CHAPTER VI
Before I had an opportunity to talk the incident over with Sarah, she had seen Cecelia.
"She is perfectly furious with you," she reported. "She hasn't heard from Mr. Mills since, and she thinks it is on your account; that you have taken steps for breaking it off."
"Well, if she admits there was something to break off … I tell you, Sarah, you are fretting yourself to no purpose, the girl had been there before."
"I'm afraid so." Sarah's taking it so much to heart was a credit to her, but I was more curious than commiserating.
"Tell me, what is in the mind of a girl when she does things like that? What does she get out of it?"
"Excitement, of course; the sense of being in the stir, and the feeling of being protected. She says Mr. Mills has been kind to her. It is odd, but she seems to think it is all right so long as it is going on; it is only when it is broken off she can't bear it. That is why she is so angry at you."
"There might be something in that," I conceded. "When it is broken off she is able to realize how cheap and temporary it has been; while it is going on she can justify it on the ground that it is going on forever. That would justify it, I suppose." I did not know how I knew this, but lately I had discovered in myself capacities for understanding a great many things of which I had had no experience. What concerned me was not Cecelia's relation to the incident.
"Whatever am I going to do about going there again, to Pauline's, I mean?"
"You can't tell!"
"And I can't go there and not tell. I've got to choose between deceiving Pauline and condoning Henry, and I've no disposition to do either." Sarah thought it over.
"There is only one thing you can do. You'll simply have to go to New York."
"For a great many reasons besides. You needn't tell me that. But how? How?"
"You know what I offered – "
"What I refused. It is out of the question. Don't speak of it."
"I suppose after this you couldn't ask the Millses?"
"Sarah … I did ask."
"Well?" All her interest hung upon the interrogation.
"They told me it was good for my spiritual development to suffer these things." We faced one another in deep, unsmiling irony. "Sarah, what do you suppose it costs a man for supper and a private room at Reeves's?"
"Don't!" she begged. "It's only a step from that to Cecelia."
"Yes; I remember she said that men never afforded protection to women except for value received."
"You must go to New York," Sarah reiterated. "You must!"
The truth was I had never told Sarah exactly how poor I was.
In the end I let her go away without telling; at the worst I thought I might borrow from Jerry, who had given up the notion of going to St. Louis, largely no doubt because I had failed to back him up in it completely, and then just at the end changed his mind and went anyway. I knew nothing about it until Jerry wrote me from Springfield, for I had grown shy of going there where all Mrs. McDermott's conversation was set like a trap to catch me in something that would convict Jerry of misdemeanour. Jerry asked me to visit her in his absence, but I put it off as long as possible. I had to settle first about going to Pauline's. I arranged to spend the afternoon there, meaning to come away before dinner and so by leaving Henry to discover my attitude in the circumstance of my having been there without destroying his home, open the way to my meeting him again without embarrassment. To do that I should have left the house before the persuasive smell of the dinner began to creep up the stairs into the warm, softly lighted rooms, but from the beginning of my visit, Pauline, in order that I might not feel her failure to put her affection more cogently, had wound me about as with a cocoon of feminine devices, from which I hadn't been able to extricate myself earlier. I am not blaming her, I am not sure, indeed, seeing how completely she justified herself to Henry Mills by what she had to offer, that I had any right to expect her to understand how completely her playful and charming affectionateness failed of any possible use to me. But I felt myself so far helpless in the presence of it, that I stayed on until the smell of the roast unloosened all the joints of my resolution. I hadn't realized how hungry I was until I found myself at a point where what Henry might think of me became inconsiderable before the possibility of my being put out of the house before dinner was served.
At the same time I could have wept at the indignity of wanting food so much. I remember to this day the wasteful heaping of the children's plates, and my struggle with the oblique desire to smuggle portions of my helping home to Griff, who looked even more of a stranger than I to soup and fish and roast, to say nothing of dessert.
