A Woman of Genius Part 8

CHAPTER II

It is no doubt owing to the habit of life in Higgleston being so little differentiated from Taylorville that I was never able to get any other impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other; always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to unpack them. Nor do I think it was altogether owing to what I left there that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. In Taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in Higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. It was as if the rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon the point of continuity with their past.

It was a generous rolling s.p.a.ce set aside for the dead, ab.u.t.ting on two sides on the boardwalks of the town, stretching back by dips and hollows to the wooded pastures. Near the gates which opened from the walk, it was divided off in single plots and family allotments, scattering more and more to the farthest neglected mounds that crept obscurely under the hazel thickets and the sapling oaks, happiest when named the least, a.s.similated quickliest to their native earth. It was this that rendered the pagan touch, for though nearly all Higgleston was church-going and looked forward to a hymn-book heaven, they seemed to me never quite dissevered from the untutored pastures to which their whole living and dying was a process of being reabsorbed.

Higgleston, until this junction of railroads occurred, had been a close settled farming community, and a vague notion of civic improvement had ripped through the centre of its wide old yards and comfortable, country looking dwellings, a shadeless, unpaved street lined with what were known as business blocks, with a tendency to run mostly to front and a general placarded state of being to let, or about to be opened on these premises.

Beyond the railway station there was a dingy region devoted to car shops and cheap lodgings, known locally as Track Town, whose inhabitants were forever at odds with the older rural population, withdrawing itself into a kind of aristocracy of priority and propriety; and between these an intermediary group, self styled, "the leading business men of the town,"

forever and trivially busy to reconcile the two factions in the interests of trade. That Tommy was by reason of his position as managing salesman of Burton Brothers, generically of this cla.s.s, might have had something to do with my never having formed any vital or lasting relations with either community; and it might have been for quite other reasons. For in the very beginning of my stay there, Life had seized me; that bubbling, frothing Force, working forever to breach the film of existence. I was used by it, I was abused by it. For what does Life care what it does to the tender bodies of women?

My baby was born within ten months of my marriage and most of that time I was wretchedly, depressingly ill. All my memories of my early married life are of Olivia, in the mornings still with frost, cowering away from the kitchen sights and smells, or gasping up out of engulfing nausea to sit out the duty calls of the leading ladies of Higgleston in the cold, disordered house; of Tommy gulping unsuitable meals of underdone and overdone things, and was.h.i.+ng the day's acc.u.mulation of dishes after business hours, patient and portentously cheerful, with Olivia in a wrapper, half hysterical with weakness--all the young wife's dreams gone awry! And Tommy too, he must have had visions of himself coming home to a well-kept house, of delicious little dinners and long hours in which he should appear in his proper character as the adored, achieving male.

Not long ago I read a book of a man's life written by a man, in which he justified himself of unfaithfulness because his wife appeared before him habitually in curl papers--and there were days when I couldn't even do my hair!

In the beginning we had taken, in respect to Tommy's position among those same live business men, a house rather too large for us, and we hadn't counted on the wages of a servant. Now with the necessity upon us of laying by money for the Great Expense, we felt less justified in it than ever. This pinch of necessity was of the quality of corrosion on what must have been meant for the consummate experience. I have to dwell on it here because in this practical confusion of my illness, was laid the foundation of our later failure to come together on any working basis. We hadn't, in fact, time to find it; no time to understand, none whatever in which to explore the use of pa.s.sion and react into that superunion of which the bodily relation is the overt sign--young things we were, who had not fairly known each other as man and woman before we were compelled to trace in one another the lineaments of parents, all attention drawn away from the imperative business of framing a common ideal, to centre on the child.

What this precipitance accomplished was, that, instead of being drawn insensibly to find in the exigencies of marriage the natural unfolding of that inward vitality, always much stronger in me than any exterior phase, I was by the shock of too early maternity driven apart from the usual, and I still believe the happier, destiny of women.

With all this we were spared the bitterness of the unwelcoming thought.

Little homely memories swim up beyond the pains and depressions to mark, like twigs and leaf.a.ge on a freshet, the swelling of the new affection: Effie at Montecito, overruling all my mother's shocked suggestions as to her supposed obliviousness of my condition, sitting up nights to sew for me ... the dress I tried to make myself ... the bureau drawer from which I used to take the little things every night to look at them ... the smell of orris.

