Sarah, her fine smudgeless personality and her lovely body, delicate and shapely as a pearl, but for the incontestable evidence he offered me of how low I had stooped. From the peak of my present prosperity, my troubles in Chicago, showed the merest accident, and the distance I had sprung away from them seemed somehow expressive of the strength with which I had sprung from all that Lawrence represented. Not all the care Sarah bestowed on him—and I think the best he could do for her was to provide her in his impaired health with an occasion for mothering—could quite distract the attention from the ineradicable mark of his cheapness.
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