It wasn't until we had got as far as the salad that I had leisure to observe Henry grow rather red about the gills as he fed, and speculate as to how far it was due to his consciousness that I could bring down the pillars of his home with a word, and didn't intend to.
There was nothing said during dinner about my prospects or the stage in general, but when Henry took me out to the car about nine o'clock, he cleared his throat several times as though to drag the subject up from the pit of his stomach, where it must have lain very uneasily.
"You know," he began, "I've been thinking about that scheme of yours of going to New York. I am inclined to think there is something in it."
"I haven't thought about it for a long time," I told him, which was only true in so far as I thought of it as a possibility.
"It would freshen you up a whole lot," Henry insisted. "Everybody needs freshening. I have been taking a little stir about myself." So that was the way he wished me to think of his relation to Cecelia!
"I've given it up," I insisted.
We were standing under the swinging arc light in a bare patch the wind had cleared of the fine, white February grit. Little trails of it blew up under foot and were lost among the wind-shaken shadows. I could see Henry's purpose bearing down on me like the far spark of the approaching trolley.
"I wouldn't do that," he advised. "It looks like pretty good business to me. You'd have to stay there some time to learn the ropes and if a few hundred dollars – "
"I've given it up," I said again. The car came alongside and Henry helped me on to it.
"If you were at any time to reconsider it, I hope you will let me know – " The roar of the trolley cut him off.
I knew I was a fool not to have accepted the sop to my discretion; I don't know for what the Powers had delivered Henry Mills into my hands, if it wasn't to get out of his folly what his sober sense refused me. Without doubt there are some forms of integrity that, persisted in, cease to be a virtue and become merely a habit; I could no more have taken Henry Mills's money than I could have gone to New York without it. I went home shivering to my fireless little room. I put on my nightgown over my underwear and my dressing gown over that, and cried myself to sleep.
It was a day or two later that I recalled that Jerry had asked me to go out and see his wife, and I thought if I must ask Jerry for help, it would be no more than prudent for me to do so, but I wasn't in the least prepared as I went up the path, from which the snow of the week before had never been cleared, to find the house shut and barred, and no smoke issuing from it. I made my way around to the kitchen door to try to discover some sign which would give me a clue to the length of time it had been deserted, if not the reason for it.
While I was puzzling about among the empty milk bottles and garbage cans, a neighbour woman put her head out of a nearby window and announced the obvious fact that Mrs. McDermott wasn't in.
"But in her condition – " I protested as though my informant had been in some way responsible for it.
"Well, if her own mother's isn't the best place for a woman in her condition!.. Three days ago," she answered to my second question. Mrs. McDermott's mother lived in Peoria, and I knew that when Jerry left there had been no such understanding, but as lingering there ankle deep in the dry snow didn't seem to clear the affair, I undertook to rid myself of a sense of blame by writing all that I knew of it to Jerry within the hour. It was the third day after that he came storming in on me like a man demented. He had been to Peoria immediately on receipt of my letter and his wife had refused to see him. It hardly seemed a time for indirection.
"Jerry, what have you done?" I demanded.
"Nothing – not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was married."
"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.
"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.
"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always proud of you."
"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over. They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and by my sensibilities got the better of me.
"Would it do any good if I were to write?"
"You? Oh, they think you're in it … a kind of general conspiracy. You know you said that – that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an artist was the source of his inspiration."
"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production. "Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."
"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.
"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and having children take that out of a woman."
"An artist ought never to marry. I will always say that."
I began to wonder if that were true, if Cecelia Brune were not after all the wiser. We beat back and forth on the subject for the time that I kept Jerry with me. The evening of the second day came a telegram. Jealousy tearing at the heart of poor little Mrs. McDermott had torn away the young life that nestled there.
Jerry wrote me later that the baby had breathed and died and that his wife was likely to be ill a long time. In view of the extra expense incurred, I didn't feel that I ought to ask him for the loan I was now so desperately in need of.
