A Woman of Genius Part 16

"Oh, Tommy, if you would only come away with me!"

If either of these things had been possible for us, I think Tommy would have recovered from his infatuation and been the happier for it. Or even if Miss Rathbone had kept away from him. But that is what she couldn't or wouldn't do. She might have thought that by being seen coming in and out of the store, she could stave off criticism by the appearance of being on good terms with us. At any rate she came. I think her coming caused my husband some embarra.s.sment, and, manlike, he made her pay for it. As I think of it now, I realize that I really did not know what went on in her; whether she had set a trap for my husband or yielded to an unconquerable pa.s.sion. In any case she had imagination enough to see that unless she could maintain the tragic status, she cut rather a ridiculous figure. Sometimes I think people are drawn into these affairs not so much by the hope of happiness as the need, the deep-seated, desperate need of emotion, any kind of emotion. I think if we had taken her note, had had it out on the world-without-end basis, she would have been almost as well satisfied by a recognized romantic loss as by success. But I never knew exactly. She was equally in the dark about me. Now and then I had a glimpse of the figure I was in her eyes, in some stricture of my husband's on my behaviour--some criticism which bore the stamp of her suggestion; it was as if he was being dragged from me by an invisible creature of which I knew nothing but an occasional sc.r.a.ping of its claws. I try to do her the justice in my mind, of thinking that the situation which she had built up out of Tommy's loneliness was as real for her as it was for him. n.o.body in Higgleston had ever taken my natural alienation from the people there as anything but deliberate and despising. To her, my husband was the victim of a cold, neglectful wife, and to him she contrived to be a figure of romance.

"I owe her a lot," Tommy insisted; "she has suffered on account of me."

He went back to that phrase again, "I owe her a lot."

"What do you owe her that you can't pay?"

"Well, I couldn't marry as long as you----"

"You want to marry her?" I cried. "You want to marry _her_?"

"I couldn't expect you to appreciate her," Tommy was sullen again; "you're so full of yourself." I held on to a graver matter.

"You want us to be divorced?" I can hear that sounding hollowly in a great s.p.a.ce out of which all other interests in life seemed suddenly to shrink and shrivel. I had learned to talk of divorce in the great world, but to me my marriage was one of the incontrovertible things.

"We might as well be," I heard my husband say; "you are never at home any more." Then the reaction set in. "Stay with me, Olivia. I don't want anybody but you; just stay with me!"

"You want me to give up the stage and live here in Higgleston _forever_?" The unfairness of this overcame me.

"Well, why not, if you're married to me?"

I believe he would have done it. He would have wasted me like that and thought little of it. I was married, and not altogether to Tommy, but to Higgleston and the clothing business. The condition he demanded of me was not of loving and being faithful, but of living over the store.

Until now, though I knew I did not love my husband as life had taught me men could be loved, I had never given up expecting to. Somewhere, somehow, but I was certain it was not in Higgleston, the trans.m.u.ting touch should find him which would turn my husband into the Lord of Life.

Now I discovered myself pulled over into another point of view. He had become a man capable of being interested in the village dressmaker. The farther she drew him from me the more the stripe of Higgleston came out in him.

I had planned to go up to Chicago for a week in August; to consult with Mr. Harding about the plays he was to produce the next season. I had not signed with him yet, but I knew that I should, that I could no more dissever myself from that connection than I could voluntarily surrender my own breath; I might try, but after the few respirations withheld, nature would have her way with me. It was not that I came to a decision about it; the whole matter appeared to lie in that region of finality that made the a.s.sumption of a decision ridiculous. I do not know if I expected to divorce my husband or if he or Miss Rathbone expected it. I think we were all a little scared by the situation we had evoked, as children might be at a dog they let loose. We felt the shames of publicity yelping at our heels.

The day before I left, I went to see Miss Rathbone; I had to have a skirt shortened. It was absurd, of course, but there was really no one else to go to. If there had been I shouldn't have dared; all Higgleston would have known of it and drawn its own conclusion. As it was, Higgleston was extremely dissatisfied with the affair. It did not know whom properly to blame, me for neglecting my husband or Miss Rathbone for snapping him up; they felt balked of the moral conclusion.

I hardly know what Miss Rathbone thought of my coming to her. I think she had braved herself for some sort of emotional struggle sharp enough to drown the whisper of reprobation. My quiet acceptance of the situation left her somehow toppling over her own defences. Sometimes I think the emotionalism which the att.i.tude of that time demanded to be worked up over a divorce, drew people to it with that impulse which leads them to rush toward a fire or hurl themselves from precipices.

