A Woman of Genius

So naturally had the occasion come about, that I cannot remember that I found any particular difficulty in reconciling myself to a possible connection with the professional stage. There had been no church of my denomination at Higgleston, and I had affiliated with one made up of the remnants of two or three other houseless sects, under the caption of the United Congregations, and there was nothing in its somewhat loosened discipline that positively forbade the theatre. In my work with McWhirter, the play had come to mean so much the intimate expression of life, so wove itself with all that had been profound and heroic in the experience of the people, that it seemed to come quite as a matter of course for me to be walking out between the captain and the manager toward the opera house. O'Farrell, too, must have beguiled me with that extraordinary Celtic faculty for the sympathetic note, for I am sure I received the impression as we went, that his play, "The Shamrock," meant quite as much to the Irish temperament, as "The Spy" could mean to Ohianna. The manager and McWhirter had crossed one another's trails on more than one occasion, which seemed to give the whole affair the colour of neighbourliness.

It transpired in the course of our walk that Laurine Dean, America's greatest emotional actress – it was O'Farrell called her that – had been taken down at Waterbury with bronchitis, and the cast having been already disarranged by an earlier defection, he had been obliged to cancel several one-night stands and put in at Kincade to wait until a substitute could be procured from St. Louis or Chicago, which difficulty was happily obviated by the discovery of Mrs. Olivia Bettersworth.

All this, as I was to learn later, was not so near the truth as it might be, but it served. I could never make out, so insistent was each to claim the credit of it, whether it was O'Farrell or McWhirter first thought of offering the part to me, but there it was for me to take it or leave it as I was so inclined. Our own performance was in Armory Hall and this was my first entrance of the back premises of a proper stage. I recall as we came in through the stage door having no feeling about it all but an odd one of being entirely habituated to such entrances.

They were all there waiting for us, the Shamrocks, grouped around the prompter's table in a dimly lit, dusty space, with a half conscious staginess even in their informal groupings, men and women regarding me with a queer mixture of coldness and ingratiation. I had time to take that in, and an impression of shoppy smartness, before Manager O'Farrell with a movement like the shuffling of cards drew us all together in a kind of general introduction and commanded the rehearsal to begin. Well, I went on with it as I suppose it was foregone I should as soon as I had smelled the dust of action, which was the stale and musty cloud that rolled up on our skirts from the floor and shook down upon our shoulders from the wings, too unsophisticated even to guess at the situation which the manager's air of genial hurry was so admirably planned to cover. I read from the prompter's book – O'Farrell had sketched the plot to me on the way over – and did my utmost to keep up with his hasty interpolations of the business. I was feeling horribly amateurish and awkward in the presence of these second-rate folk, whom I took always far too seriously, and suddenly swamped in confusion at hearing the manager call out to me from the orchestra what was meant for instruction, in an utterly unintelligible professional jargon. McWhirter through some notion, I suppose, of keeping his work innocuously amateurish, had used no sort of staginess, and the phrase froze me into mortification. With the strain of attention I was already under I could not even make an intelligent guess at his meaning, as O'Farrell, mistaking my hesitation, repeated it with growing peremptoriness. I could see the rest of the cast who were on the stage with me, aware of my embarrassment, and letting the situation fall with a kind of sulky detachment, which struck me then, and still, as vulgar rather than cruel. Suddenly from behind me a voice smooth and full, translated the clipped jargon into ordinary speech. I had not time, as I moved to obey it, for so much as a grateful glance over my shoulder, but I knew very well that the voice had come from a young woman of about my own age, who, as I entered at the beginning of the rehearsal, had been sitting in the wings, taking in my introduction with the gaze of a tethered cow, quiet, incurious, oblivious of the tether. As soon as I was free from the first act, I got around to her.

"Thank you so much," I began. "You see I am not used – "

"Why do you care?" she wondered. "It is only a kind of slang. They all had to learn it once."

I could see that she sprang from my own class. Taylorville, the high school, the village dressmaker, might have turned her out that moment; and by degrees I was aware that she was beautiful; pale, tanned complexion, thick untaught masses of brown hair, and pale brown eyes of a profound and unfathomed rurality. As she moved across the stage at the prompter's call, with her skirts bunched up on her hip with a safety pin, out of the dust, as if she had just come from scrubbing the dairy, I fairly started with the shock of her bodily perfection and her extraordinary manner of going about with it as though it were something picked up in passing for the convenience of covering. It provoked me to the same sort of involuntary exclamation as though one should see a child playing with a rare porcelain. By contrast she seemed to bring out in the others, streaks and flashes of cheapness, of the stain and wear of unprofitable use.

She came to me again at the end of her scene. "Where do you live?" she wished to know. "I can come around with you and coach you with your part."

"I'm not sure," I hesitated: "I don't know if I shall go on with it." She took me again with her slow, incurious gaze.

"Why, what else are you here for?"

That in fact appeared to be Mr. O'Farrell's view of it, and though I went through the form of taking the day to think it over and telegraph to Tommy, I did finally engage myself to the Shamrock Company for the term of Miss Dean's illness. My husband made no objection except that he preferred I should not use my own name, as indeed, O'Farrell had no notion of my doing, as the posters and programmes stood in Miss Dean's name already.