It was about this time that Griffin and I began to avoid one another about meal time. I have read how wild animals in sickness turn their backs on one another; one must in unrelievable misery … we dodged in and out of our hall rooms like rabbits in a warren. And then suddenly we would meet and walk along the streets together, mostly at night when the alternate flare of the lamps and the darkness and the hurrying half-seen forms, numb the sense like the flicker of light on a hypnotist's screen, and we moved in a strange, incommunicable world out of which no help reached us. We saw women go by with the price of our redemption flashing at their breasts or in their hair. We saw men hurried, overburdened with work, and there was no work for us. In our own land we were exiled from the community of labour and we sighed for it more than the meanest Siberian prisoner for home. And then suddenly communication seemed to be reëstablished. Effie for no reason sent me half of the rent money. "I don't need it here, and I think maybe I shall get more out of it by investing it in you," she wrote. She had always such a way of making the thing she did seem the choice of her soul. I bought meat and vegetables and invited Griff to dinner. He took me that night to that sort of dreary entertainment known as musical comedy. He could often get tickets and it was a way of spending the evening that saved fuel. As we tramped back through the chill, trying for an effect of jocularity in his voice, so that he might seem to have made a joke in case I shouldn't like, Griff said to me.
"I suppose you wouldn't go with a musical comedy?"
"My dear Griff," I answered him in the same tone, "I'd go with a flying trapeze if only it paid enough."
"I'm acquainted with Lowe, the tenor. I've been thinking I'd ask him – " We were as shy of speaking of an engagement as though it were wild game to be scared away by the mere mention of it.
There was no reason why Griffin shouldn't have succeeded in musical comedy, he had a fairish voice and had turned his gift as many times as the minister's wife in Higgleston used to turn her black silk. It was not more than two days or three after that, as I was coming back to my cold room in the twilight – I had spent the day in the public library on account of the heat – and as I was fumbling at the lock as I had been that first evening he had spoken to me, I heard Leon Griffin come up the stair three steps at a time, and I knew before I heard it in his voice, that the times had turned for him. I struck out fiercely against a sudden blankness that seemed to swim up to the eyes and throat of me.
He was trembling too as he came into the room.
"Olive," he cried, "Olive, I've turned the trick. I'm going with the 'Flim-Flams.'" That was the wretched piece we had seen together. He had never called me by my name before, and I had no mind to correct him. In the dusk he ran on about his engagement; they would go on the road presently and settle for the summer in some city. I heard him speak far from me. I was down, down in the pit of the cold room with the shabby furniture and the bleak light that disdained it from the one high window.
"Don't take off your things," I heard him say. "I came to get you. We'll have a blow-out somewhere. Olive, Olive!" His quick sympathy came out, and the excusing charm. "Oh, my dear, you're crying!"
"Griff, you're leaving me." It was as if I had accused him. I sank down in a chair; I was dabbling at my eyes and trying to get my veil off with cold fingers.
"Not if you feel that way about it." He came and put his arms about me and constrained me until I leaned against his body. I knew what he was, what a man of that stamp must be feeling and thinking, and, knowing, I permitted it. I was crying still, I think … his hands came fumbling under my veil … presently he kissed me.
"Olivia?"
"Well, Griff!"
"You know – it is for you to say if I shall leave you."
"You mean that you will give up … but how can you, Griff; it is the only thing that's been offered." We were sitting still on the low cot in my room and there was no light but the dull glow of the stove and the last trace of the day that came in at the window. We had not been out to dinner yet, and Griffin's arm was around me. I could feel it slack a little now as if he definitely forebore to constrain me.
"I mean, Lowe could get you a place in the chorus."
"But, Griff, I can't sing."
"You can sing enough for that, and Lowe would get you the place if – if you belonged to me." I knew exactly what this implied, but no start responded to it. The nerve of propriety was ached out.
"Of course I know I'm not in your class," Griff was going on. "I wouldn't do such a thing as ask you to marry me. But I'm awfully fond of you … and you're up against it."
"Yes, Griff, I'm up against it."