Miss Rathbone must have been aching to fling out at me, to justify her own position by abuse of mine, and here she was down on the floor with her mouth full of pins squinting at the line of my skirt. It was then that I told her what I was going to Chicago for. "You'll be away from home all winter, then?" The question was a challenge.

"I don't know, I haven't signed yet." For the life of me I couldn't have foreborne that; it was exactly the kind of an advantage she would have taken of me. If I chose not to sign for the next winter, where was she?

She stood up blindly at last. "I guess I can do the rest without you,"

she said. Some latent instinct of fairness flashed up in me.

"But I think I shall sign," I admitted. "I couldn't stand a winter in Higgleston." I was glad afterward that I had said that; it gave her leave for the brief time that was left to them, to think of him as being given into her hands.

I was greatly relieved to get away, even for a week, from the cold curiosity of Higgleston which, without saying so, had made me perfectly aware that I showed I had been crying a great deal lately. But no sooner was I freed from the pull of affection than I began to feel a deep resentment against Tommy. His attempt to charge his lapse of loyalty, on my art, on that thing in me which, as I read it, const.i.tuted my sole claim upon consideration, appeared a deeper indignity than his interest in the dressmaker. It was all a part of that revelation which sears the path of the gifted woman as with a flame, that no matter what her value to society, no man will spare her anything except as she pleases him. At the first summer heat of it I felt my soul curl at the edges. His repudiation of me as an actress began to appear a slight upon all that world of fineness which Art upholds, a thing not to be tolerated by any citizen of it. In its last a.n.a.lysis it seemed that my husband had deserted me in favour of Higgleston quite as much as I had deserted him, and it was for me to say whether I should consent to it. In that mood I met Mr. Harding and signed with him for the ensuing season, and then quite unaccountably, ten days before I was expected, I found myself pulled back to Higgleston. I had wired Tommy, and was surprised to have Mr. Ross meet me at the station.

"Mr. Bettersworth is not very well," he explained, as he put me into Higgleston's one omnibus. "It came on him rather suddenly. Some kind of a seizure," he admitted, though I did not gather from his manner that it was particularly serious until the 'bus, instead of stopping at our store, drove straight on up the one wide street.

"I thought you'd want to see him immediately," the attorney interposed to my arresting gesture. "You see he was taken at his partner's house."

He seemed to avoid some unpleasant implication by not mentioning Rathbone's name.

I scarcely remember what other particulars he gave me at the time; my next sharp impression was of my husband lying white and breathing heavily in the bed in the Rathbone's front room, the drapery of which had been torn hastily down to make room for him, regardless of the finished pieces of Miss Harvey's trousseau still crowding the chairs upon which they had been hastily thrust. Empty sleeves hung down and vaguely seemed to reach for what they could not clasp; strangely I was aware in them of an aching lack and loss which must have sprung in my bosom. I took my husband's hand and it dropped back from my clasp, waxlike and nerveless. I think I had been kneeling by the bed for some time, talk had been going on whisperingly around me; finally the light faded and I discovered that the doctor had gone. The beribboned bridal garments hung limply still on the chairs and mocked me with their empty arms. Presently I was aware that Miss Rathbone had come in with a lamp.

She stood there on the other side of the bed and we looked at him and at one another.

"How long?" I asked her.

"Two or three days maybe, the doctor says."

"Will he know me again."

"The doctor says not."

"Oh, Tommy, Tommy!" I began to shake with suppressed sobbing. Miss Rathbone looked at me with cold resentment.

"You can cry as much as you like, it won't disturb him," she said.

She seemed to have taken the fact that she wasn't to cry herself, as final. In a few minutes old Rathbone shuffled in from the shop and stood peering at Tommy with his little red-lidded eyes, wiping them furtively.

I believe the old man was fond of his partner and it was not strange to him that Tommy should be lying ill at his home. Miss Rathbone came and took him by the shoulders as one does to a grieving child and turned his face to her bosom. She was a head taller than he, and as she looked across him to me there was compulsion in her look and pleading.

"He is never to know," the look said, and I looked back, "Never."

It was then that I realized how genuine her affection was for the feeble, snuffling old man; she would suffer at being lessened in his eyes.

Some one came and took me away for a while, and by degrees I got to know the story. It had been the night before, just about the time I was taken with that strange impulse to return, that Tommy had shut up the store and gone over to the half-furnished room belonging to the Board of Trade, which had become a sort of club for the soberer men of the community. A great deal of talk went on there which gave them the agreeable impression of something being done, though there must have been much of it of the character of that which was going on in a group around Montague when Tommy came in at the door. He came in very quietly, blinded by the light, and they had their backs to him, shaking with the loose laughter which punctuates a ribald description. Then Montague's voice took it up again.