"See, Tommy; I've done so much to-day. Isn't it pretty?"

"My dear, you've shown that to me at least forty times and I've always said so."

"Yes, but isn't it?... the little sleeves ... did you think anything _could_ be so small? Tommy, don't you wish it would _come_?"

We had to make what we could of these moments of thrilled expectancy, of tender brooding curiosity.

I scarcely recall now all the reasons why it was thought best for me to go back to my mother in August, and to the family physician, but I find it all pertinent to my subject. Whatever was done there was mostly wrong, though I was years finding it out. I mean that whatever chance I had of growing up into the competent mother of a family was probably lost to me through the inexact.i.tudes of country practice. We hadn't then arrived at the realization that the well or ill going of maternity is a matter of sceptics rather than sentiment. Taylorville was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, but at that time no one had heard of such a thing as a trained nurse; the business of midwifery was given over in general to a widow so little attractive that she was thought not to have a chance of marrying again, and by the circ.u.mstance of having had two or three children of her own, believed to be eminently fit. To Olivia's first encounter with the rending powers of Life, there went any amount of affectionate consideration and much old wives' lore of an extraordinary character. It seems hardly credible now, but in the beginning of things going wrong, there were symptoms concealed from the doctor on the ground of delicacy.

My baby, too, poor little man, was feeble from birth, a bottle baby; the best that could have been done would hardly have been a chance for him.

Lying there in the hot, close room, all the air shut out with the light, in the midst of pains, I made a fight for him, tried to interpose such sc.r.a.ps of better knowledge as had come to me through reading, but they made no headway against my mother's confidential, "Well, I ought to know, I've buried five," and against Forester, who by the added importance of having invested all her fortune, had gained such way with my mother that she listened respectfully to his explication of what should be done for the baby. It was Forester who overbore with ridicule my suggestion that he should be fed at regular hours, for which I never forgave him. But I had enough to do to fortify my racked body against the time when I should be obliged to get up and go on again, as it seemed privately I never should be able.

And they were all so fond and proud of my little Thomas Henry--he was named so for his father and mine--Effie simply adored him; the wonder of his smallness, the way in which he moved his limbs and opened and shut his eyes; quite as if there had never been one born before. The way they hung over him, and the wrong things they did! Even Cousin Lydia drove into church the first Sunday after, for the purpose of holding him for a quarter of an hour in her large, silk poplin arms, at the end of which time she had softened almost to the point of confidence.

"I thought I was going to have one once," she admitted, "but somehow I couldn't seem to manage it." She looked over to where Cousin Judd sat with my mother. "He was always fond of young ones...." It occurred to me then that Cousin Lydia was probably a much misunderstood woman.

Of the next six months at Higgleston after I returned to it with a three months' old baby I have scarcely any recollection that is not mixed up with bodily torment for myself and anxiety for the child. I think it probable that most of that time my husband found the house badly kept, the meals irregular and his wife hysterical. I hadn't anything to spare with which to consider what figure I might have cut in the eyes of the onlooker. Tommy s.h.i.+nes out for me in that period by reason of the unwearying patience and cheerfulness with which he successfully ignored the general unsatisfactoriness of his home, and at times for a certain exasperation I had with him, as if by being somehow less quiescent he might have opposed a better front to the encroachments of distress. We did try help in the kitchen after our finances had a little recovered from the strain of my confinement, a Higgleston girl of no very great competence and a sort of back-door visiting acquaintance with two thirds of the community. Her chief accomplishments while she stayed with us, were concocted out of the sc.r.a.ps and f.a.g ends of our private conversations. I could always tell that Ida had overheard something by the alacrity with which she banged the pots about in the kitchen in order that she might get through with her work and go out and tell somebody. In the end Tommy said that when it came to a choice between getting his own meals and losing his best customers he preferred the former.

All this time I did not know how ill I was because of the consuming anxiety for the baby. I remember times in the night--the dreadful momentary revolt of my body rousing to this new demand upon it, before the mind waked to the selfless consideration; and the failure of composure which was as much weakness as fear; the long watching, the walking to and fro, and the debates as to whether we ought or ought not to venture on the expense of the doctor. And for long years afterward what is the bitterest of bitterness, finding out that we had done the wrong thing. To this day I cannot come across any notices of the more competent methods for the care of delicate children, without a remembering pang.