We had from Thursday to Monday to get up my part. With all my quickness I could not have managed it, except for the alacrity with which, after the first day, all the company played up to my business, prompted me in my lines, and assisted in my make-up. There was, if I had but known it, a reason for this extra helpfulness, which, remembering the way the ladies of the United Congregations had pulled and hauled about the Easter entertainment, went far with me toward raising the estimate of professional acting among the blessed privileges. Several members of the cast had felt themselves entitled to Miss Dean's place, for the manager had refused to pay an understudy, and found it easier to concede it to me, a brilliant society woman as I had been figured to them – I suspected McWhirter there – a talented amateur who would return to privacy and trouble the profession no more, rather than to one who might be expected to develop tendencies to keep what she had got. Moreover, they had played to small houses of late, most of the salaries were in arrears, and from the first of my taking hold of it, it began to be certain that the piece would go. For I not only played the part of the gay, melodramatic Irish Eileen, but I played with it. There was all my youth in it, the youth I hadn't had, there was wild Ellen McGee and the wet pastures and the woods aflame. With Tommy and a home to fall back upon, with no professional standing to keep, with no bitterness and rancours, I adventured with the part, tossed it up and made sport of it, played it as a stupendous lark. The rest of the company took it from me that it was a lark, and were as solicitous to see it through for me as though I had been an only child among a lot of maiden aunts. And I did not know of course that this charm of good fellowship was based more directly on the box-office returns than on the community of art.

Incidentally a great deal that went on in my behalf threw light on the character and disposition of the star.

"I 'most wore my fingers off, hookin' 'er up," confided the dresser who took in her gowns for me, "but she won't let out an inch, not she. Well, this spell 'll pull 'er down a bit, that's one comfort."

Cecelia Brune made me up. She was the youngest member of the company and that she was distractingly and unnecessarily pretty didn't obviate the certainty that in Milwaukee where she was born she had been known as Cissy Brown.

"You don't really need anything but a little colour and black around the eyes," she insisted. "Dean is a sight when she's made up; got so much to cover. I'll bet she is no sicker than me, she's just taken the slack time to get her wrinkles massaged. Gee, if I had a face like hers I'd take it off and have it ironed!"

Cecelia, I may remark, lived for her prettiness; she lived by it. She had a speaking part of half a dozen lines and a dance in the Village Green act, and her mere appearance on the street of any town where we were billed, was good for two solid rows clear across the house. In Cecelia's opinion this was the quintessence of art, to attract males and keep them dangling, and to eke out her personal adornment by gifts which she managed to extract from her admirers without having yet paid the inestimable price for them. Married woman as I was, I was too countrified to understand that inevitably she must finally pay it. She had all the dewy, large-eyed softness of look that one reluctantly disassociates from innocence, and a degree of cold, grubby calculation which she mistook, flaunted about in fact, for chastity. It was she who told me as much as I got to know for a great many years of Sarah Croyden, who had already taken me with the fascination of her Gift, the inordinate curiosity to know, to touch and to prove, which makes me still the victim of its least elusive promise and the dupe of any poor pretender to it. I wanted something to account for, except when she was under the obsession of a part, her marked inadequacy to her perfect exterior, for the rich full voice that, caught in the wind of her genius, gripped and threatened, but ran through her ordinary conversation as flaccid as a velvet ribbon.

She was, by Cecelia's account, the daughter of a Baptist elder in a small New York town, strictly brought up – I could measure the weals of the strictness upon my own heart – and had run away with an actor named Lawrence, after one wild, brief encounter when O'Farrell had been playing in the town. That was before Cecelia's time and she had no report of the said Lawrence except that he was as handsome as they make them and a regular rotter.

"She'd ought to have known," opined Cecelia – though where in her nineteen years she could have acquired the groundwork of such knowledge was more than I could guess – "She'd ought to have known what she was up against by his bein' so willing to marry her. He wouldn't have put his head in a noose like that without he had hold of the loose end of it himself."

That he had so held it, transpired in less than a year, in the reappearance of a former wife who turned up at his lodging one night to wait his return from the theatre, where, no one knew by what diabolical agency, Lawrence had word of her, and made what Cecelia called a "get away." What passed between the two women on that occasion must have been noteworthy, but it was sunk forever under Sarah's unfathomable rurality. O'Farrell, who of his class was a very decent sort, had been so little able to bear the sight of beauty in distress that he offered the poor girl an unimportant part as an alternative to starvation, and Sarah had very quickly settled what was to become of her by developing extraordinary talent.

I think no one of us at that time quite realized how good she was; Cecelia Brune, I know, did not even think her beautiful.

"No style," she said, settling her corset at the hips and fluffing up her pompadour with my comb, "and no figgur." But myself, I seemed to see her the mere embodiment of a gift which had snatched at this chance encounter with an actor, to swing into opportunity, regardless of its host. Whenever I watched her acting, some living impulse deep within me reared its head.

I have set all this down here because with the exception of Manager O'Farrell and Jimmy Vantine, the comedian, who was thirty-five, objectionable, and in love with Cecelia, these two women were all I ever saw again of the Shamrock players. Miss Dean I did not meet on this occasion, for though at the end of three weeks, before I had time to tire of travel and new towns and nightly triumphs, she wrote she would return to her work, it fell out that she did not actually return until I was well on my way home.

"I thought she would have a quick recovery when she found out what a sweep you'd been makin'," remarked Cecelia. That was all the comment that passed on the occasion. If Mr. O'Farrell made no motion toward making me a permanent member of his company, there were reasons for it that I understood better later. I had to own to a little disappointment that nobody came to the station to see me off except Cecelia and Sarah Croyden. It is true Jimmy Vantine was there, but he left us in no doubt that he only came because Cecelia had promised to spend the interval between their train and my own in his company. He fussed about with my luggage in order to get me off as quickly as possible.

The very bread-and-buttery relation of the Shamrocks to what was for me the community of Art, had never struck so sourly upon me as at the casual quality of their good-byes. I remembered noticing that morning how very little hair there was on the top of Jimmy Vantine's head, and that he did not seem to me quite clean. I found myself so let down after the three weeks' excitement that I thought it necessary at Springfield, where I changed, to interpose two days' shopping between me and Higgleston. Among other things I bought there was a spirit lamp and a brass teakettle.