"Rathbone'll get him," he said. "She's got the goods. The other one has probably got somebody on the side; these actresses are all alike."

There was a word or two more to that before Tommy's fist in his jaw stopped him. Montague struck back, he was a heavier man than my husband, but in a minute the others had rushed in between them. They were drawn back and held; Tommy's nose bled profusely, he appeared dazed, and accepted Montague's forced apology without a word. The men were all scared and yet excited; some of them were ashamed of themselves. They suspected it was not the sort of thing that should go on at a Board of Trade, and agreed it ought to be kept out of the papers. Some one walked home with my husband, and on the way he was seized with a violent fit of vomiting.

"Who was it hit me?" he asked at the door, and seemed but vaguely to remember what it was about. The next morning he opened the store as usual and appeared quite himself to old Rathbone, who came shuffling and sidestepping in to his nest at the accustomed hour. About half-past ten the tailor was made aware by the rapping of a customer on the deserted counter, that Tommy had gone out without a word. He must have gone straight to Miss Rathbone; those who met him on the street recalled that his gait was unsteady. She must have been greatly concerned to have him there at that hour, for people were moving about the streets and customers beginning to come in, and in the presence of Tillie Hemingway he could offer her no adequate explanation.

She was desperately revolving the risk of taking him into the front room to have out of him what his distrait presence half declared, when he was taken with a momentary retching; she went into the next room to fetch him a gla.s.s of water and a moment after her back was turned she heard him pitch forward on the floor.

When Rathbone had sent for me by the wire that pa.s.sed me on the way home, he sent also to Tommy's father, who got in before noon the next day. I remember him as a quizzical sort of man always with his hands in his pockets, and a bristling brown moustache cut off square with his upper lip, and a better understanding of the situation than he had any intention of admitting. I had by some unconscious means derived from him that though he was fond of Tommy, he never had much opinion of his capacity. I think now it must have been his presence there and his manner of being likely to do the most unexpected thing, that pulled those same live business men who had stood listening in loose-mouthed relish of Monty's ribaldry, out of the possibility of entertainment in the case that might be made out of his implication in my husband's death, to the consideration of the town's repute as a place where such things could not possibly happen. By the time Forester came on, a covert discretion had supplied the event with its sole consoling circ.u.mstance of secrecy. Not even my family got to know what led up to that blow which had precipitated an unsuspected weakness. It was quite in accordance with what they believed of the life I had chosen, that my husband's death in a brawl should be among its contingencies. Poor Tommy's end took on a tinge of theatricality.

It was toward the end of the second day that he began to respond to the stimulants the doctor had been pouring into him. He opened his eyes and looked at us, conscious, but out of all present time. Feebly his glance roved over the figures by the bed, and fell at last on me.

"Ollie," he whispered, "Ollie!" It was a name he had not called for a long time.

"Oh, my dear, my dear!" I took his hand again and felt a faint pressure.

Miss Rathbone hardly dared to look at him with the others standing about. I whispered her name to him, and his partner's, but he did not so much as turn his eyes in their direction. I could see him studying me out of half-shut glances; there would be an appreciable interval before the sense of what he saw penetrated the dulled brain; I thought I knew the very moment when the significance of our standing all about his bed crying, took hold of him. All at once he spoke out clearly:

"Is my father here?" I fancied he must have hit on that question as a confirmation; but before there could be any talk between them he slid off again into the deeps of insensibility. At the end of half an hour or so he started up almost strongly.

"Ollie!" he demanded, "where is the baby?"

"Asleep," I told him.

"Then I will sleep too," and in a little while it was so.

The Odd Fellows took charge of my husband's funeral, his body was moved from the Rathbones', to their hall and did not go back again to the rooms over the store. Miss Rathbone made up my c.r.a.pe for me. I believe it gave her a little comfort to do so. Forester came and settled up my husband's affairs; he was rather inclined to resent what he felt was an effort of the Rathbones to claim a larger share in the business than the books showed, but he thought my indifference natural to my grief. He was shocked a little at my determination to go on with my engagement; we were not so poor he thought, that I could not afford a little retirement to my widowhood. But in that strange renewal of communion after death, I felt my husband nearer than before. He would go with me at last out of Higgleston. Strangely, I wanted to see Miss Rathbone, but she kept away from me. That was as it should have been in Higgleston. She had tried to get my husband, she had been, in a way, the death of him. It was hardly expected that I could bear the sight of her, though it would have been Christian to forgive her.