All the time this was going on I was aware by a secondary detached sort of self, that there was a point somewhere beyond this perplexity of pain, at which the joyful possession of my son should begin. I was anxious to get at him, to have speech with him, to realize his ident.i.ty--any woman will understand--and along about the time the blue flags and the live-for-evers and the white bridal wreaths were at their best in the cemetery, it came upon me terrifyingly that I might, after all, have to let him go without it. We were walking there that day, the first we had thought it safe to take the baby out, for it was customary to walk in the cemetery on Sunday and almost obligatory to your social standing. The oaks were budding, and the wind in the irises and the shadow of them on the tombstones, and the people all in their Sunday best, walking in the warm light, gave an effect of more aliveness than the sombre yards of the town could afford.

Tommy had taken the baby from me, for, though I could somehow never get enough of the feel of him, his head in the hollow of my shoulder, his weight against my arm, I was so little strong myself that I was glad to pretend that it was because he was really getting heavy, and just then we pa.s.sed a little mound, so low, where a new headboard had been set up with the superscription, "Only son of ---- and ---- aged eight months,"

and it was the age, and the little mound was just the length of my boy.

I think there was a rush of tears to cover that, the realization by a kind of prevision that it was just to that he was to come, tears checked in mid-course by the swift up-rush of the certainty, of the reality, of the absoluteness of human experience. For by whatever mystery or magic he had come to ident.i.ty through me, he was my son as I knew, and not even death could so unmake him.

I dwell upon this and one other incident which I shall relate in its proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional compensation for what women are supposed to be. If a sedulous social ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to find them in a happier way. This would be reasonable if they found them.

What society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the experience of being married.

Whatever proportions the change in my life had a.s.sumed to the outward eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that I began to perceive that I could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to identify my experience with the world adventure. I had become, by the way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from dark to dark; I had touched for the moment a reality from which the process of self-realization could be measured. It was the most and the best I was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable.

I suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that Tommy must have caught something of my mood from me. He didn't seem to see anything ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his crib again, so wan and so little, I sat on my young husband's knee and cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about.

I think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the summer. She was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with Tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, I saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to Tommy and back to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness in all her manner to me. That night after I was in bed she came in her night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and I was too surprised to make any motion of response. That was the first time I remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official occasion ... but she had buried five herself.

Notwithstanding, my mother's coming and the care she took of the baby, seemed to make me, if anything, less prepared for the end. There were new remedies of my mother's to be tried which appeared hopeful. I recovered composure, thought of him as improving, when in fact it was only I who was stronger for a few nights' uninterrupted sleep. Then there was a day on which he was very quiet and she scarcely put him down from her lap at all. I do not know what I thought of that, nor of the doctor coming twice that day, unsummoned. I suppose my sensibilities must have been blunted by the strain, for I recall thinking when Tommy came home in the middle of the afternoon, how good it was we could all have this quiet time together. It was the end of June. I remember the blinds half drawn against the sun and the smell of lawns newly cut and the damask rose by the window; I was going about putting fresh flowers in the vases, a thing I had of late little time to do ... suddenly I noticed Tommy crying. He sat close to my mother trying to make the boy's poor little claws curl round his finger, and at the failure tears ran down unwiped. I had never seen Tommy cry. I put down my roses uncertain if I ought to go to him ... and all at once my mother called me.

CHAPTER III

Very closely on the loss of my baby, of which I have spared you as much as possible, came crowding the opening movement of my artistic career.

Within a month I was in a hospital in Chicago, recovering from the disastrous termination of another expectancy that had come, scarcely regarded in the obsession of anxiety and overwork during the last weeks of my boy's life, and had failed to sustain itself under the shock of his death. And after the hospital there was a month of convalescence at Pauline's. It was the first time I had seen her since her marriage.

I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling, scattered homes of Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp, until I discovered a kind of s.p.a.ciousness in the life within. It was really very little else than relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic air and light that answered perfectly so long as you believed it real.

Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline gave them tea which she made in a bra.s.s kettle over a spirit lamp. You can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to press toward expression. It rose insistently against the depressing figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of Pauline's bright competency and the quality of a.s.surance in her choice of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to the particular department store where I saw rows of them s.h.i.+ning in the ticketed inaccessibility of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From point to point of such eminent practicability I was p.r.i.c.ked to think of preempting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the plent.i.tude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and fit so that n.o.body need have lacked a portion of it, save for an inexplicable error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who had within me the witness of heirs.h.i.+p, had none of it.

