Part 16 (1/2)
”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.