"Your fine friends … what would they do for you?"
"Nothing whatever."
"Well, then … you needn't go under your own name, and this is a chance; you could live and maybe get somewhere. Lowe told me he meant to strike for Broadway. You aren't insulted, are you?"
"No, I'm not insulted." Curiously that was true. I was drunk and shaking inside of me; I seemed to be poised upon the dizzying edge, but I was neither angry nor insulted.
"And I'd never come back on you if you got your chance for yourself … honest to God, Olive. I've had my lesson at that. You believe me, don't you?"
I believed him. I hadn't any sense whatever of the moral values of the situation. It was too desperate for that.
"I guess I ought to tell you … I'm a bad sort … bad with women. After I knew that my – that Miss Dean didn't want me, I didn't care what became of me. There was a woman in the company … she liked me, and I thought it would give Laura a chance. That was what the divorce was about. I thought I could make it up to the other woman by marrying her. But that didn't work either." He was silent a while, forgetting perhaps that he had begun to explain himself to me. "There's a way you've got to like a person to live with them … and, anyway, I'm not asking you to marry me." He got as much satisfaction out of that as if it were a superior abnegation.
"You've got to decide, right away," Griffin urged me.
"I must have a day to think," I insisted, not because I hoped that anything would interfere between me and disaster, but I wanted to be able to throw it up to the Powers that I had given them an opportunity.
I knew what he was. I had always known. When he put his cheek against mine to kiss me I had felt the marks there of waste and looseness, just as I felt now that native trick he had for extenuation, for putting himself on the pathetic, the excusing side of things. But I did not shrink from him. I suppose it was because just then he was a symbol of the protection which I had so signally gone without. The need of trusting is stronger in women than experience. Nothing saved me but the persistent monitor of my art. Here, when all else was numbed by loneliness and hunger and unsuccess, it waked and warned me. I had not drawn back from Griffin nor the relation he proposed to me; but I couldn't stand for Flim-Flam. I think just at first, though, I made myself believe I was considering it.
I went out to see Pauline the next afternoon. Not that I expected anything from her. It was merely that she represented all that stood opposed to what I was being coerced into, and I meant to give it a chance.
"I am thinking of going with 'Flim-Flam'," I told her.
"Oh, but my dear – surely not with that!"
"I'll get eighteen dollars a week and my expenses."
"Well, of course, if you want to sell yourself just for a salary!" Pauline's attitude could not have been improved on if she had known all that the engagement implied, but it wasn't in her to be ungracious for long. "I suppose you'll get experience?"
"I'll get my board and clothes out of it," I told her bluntly. "And whether I like it or not, it is the only thing offered."
"And you are just taking it on trust? I suppose that is the right way; you can never tell how things will be brought about." I don't know how much of this was honest, and how much derived from the capacity for self-deception which grows on women whose sole business in life is getting on with a man. At any rate, having shaken my situation around to the shape of a moral attitude, as a robin does a worm, nothing would have prevented her from swallowing it whole.
Faint as I was I refused her invitation to dinner. With what I had in mind to do I didn't care to meet Henry Mills again. I was fiercer in my detestation of him and Cecelia than I had been before I had thought of being in the same case myself. I resented them as a ribald commentary on my necessity.
As I rode home on the car, all my outer self was in a tumult, dazed and buzzing like a hive. I was dimly aware of moving, sitting upright, of paying my fare, and of great staring red posters that flashed upon me from the billboards. I remember that it occurred to me several times that if I could only understand what I read on them, it might be greatly to my profit. Somewhere deep under my confusion I was aware of being plucked by the fringes of my consciousness. Something was trying to get through to me.
I refused to see Griffin at all that evening, and got into bed early, staring into the dark and seeing nothing but fragments of red letters that seemed about to shape themselves into the saving word, and then dissolved and left me blank. I tried to pray and realized that I had no connecting wires over which help might come.
