A Woman of Genius

CHAPTER II

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.

I don't know why London seems a more homey place than New York. It has been going on so long, perhaps, is so steeped in the essential essence of human living, and the buildings there are smaller, more personal, the mind is able to grasp them to the uttermost. I remember as we stopped at my hotel, being taken suddenly with a tremendous awareness of it all, the noble river flowing by, the human stream, miles on miles of homes, and the green countryside. I was aware of a city set in an island and an island in the sea, the wide immortal sea going around and around it, the coursing waves – I checked myself in an upward gesture of the arms, as though I had pulsed and surged with it. I caught in my companion's smile a delighted recognition.

"Sh – " he said, "what'll Flora Haines think of you!"

"Flora! Oh, Flora wouldn't even think about a play-actor. What would your uncle – "

"He's dead now." He stopped me.

"They are all dead," I told him, "all those that mattered to us."

We had another mood when we came to my rooms. I perceived suddenly what there was in him more than I had known. It was in his manner that he had commanded men. I was pierced through with a sense of his virility, the quality that goes to make a male. I was glad of an excuse to put away my hat and wrap, to escape for a moment from the effect he produced on me … from inordinate pride in him that he could so produce it. The room was full of the tumult we created for one another.

"Will you sit here?" I said at last. I believe I pushed a chair toward him.

"No, you." He must have turned it back toward me, otherwise I do not know how I came to be so near him.

"You know," I said, … "I never got your letter."

"I guessed as much when it came back to me. I should have come to you the next day, but I quarrelled with my uncle. I walked all the way to the railway station before I remembered. But what had I to offer you?"

"It was so long ago …"

"No, no, yesterday." His arms were around me. "Olivia … yesterday and to-day!"

I think I moved a little to be the more completely engulfed by him, to lay against his the ache of my empty breast; all these years I had not known how empty. We kissed at last and Joy came upon us. We loved; we kissed again between laughter. I remember little snatches of explanation in the intervals of kissing.

"All this time, Helmeth, I have wanted you so."

"I was on my way to you. All last winter in Alaska … in the long night, Olivia. I should have come soon."

"Oh," I cried, "I have been drawn across the sea to you. All the way I felt you calling!"

"We had to meet again; had to!"

After a time I insisted that he should sit down. "You haven't had any tea." I tried to get control of myself. I was crossing the room to ring when he swept me up again.

"Look here, Olivia, I don't want any tea. I want you. God!" he said, "do you know how I want you?" All at once I was crying on his breast.

"Oh, Helmeth, Helmeth, do you know you have only seen me twice in your life."

"And both times," he insisted, "I've wanted to marry you."

It was two or three days before we spoke of marriage again. I believe I scarcely thought of it; we had all the past to account for, and the present. We had moments of strangeness, and then we would kiss, and all the years would seem to each of us as full of the other as the very hour.

"Where were you, Helmeth, the second summer after we met?" I had told him of my visit to Chicago and the dream of him I had had there.

"Out in Arizona, carrying a surveyor's chain, dreaming of you! Often when the moonlight was all over that country like a lake, I would walk and walk. I had long talks with you; they were the only improving conversation I had."

"For years," I said, "that dream of you was the only thing that kept my Gift awake. Times I would lose it, and then I would dream again and it would come back. I know now when I lost it completely, it was about a year before I saw you that time in Chicago." I had told him of that, too.

"That year I married." I could see that there was something in the recollection always that weighed upon him.

"I didn't," he said, "until after my aunt had told me about you. I went back there when she died; she was always good to me. You know, don't you, Olive, that in spite of everything … everything … there is only you."

"Let us not talk of it." I do not know how it is proper to feel on such occasions, but I supposed that he must have had as I had, stinging tears to think of the dead and how their love was overmatched by this present wonder. I would have had, somehow, Tommy and my boy to share in it.

I went rather tardily to make my apologies to Mrs. Franklin Shane. I hope they sounded natural.

"My dear! you needn't expect me to be surprised at anything Helmeth Garrett does." She talked habitually in italics. "My husband says that it is only because he so generally does right, that it is at all possible to get along with him." I snapped up crumbs like this with avidity.

