A Woman of Genius Part 26

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 cla.s.s," 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 G.o.d, 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 wors.h.i.+ppers.

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 pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.p. 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.