Belief in the God I had been brought up to, had been beaten out of me at Higgleston, very largely by the conviction of those who professed to know Him best, that He couldn't in any case be the God of my Gift. And I hadn't been thinking since then of the Something Without Us to which I acted, as Deity. Now it occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that if the God of the Church had cast me off, there must still be something which artists everywhere prayed to, a Distributer of Gifts who might be concerned about the conduct of His worshippers.
I reached out for Him – and I did not know His name. I must pray though, I must pray to something which stood for Help. Slowly, as I cast back in my mind to find the name for it, I remembered Eversley. Eversley was everything which any player might wish to be, and Eversley had been kind. I would pray to Eversley. All at once there flashed across the blank of my mind, his name in letters of red. That was it! That was the name on the billboards! Eversley was in town. I recalled that Griff had spoken of it. I hadn't been able to spare a penny for a paper for a long time, or I should have known it. I would see Eversley. I got up and groped around in the cupboard for a piece of dry bread and ate it. Then I went back to bed and dropped asleep suddenly with the release of tension. To-morrow I would see Eversley.
Griffin failed to understand my change of mood in the morning.
"You aren't afraid that I shall try to hold you?"
"No I'm not afraid."
"Or that anybody will find it out?"
"I shouldn't care if they did," I told him. "I'm going to see Eversley. I suppose it's fair to tell you, you'll be the last resort, Griff."
"I'll be the foundation of your fortune, if Eversley will let me, but he won't." I think there was regret in his voice, but it was never in anything he said to me.
"I know you're not mean, Griff; that's why I told you."
"Oh, I'll tell you, too. I was mean once; I didn't mean to be, but it turned out that way." He was on the point of admitting something to me that I felt if I was to depend upon him I shouldn't hear.
I got out as early as possible and walked until I found a billboard. Eversley was at the Playhouse; he had been playing here for three days. I walked past it several times considering the possibility of getting his address from the stage doorman, though I knew I couldn't.
It was clear and bright, few people moved in the street. I walked between the alleyways and a row of ash-cans waiting for the belated carts of the cleaners. "Eversley, Eversley!" I called over and over as if it had been a charm. Suddenly in the still cold brightness, a torn fragment of newspaper flapped in the ash-can, it lifted and made a clumsy flight like a half-fledged bird and dropped beside me. Its one torn wing flapped gently as I passed it, and showed me part of a pictured face. I said to myself that I was in a pretty state when even a torn face in a paper looked like Eversley. I had gone on three steps, and suddenly I stopped. It was Eversley, of course; his picture would be in the papers. I went back and lifted the printed scrap. It was part of an interview with the great tragedian, three days old, and it told me the address of his hotel.
It was nearly eleven when I arrived there. The foyer was crowded with people among whom I fancied I recognized several of my profession. They had the same desperate air that I knew must stand out on me. I thought the clerk recognized it.
"Mr. Eversley is not in this morning," I was told. They pretended, too, not to know when he would be in. I understood that this meant that he was in, but probably asleep or breakfasting. I found a chair close to one of the elevators and waited. The room was warm and I was faint. I do not know how long I sat there; I must have been almost unconscious. Suddenly I snapped alert. There was Eversley and two or three others stepping into the elevator on the opposite side of the room. I was too late of course to catch them.
"Mr. Eversley's apartments," I said to the elevator boy.
"First turn to the left," he told me when he had let me out on the fourth floor. I was afraid to ask the number of the room lest he should suspect me of intruding. There were five or six doors down the left corridor. I knocked at one at a hazard, and was rejected by a large woman in deshabille. I was discouraged; somehow the prospect of knocking at every one of those doors and inquiring for Mr. Eversley daunted me. I was dividing between my dread of that and a still greater dread, if I should be found loitering too long in the corridor, of being taken for a suspicious person. In a few moments, however, a woman came out of one of the doors farthest down and moved toward me. I thought it was she I had seen getting into the elevator with Mr. Eversley; she had the gracious air of women who know themselves relied upon. She stopped, hypnotized by my evident wish to speak to her.