"His wife, too, you must have known her." I hinted. This was at the end of a rather complete account of Helmeth's business relations with Mr. Shane.

"Oh, well," I could see Christian charity struggling with Mrs. Shane's profound conviction of the rectitude of her own way of life. "She was a good woman, but no – imagination." She was so pleased to have hit upon a word which carried no intrinsic condemnation that she repeated it. "No imagination whatever. One feels," she modified the edge of her judgment still further, "that so much might have been made out of Mr. Garrett. These self-made men are so difficult."

"Are you difficult?" I demanded when I had retailed the conversation to him that evening.

"I suppose so; anyway I am self-made. She is right so far; I dare say it is badly done. You'll have to take a few tucks in me."

"Not a tuck. I like you the way you are. Oh, I like you … I like you so!" There was an interval after this before we could go on again.

"Tell me how you made yourself, Helmeth. Don't leave anything out, not a single thing."

"By mistakes mostly. Every time I had made one I knew it was a mistake and I didn't do it again. I don't know that I'm much of a success anyway, but I've got a large assortment of things not to do."

"That was the way I learned how to act; filling in behind!"

"I thought that came by instinct. What counts with a man, is not so much getting to know how to do it, but getting a chance to prove to other people that he knows how."

"I've been through that too," I told him, but he was bent on making himself clear.

"I suppose I ought to tell you, Olivia, I'm only a sort of scab engineer. I haven't any papers."

"But if you can do the work? Mrs. Shane said – "

"Oh, Shane will trust me; he's learned. What hurts is to have worked up a scheme to the point where it is necessary to have outside capital, and then have one of the outsiders stick out for a certificated engineer. That's what comes of my uncle's notion that a man should 'pick up' his professional training." There was the core of that old bitterness rankling in him still; he could not yield himself quite to consolation.

"But you have got on, Helmeth, you got here." What "here" meant to me exactly, was more than my lover, more than the pleasant room behind us, the obsequious servitors, more even than the sleek, silvered river and the towered banks that took on shapes of romance under the London gray. There was something in the word to me of fulfilment, the knowledge of things done, the certainty of an unassailed capacity for doing. We were sitting with the broad window flung open, the top of a lime tree tapping the sill of it with soft shouldering touches, as of some wild creature against its mate, creaking a little in somnolent content. I put out my hand to touch his knee – oh, as I might have done it if the "here" had been the point toward which we had travelled together all these years. He laughed then as he often did when I touched him, a man's short full laugh of repletion. He thrust out his knee quite frankly till it touched mine, and closed his hand over my fingers; he returned to what had been in the air the previous moment with an effort. The suspicion that it was an effort, was all I had to prepare me for what was about to leap upon me.

"Oh, I've pulled through, I've pulled through. But I'm not where I might have been. And I'm not rich, Olivia. Not what is called rich."

"Is being called rich one of the things that goes with – what was it you called yourself – a promoting engineer?"

"It goes with it if you are any good at it. Not that I care about money except for what it stands for … and then there are the girls."

"You have – girls." It struck me as absurd that I hadn't thought of it until that moment.

"I thought Mrs. Shane would have told you. I have two. It isn't going to make any difference with you, Olivia?"

"Ah, what difference should it make!" I was apprised within me by the haste I made to cover my consternation, that there was more difference in it than my words allowed. "Children of yours?" I said. "So much more of you for me to love." The apprehension was whelmed in the possessing movement with which he drew me to his breast.

CHAPTER III

We Had to go back to the subject of course, it couldn't be left hanging in the air like that. It was a day or two later at Hampton Court, where we had gone for no reason really, except that it seemed a more commensurate background for what was going on in us, the identification in each by the other, of the springs of immortal passion. We had roved through all the rooms, recharged for us with the exceptional experience, and come out at last on the river bank where there was quite a holiday air among the houseboats.

