A Woman of Genius

It was a perfect night, warm emanations from the earth shut in the smell of the garden, and light airs from the river stirred the full-leafed trees. At the bottom of the lawn the soft, full rush, of the Hudson made a stir like the hurrying pulse. Beyond the silver gleam of its waters, lay the farther bank strewn with primrose-coloured lights, and above that the moon, low and full-orbed and golden. Its diffusing light mixed and mingled with the shadow of the moving boughs. I was wearing about my shoulders a light scarf that from time to time blew out with the wind, and as we paced in the garden strayed across Jerry's breast and was caught back by me, but not before on its communicating thread, ran an electric spark. It must have been a good two hours after moonrise before we turned to go in, where the great hall lamp burned with a steady rose-red glow.

At the foot of the veranda a breeze sprang up fresher than before, that caught my scarf from me and wrapped us both in it as in a warm, suffusing mood. We were so close that I had instinctively to put up my hand as a barricade against what was about to come from him to me, and as I did so I was aware of something that rose up from some subterranean crypt in me … that old romance of my mother's … women like her, worlds of patient, overworking, women who could do without happiness if only they found themselves doing right. Somehow they had laid on me, the necessity of being true to the best I had known, because it was the best and had been founded in integrity and stayed on renunciations. I knew what I had come into the garden to do. I had planned for it. I thought myself prepared to take up, as many women of my profession did, the next best in place of the best which life had denied me, but my past was too strong for me. The unslumbering instinct that saves wild creatures before they are well awake, had whipped me out of the soft entanglement, and before Jerry could grasp the change of mood in me, I was halfway up the stair.

"This wind," I said, "I think it will blow up a rain before morning." I went on up before him. "You can see the river darkling below its surface, it does that before a change." I went on drawing the chairs back from the edge of the veranda, I called Elsa to fasten all the windows. When at last we came into the glow of the hall lamp, I could see his face white yet with what he had missed; he thought he had blundered. He caught at my hand as I gave him his bedroom candle in an effort to recapture what had just trembled in the air between us.

"Olivia! I say … Olivia!"

"Your train leaves at nine-thirty," I reminded him. "I'll be up to pour your coffee."

I went into my room and blew out my candle. The warm summer air came in between the white curtains. I knelt down beside my bed; an old habit, long discontinued. I was too much moved to pray, but I continued to kneel there a long time listening to the soft shouldering of the maples against the wall outside the window. Far within me there was something which inarticulately knew that whatever the world might think of me, in spite of what I had confessed to Pauline, I was a good woman; I had loved Helmeth Garrett with the kind of love by which the world is saved. Past all loss and forsaking, past loneliness and longing, there was something which had stirred in me which would never waken to a lighter occasion; and whether great love like that is the best thing that can happen to us or the most unusual, it had placed me forever beyond the reach of futility and cheapness.

All this was several years ago. Jerry and I are the best of friends and I am far too busy a woman to miss out of my life anything Pauline Mills could have contributed to it. Besides, I am very much taken up with my nieces and nephews. Forester's oldest boy shows a creditable talent for the stage, and I have him at school here where I can watch him. I shall try him out on the road next summer. Effie's husband is in the legislature now, and Effie looks to see him governor. I am very fond of my sister; we grow together. I owe it to her to have found ways of making things easier for women who must tread my path of work and loneliness. It is partly at her suggestion that I have written this book, for Effie is very much of the opinion that the world would like to go right if somebody would only show it how. Sarah also added her word.

"It is the fact of your telling, whether they believe you or not, of your not being ashamed to tell, that is going to help them," she insists. "At any rate it will help other women to speak out what they think, unashamed. Most women are not thinking at all what they are very willing to be thought of as thinking."

I am the more disposed to take their word for it, since as they are both happy, they cannot be supposed to have the fillip of discontent. Sarah left the stage a year after Mr. Lawrence's death, to marry a banker from Troy, and she has never regretted it. She calls her oldest girl Olivia. It is the sane and sympathetic contact with the common destiny, which I get at her house and my sister's that keeps me from the resort of successive and inconsequent passions, such as fill the void in the lives of too many women who are under the necessity of producing daily the materials of fire. But you must not understand me to blame women for taking that path when so many are closed to them. Haven't they been told immemorially that loving is their proper function, their only one?

Last year I walked in a suffrage parade because Effie wrote me that it was my duty, and the swing of it, the banners flying, the proud music, set gates wide for me on fields of new, inspiring experience … all the paths that lead to the Shining Destiny … why shouldn't women walk in them? I should think some of them might lead less frequently to bramble and morass.

"And after all," said Jerry, a day or two ago when I had read him some pages of my book, "you have only told your own story, you haven't found out why all the rest of us run so afoul of personal disaster. We, I mean, who as you say, nourish the world toward the larger expectation."

"And after all," said I, "what is an artist but a specialist in human experience, and how can we find out how the world is made except by falling afoul of it?"

"If when we fall we didn't pull the others down with us! I'm willing to learn, but why should others have to pay so heavily for my schooling? Where's the justice in making us so that we can't do without loving and then not let us be happy in it?"