That I should have felt it so, was no doubt a part of that Taylorvillian fallacy in which I had been reared, that all that was precious and desirable was shed as the natural flower and fruit of goodness. Here confronted with the concrete preciousness of the shop windows, I realized that if there had been anything originally sound in that proposition, I had at least missed the particular kind of goodness to which it was chargeable. I wanted, I absurdly wanted just then to collect my arrears of privilege and consideration in terms of hardwood furniture and afternoon teakettles, in graceful, feminine leisure, all the traditional sanct.i.ty and enthronement of women, for which I had paid with my body, with maternal anxieties and wifely submission. What glimmered on my horizon was the realization that it was not in such appreciable coin the debt was paid, the beginning of knowledge that seldom, except by accident, is it paid at all. What I learned from Pauline was that most of it came by way of the bargain counter. Not even the s.h.i.+ning Destiny was due to arrive merely by reason of your own private conviction of being fit, but demanded something to be laid down for it; though if you had named the whole price to me at that juncture, I should have refused to pay.

Besides all this, the most memorable thing that came of my visit to Pauline was that I went to the theatre. It was Henry's suggestion; he thought I wanted cheering. Pauline was not going out much that season and her reluctance to claim my attention, in the face of my bereavement, to her own approaching Event, threw at times a shadow of constraint on our quiet evenings. Henry had fallen into a way of taking me out for timid and Higglestonian glimpses of the night sights of the city, but I am not sure it was the obligation of hospitality which led him to propose the theatre. I recall that he displayed a particular knowingness about what he styled "the attractions." What surprised me most was that I discovered no qualms in myself over a proceeding so at variance with my bringing up; and the piece, a broad comedy of Henry's selection, made no particular impression on me other than the singular one of having known a great deal about it before. My criticism of the acting brought Pauline around with a swing from the City Cousin att.i.tude in which she had initiated the experience for me, to one aesthetically sympathetic.

"The things men choose, my dear--and to anybody who has been saturated in Shakespeare as you have! You really must see Modjeska; it will be an inspiration to you. Henry, you must take her to see Modjeska."

I had not yet made up my mind as to whether I liked Henry Mills, but I was willing to go and see Modjeska with him; we had orchestra seats and Pauline insisted on my wearing her black silk wrap. On the way, Henry told me a great deal about Madam Modjeska with that same air of knowingness which fitted so oddly with his a.s.sumption of the model husband. I had accustomed myself to think of Henry as an attorney, which in Taylorville meant a man who could be trusted with the administration of widows' property and Fourth of July orations. Henry, it transpired, was a sort of junior partner in one of those city firms whose concern is not with people who have broken the law, but with those who are desirous to sail as close to the wind as possible without breaking it. They had a great deal to do with stock companies, in connection with which Henry had found some personal advantage. He always referred to it as "our office" so that I am in doubt still as to the exact nature of his connection with it; its only relation to his private life was to lead to his habitually appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air of shrewd reliability. If in the beginning he had any notions of his own as to what a husband ought to be, he had discarded them in favour of Pauline's, and if as early as that he had devised any system of paying himself off for his complicity in her ideals, I didn't discover it.

I saw Modjeska with Henry, in "Romeo and Juliet," and afterward stole away to a matinee by myself and saw her as Rosalind. I do not know now if she was the great artist she seemed, it is so long since I have seen her, but she sufficed. I had no words in which to express my extraordinary sense of possession in her, the profound, excluding intimacy of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial pillow I remained walking up and down in my room in a state of intense, inarticulate excitement. I did not think concretely of the stage nor of acting; what I had news of, was a country of large impulses and satisfying movement. I felt myself strong, had I but known the way, to set out for it. When I found sleep at last, it was to dream, not of the theatre, but of Helmeth Garrett. I was made aware of him first by a sense of fulness about my heart, and then I came upon him looking as he had looked last in the Willesden woods, writing at a table, a pale blur about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red boughs of sycamore and oak depended through the dream-fogged atmosphere.