Behind us we could hear the soft slither of the fountain in the sunk garden; the warm sun streaming on us through the filmy air, the flutter of curtains in the houseboats above the little pots of geraniums, the voices of young people laughing and calling across, began to steal across my mind with a sense of the extraordinary richness of life. Here was all the stuff of which I had built up my earliest dreams of the Shining Destiny … young people growing up about me … room to stretch my capacity to the uttermost … the orderly social procedure. For the moment I believed that I might turn back on that path my feet had failed in, and find in it all that I had missed. I recalled that there were always children in my dream. For the instant they were back … little heads and faces … all the eyes on me … soft curls, like wisps of gossamer. I suppose there must be such little unclaimed souls forever hovering and flitting, little winged things, to love's mighty candle. What should there be in the touch of a man's hand on a woman's that they should come crowding to it like homing doves?

There was a maid going by with her charge, one of those glowing fair-haired English children who supply us with the images by which we prefigure the angelic choirs. Helmeth held out his hand to the boy, and with that swift spark that passes between the young and those by whom they are beloved, he toddled forward and laid hold of the inviting finger.

If I had had more experience of the pang that shot through me then, I should have known it for jealousy. It drove me on toward what, until now, I had avoided.

"Tell me about your girls, Helmeth." He felt in the pocket of his coat.

"If you would care to see them – " He was so pleased and shy, I suppose he must have understood better than I how it was with me. "They are with an aunt in Los Angeles; it was handier for me to see them when I ran up from Mexico. They are rather decent kiddies. You'll see them when they come to New York this winter."

"Shall you be in New York?" It struck coldly on me that he should speak of plans that seemed to be going on regardless of the extraordinary interruption of our love.

"Until I get this Mexican scheme on its feet I shall be going back and forth."

"They look like their mother," I suggested. I was looking still at the small, rather pale photographs he had handed me.

"Because they look so little like me?"

"You forget I saw her once, in Chicago."

"I remember. You know, I think I went there that time because I heard you were playing there." He was silent a moment, pitching bits of sod into the river. "There is something that manages these things. If I had met you then we couldn't have been like this. And we might never have met again."

When he said "like this," he had touched my knee with his hand with that possessive intimacy with which a man may touch his own woman. I had to go back to the photographs of the children to save myself from the blinding lightning of his eyes.

"Are they like their mother?"

"I suppose so. I hope so – she was a good woman."

"I'm sure of that." He sat up with intention.

"Ah, it isn't just a sense of what is due her that makes me say that. She was thoroughly good. When I met her out in Idaho she was my chief's daughter and the only nice girl in the place. She wasn't what you are – no other woman is – but she was one of those plain, quiet women that have a kind of a grip on rightness. There was nothing could make her let go."

"My mother was like that. I think I can understand."

"Well, it was mighty good for me. I'm a bad lot, I suppose. I always want things harder than most, and I think the wanting justifies me in getting them, but she taught me better. She did things to me that made me fit for you, and I don't want us to forget that."

"Oh, my dear, it is I who am not fit."

But I could see he did not believe that. He had come upon me that day in the woods when happily the mood of Perdita had shut round the odd, blundering Olivia like an enchanter's bubble, through which iridescent surfaces he was always to see me; and by the mere act of loving he had fixed me in my happiest moment. He was the only man I ever knew, whom I could handle like an audience, perhaps he was the only man who never knew me in any other character than the lady of romance.

We went that evening to see Beerbohm Tree in a Shakespearian piece, always so much more worth while in London than anything the same people can do on any other soil, as if the play had mellowed there by all the rich life it tapped with its four-hundred-year roots. Borne up by my mood and the beauty of the production, so much greater than anything we could manage in New York at that time, I was chanting bits of it all the way home, and when we came to my room again I moved before him in the part of Egypt's queen.

"Who's born the day

When I forget to send to Antony

Shall die a beggar – "

"Oh, Helmeth, if you could just see me do it!" I was aching to lay up my gift before him as on an altar.

"You shall do them all for me when we are out in the shack in Mexico."

"Mexico!" I was blank for the moment.

"We'll have to live there for a few years, until I get this scheme on its legs. Look here, Olivia, you haven't said yet when you are going to marry me."

"I've only known you four days!" I tried for the note of feminine evasion.