"Mrs. Eversley?" She acknowledged it. "I am trying to find your husband; I have his permission," I interpolated as I saw her pleasant, open countenance close upon me. I learned afterward how much of her life went to saving him the strain of publicity, and I did not blame her.
"My husband never sees visitors in the morning."
"If you would show him this card," I begged. "Perhaps he would make an appointment." She recognized the writing on the card, and I saw her relenting. Mr. Eversley, it proved, would see me.
He pretended kindly to have recognized me at once, but he didn't ask after the Hardings. He saw that it was the last lap with me.
"My dear Miss Lattimore, sit here. Now, tell me."
"So," I concluded at the end of half an hour, "I thought you could tell me if it is all gone. If I am never to have it back again, I can go with a musical comedy." I hadn't told him, of course, what the conditions were of my having even that, "but if you think it could be brought back again …" I could hardly formulate a hope beyond that.
"Never in the old way," he answered promptly. "You wouldn't wish that. What you did at twenty you must not wish to do at thirty, for then there is no growth. What do you really feel about it?"
"I feel," I said, "as if I could do something – something pressing to be done, but somehow different, so different that I do not know how to describe it to anybody nor to get them to believe in it."
"And so you have begun to doubt it yourself?"
"I shall believe you," I said.
He sat still after that for a while, staring into the open fire and rubbing his fine expressive hands together in a meditative way. It was good to me to see him, just touched mellowly with age, the delicate carving in his face of nobility and gentleness. There were men like that then, men who made by their mere being, something more than a shibboleth of the traditional dependability. He seemed to be far away from me, groping around the root of truth in respect to that gift with which he was so richly endowed. He rose presently and took a play-book which lay face downward on the table.
"Could you do a bit of this with me?" he suggested. "It will help me get my lines." The play was "Magda," new then on the American stage. Eversley was getting up the part of Colonel Schwartz. He explained the story to me a little and I began reading and prompting him. Presently I felt the familiar click of myself sliding into the part. All my winter in Chicago rose up in the part of Magda to protest against the judgment of Taylorville.
I knew better too than to attempt any sort of staginess with Eversley; I said the words, trying to understand them, and let the part have its way with me. It was not until we had laid down the book that I remembered I was still waiting judgment, and did not feel to want it.
"I won't take up any more of your time," I suggested. "You have been very good to me." I got up to go. After all what was there that Eversley could do for me.
"Well," he said, "and is it to be musical comedy?"
"No," I told him, "no, it may be starvation or the lake, but I'll not let myself down like that… Was that why you asked me to do the part?" I said after a while, in which he had sat gazing into the fire without taking any note of my standing.
"Sit down," he said. "Have you ever heard of Polatkin?"
I shook my head and sat provisionally on the edge of my chair.
"Polatkin is a speculator; he speculates in ability. I think on the whole the best thing I can do for you is to introduce you to Polatkin."
Mr. Eversley thought of Morris Polatkin because he had met him the day before in Chicago. Before I left the hotel it was arranged that I was to see him the next day, and if he liked me – by the tone in which Mark Eversley spoke of him I knew that was foregone – he would take me on to New York with him and put my gift on a paying basis.
So suddenly had the release from strain come that I found myself toppling over my own resistance. I went out in the street and walked about until reminded by the gnawing in my stomach, that I had had nothing but the brewing of my twice-boiled coffee grounds for breakfast, I turned into the first attractive café and paid out almost my last cent for a comforting luncheon. It would have gone farther if I had bought food and cooked it at home, but I was past that. I had pinched and endured to the last pitch; I could no more. And besides the assurance of Mark Eversley, which as yet I could scarcely believe in, there had come a strange new courage upon me. For as I had suffered and struggled with Magda, suddenly from some high unknowable source, power descended. I had felt it fluttering low like a dove, hovering over me; it had perched on my spirit. I could feel it there now brooding about me with singing noises. It had come back! I rushed to meet it as to a lover.