I stood and read over his shoulder what he wrote, and though the words escaped me, the meaning of them put all straight between us. He turned as he wrote and looked at me with a look that set us back in the wrapt intimacy of the flaming forest ... somehow we had got there and found it softly dark! In the interval between my dream and morning, that kiss which had been the source of so much secret blame and secret exultation was somehow accounted for: it was a waif out of the country of Rosalind and Juliet. The sense of a vital readjustment remained with me all that day; there had been after all, in the common phrase, "something between us." But I explained the recrudescence of memory on the basis that it was from Helmeth Garrett that I had first heard of Chicago and Modjeska.

I came back to Higgleston reasonably well, with some fine points of achievement twinkling ahead of me, to have my new-found sense of direction put all at fault by the trivial circ.u.mstance of Tommy's having papered the living room. The walls when we took the house, had been finished hard and white, much in need of renewing, from the expense of which our immediate plunge into the cares of a family had prevented us.

Casting about for any way of ridding it against my return, of the sadness of a.s.sociation, Tommy had hit upon the idea of papering the room himself in the evenings after closing hours, and by way of keeping it a pleasant surprise, had chosen the paper to his own taste. Any one who kept house in the early 80's will recall a type of paper then in vogue, of large unintelligent arabesques of a liverish bronzy hue, parting at regular intervals upon Neapolitan landscapes of p.r.o.nounced pinks and blues. Tommy's landscapes achieved the added atrocity of having j.a.panese ladies walking about in them, and though the room wanted lighting, the paper was very dark. It must have cost him something too! From the amount of his salary which he had remitted for my hospital expenses he could hardly have left himself money to pay for his meals at Higgleston's one doubtful restaurant. The appearance of the kitchen, indeed, suggested that he had made most of them on crackers and tinned ham.

I was glad to have discovered this before I said to him how much better it would have been for him to send me the money and let me select the paper in Chicago. What leaped upon me as he waved the lamp about to show me how cleverly he had matched the borders, was the surprising, the confounding certainty that after all our shared sorrow and anxiety we hadn't in the least come together. I had lived in the house with him for two years, had borne him a child and lost it, and he had chosen this moment of heartrending return, to give me to understand that he couldn't even know what I might like in the way of wall papers.

I suppose all this time when the surface of my attention was taken up with the baby, I had been making unconscious estimates of my husband, but that night just as we had come from the station, the moment of calculating that on a basis of necessary economy, I should have to live at least three years with the evidence of his inept.i.tude, was the first of my regarding him critically as the instrument of my destiny. And I hadn't primarily selected him for that purpose. I do not know now exactly why I married Tommy, except that marriage seemed a natural sort of experience and I had taken to it as readily as though it had been something to eat, something to nourish and sustain. I hadn't at any rate thought of it as entangling. I did not then; but certainly it occurred to me that for the enlarged standard of living I had brought home with me, a man of Tommy's taste was likely to prove an unsuitable tool.

Slight as the incident of the wall paper was, it served to check my dawning interest in domesticity, and set my hungering mind looking elsewhere for sustenance. We were still a little in arrears on account of the funeral expenses and my illness, and no more improvements were to be thought of; Tommy and I were of one mind in that we had the common Taylorvillian horror of debt. There were other things which seemed to put off my conquest of the harmonious environment, things every woman who has lost a child will understand ... starting awake at night to the remembered cry ... the blessed weight upon the arm that failed and receded before returning consciousness. I recall going into the bedroom once where a shawl had been dropped on the pillow, like ... so like ...

and the memories of infinitesimal neglects that began to show now preposterously blamable.

In my first year at Higgleston I had been rather driven apart from the community by the absorption of my condition and the intimation that instead of being the crown of life it merely saved itself by not being mentioned. Now, in my desperate need of the social function, I began to imagine, for want of any other likeness between us, a community of lack.

I thought of Higgleston as aching for life as I ached, and began to wonder if we mightn't help one another.

As the colder weather shut me more into the haunted rooms, Tommy thought it might be a good thing if I took an interest in the entertainment which the I. O. O. F., of which he was a Fellow, was undertaking for the benefit of their new hall. As the sort of service counted on from the wives of prominent members, it might also be beneficial to trade. On this understanding I did take an interest, with the result that the entertainment was an immense success. It led naturally to my being put in charge of the annual Public School Library theatricals and a little later to my being connected with what was the acute dramatic crisis of the Middle West.