A Woman of Genius Part 29

"For where?"

"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment.

"Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses."

"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals between the showers, and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.

Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.

"I don't blame you for going."

"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker of consternation pa.s.sed in his face between his divided interest and a suspicion of the reason for my desertion.

"Look here, Olivia--oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering over me. I have often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.

I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as soon as I had decided, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre closed for the season I sailed for London.

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 _n_th 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 a.s.sured 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 t.i.tian 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 sh.e.l.l in which the only kind of society which wasn't open to them, lived, and the man blocking out a pa.s.sage 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 t.i.tian. 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 cochere_ 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 plat.i.tude." I had thrown it out instinctively against his engulfing manner, against everything that rose up in me to a.s.sure 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 a.s.senting 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 s.p.a.ce 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 n.o.ble 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes of explanation in the intervals of kissing.

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