Chapter 9

There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came, though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ... sometimes even yet...

For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn’t in me to understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it.

There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with her husband’s declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie was expecting another baby and wasn’t to be thought of, so I turned at last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all America stood for that high identification of his work with the source of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again, practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is loving that is the fructifying act.

That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss, dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build. I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else has happened to me, I am at least a success.

I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some sort of brokers’ convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to face with them.

They were walking in the lobby. Pauline was in what for her, was evening dress, her manner a little daunted, not quite carrying it off with the air of being established at the pivot of existence which she could manage so well at Evanston. They were walking up and down, waiting, it seemed, for friends to join them, and they wheeled under the great chandelier just in time to come squarely across us. I could see Pauline clutch at her husband’s arm, and the catch in her breath with which she jerked herself back from the impulse to nod, and looked deliberately away from me. For her, the evidence of my misdoing hung about me like an exhalation. She was afraid I should insist on speaking to her and some of her friends would come up and see me doing it. I didn’t, however, offer to speak to her, I looked instead at Henry. I stood still in my tracks and looked at him steadily and curiously. I wished very much to know what he meant to do about it. He turned slowly as I looked, from deep red to mottled purple, and very much against his will his head bowed to me; his body, to which Pauline clung, dared not move lest she detect it, but quite above and independent of his smooth-vested, self-indulgent front, his head bowed to me. So went out of my life thirty years of intimacy which never succeeded in being intimate.

But though one may excise thirty years of one’s past without a tremor, one may not do it without a scar. To allay the irritation of Pauline’s slight, I came near to being as abandoned as she believed, as I had moments of believing myself. For the possibility that Helmeth Garrett had found in our relation of setting it aside, made it at times of a cheapness which seemed to extend to me who had entertained it. I should have been happier, I thought, to have taken it lightly as he did. If so many women who had begun as I had begun, had gone on repeating the particular instance, wasn’t it because they found that that was the easiest, the only possible way to bear it? How else could one ease the pain of loving except by being loved again? And if I was to lose the Pauline Millses of the world by what had been entered upon so sincerely, why, then, what more had I to risk on the light adventure? All this time I was sick with the need of being confirmed in my faith in myself as a person worthy to be loved, to feel sure that since my love had missed its mark, it wasn’t I at least that had fallen short of it.