"I don't believe it is the loving that is wrong; it is the other things that are tied up with it and taken for granted must go with loving, that we can get on with."

"Marriage, you mean?"

"Not exactly … living in one place and by a particular pattern … thinking that because you are married you have to leave off this and take up that which you wouldn't think of doing for any other reason."

"You mean … I know," he nodded; "my wife was always wanting me to do this and that, on the ground that it was what married people ought, and I couldn't see where it led or why it was important. But what if it should turn out that the others are wrong and we are right about it?"

"Oh, I think we are all wrong. People like us are after the truth of life, and marriage is the one thing that society won't take the trouble to learn the truth about. My baby, you know, I lost him because I didn't know how to take care of him, and there was nobody at hand who knew much more than I. But Effie's last baby came before its time and they saved it by science, by knowing what and how. Why can't there be a right way like that about marriage, and somebody to discover it?"

"Then where would we come in – after it was all found out – if we are the experimentors?"

"Oh, there'd be other fields. Why shouldn't it be that when we have found out our relation to the physical world – we are finding it, you know, radioactivity and laws of falling bodies – go on finding out the law of our relations to one another? And, when we've found that out, then there's all the Heavenly Host. We'd have to find out how to get on with Them."

"And in the meantime we are spoiling a lot of people's lives because we can't get on with one another – " He broke off suddenly. "My wife is married again. I don't know if I told you."

"Ah, then, you haven't quite spoiled her life; she has another chance. And the children?" He had been very fond of them, I knew.

"I haven't done so much with my own life that I'd insist on controlling theirs."

"You've done wonders," I assured him. "Jerry, honest, do you mind it so much, not having a wife and family?"

"Oh, Lord, yes, Olivia; I need a wife the same as a man needs a watch, to keep the time of life for me." He faced me with a swift, sharp scrutiny. "Honest, do you mind?"

"Sometimes," I admitted, "when I think of what's coming … when I can't act any more."

"You'll be leading them all still when you are seventy. You do better every season." He threw away his cigar and came and stood before me, preening his raven's wing which now had a little streak of white in it. "Olivia, what's the matter with you and me being married? We get on like everything."

"There's more to it than that, Jerry."

"Being in love, you mean? Well, I don't know that I would stick at a little thing like that." He was looking down at me with an effect of humour which I was glad to see covered a real anxiety about my answer. "I've been in love lots of times; I've been mad about several women. I don't feel that way about you, and I don't know that I care to. But if wanting you is loving, if worrying about you when you aren't quite up to yourself, and being proud of you when you are, if liking to be with you and wanting to read my manuscripts to you the minute I've written them, if owing you more than I owe any other woman and being glad to owe it, is loving you, why, I guess I love you enough for all practical purposes."

"What would Tottie Lockwood say – or is it Dottie?" Miss Lockwood was Jerry's latest interest at the Winter Garden.

"Oh, she? She isn't in a position to say anything. It's only vanity on her part and the lack of anything to do on mine. There'd be no time for Totties if you married me."

"Jerry … since you've asked me … I suppose you know that I … that I…" He put up an arresting hand.

"I've guessed. There isn't anything you need to tell me. And I haven't an altogether clean record myself. But, I want you to know, Olivia, that there was never anything in my case that you could take exception, to so long as my wife was with me. I couldn't make her believe it but it's true. Except, of course, that I was a fool. I hope I'm done with that."

"I'd want you to be a bit foolish about me, Jerry, – that is, if I make up my mind to it." I had to defend myself against the encouragement he got out of my admission. "But, Jerry, when did you begin to think about – what you've just said?"

"About marrying you? Ever since that time I went down to your place … when that Chichester girl…"

"When I wouldn't take her place, a pis aller merely. Well, suppose I had; suppose I had been … what the Chichester girl wouldn't … would you still have wanted to marry me?" I would not admit to myself why I had asked that question.

"I don't know, Olivia … men, don't you know, not often … but I want to marry you now. I want it greatly." I held him off still, trying to get my own experience in shape where I could leave it behind me.

"Such affairs never turn out well, do they?"

"Hardly ever, I believe."

"Unless you turn them into marriage," I hazarded.

"You know," he conjectured, "I've a notion that the kind of loving that goes to making such affairs, can't be turned into marriage very easily. It's a kind of subconscious knowledge of their unfitness that keeps us from turning them into marriage in the first place."

"I wonder."

He let me be for the moment revolving many things in my mind.

"It wouldn't be the vision and the dream, Jerry. You and I – "

"Well, what of it? It might be something better. Something neither of us ever had, really. It would be company."

"No, I've never had it." I remembered how blank the issue of my work had been to Helmeth Garrett.

"Well, then, … we have years of work in us yet. I'll buy Polatkin out of the theatre." He was going off at a tangent of what we might do together, but I had thought of something more pertinent.

"We might solve the problem of how to keep our art and still be happy."

"We might." He was looking down on me with great content, but quite soberly. "Tell me, Olivia, suppose we shouldn't, even with the unhappiness, with all you have been through, would you rather be what you are, or like the others?" We were silent as we thought back across the years together; there was very little by this time that we did not know of one another.

"No," I said at last, "if being different meant being like the others, I'd not choose to have it any different."