Part 36 (1/2)
Among all the devices with which we confound the Powers forever fumbling at our lives, none must puzzle them more than the set of obligations and interactions that go by the name of business. Unless, indeed, there is a G.o.d of business, which I doubt.
Past all misguiding of our youth, past all time and distance and unlikelihood, the G.o.d who would be wors.h.i.+pped most by the welding of spirit into spirit, had brought us two together only to be rived apart by the necessity which tied us each, not only to our own, but to other people's means of making a living. The two or three hours following on Helmeth's announcement of the accident which had, who knows but at the instance of the Powers which was bent upon uniting us, shattered the point of his attachment to the Mexican scheme, we spent in that drowning realization of the source of being and delight for each in the other, which is the process and the end of loving. And then the withdrawing of whole electric constellations from the city skyline and the clatter of the morning traffic in the street, and the dispersing blueness, let in with them the considerations which whipped us apart.
If there is a G.o.d of business he is of a superior subtlety, for even then we proposed to one another that the best way of being quit of the obligation was to serve our time to it; and it was in pursuance of some such idea that I found myself, toward the latter part of June, going out to Los Angeles to meet Mr. Garrett who would by that time, have come up the coast from Mazatplan to make purchases of supplies. I should have gone much farther than that merely to have touch with him, the warm pressure of his hand, his voice at my ear; all my dreams even, were tinged by the loss out of my life of his bodily presence. It was a singular flame-touched circ.u.mstance that the a.s.sured success of my new venture set up in me a fiercer need.
There had not been time for much in his letters but accounts of his struggle with conditions at the mine and his slow conquest of the water that flooded all the lower levels, of disheartening, incompetent labour and the multiplied difficulty of distance from any base of supplies. But that little was all timed to our meeting again. ”I will explain all that when I see you,” ”We will talk of that later,” were phrases that cropped out in his letters many times. I did not know, even in the act of going there, just what he expected to bring to pa.s.s in our affairs by my being in Los Angeles. I only know that I wanted desperately to see him.
One thing I gathered from his letters, that in the preoccupation and haste of his stay in New York he had wholly missed the significance of my new entanglement with Morris Polatkin. I have to suppose, to account for his never having any other conception of what my work was to me, that he had never known a professional woman or one who worked at anything except as a stop-gap between the inconsequence of youth and marriage. He felt himself, humbly, rather a poor subst.i.tute for the colour, the excitement and gayety of my career--why should so many people suppose that an actress's life is gay--but he balanced that with what he meant to purchase for me by his own achievement. He had, without thinking it necessary to account for it, the idea that is so generally and unexcusedly entertained that I am sometimes hypnotized into thinking it must be the right one, that a woman in becoming a man's wife ceases to be her own and becomes somehow mysteriously and inevitably his. It was not that in all our talk about it, he had any conclusions about the stage as an unsuitable profession for women, but that he was inherently unable to think of it as possible for his wife. We were saved from dispute by the proof I had had in Italy that his inability to think of me as having a life apart, arose chiefly in his need of me, which had in it something of the absolute quality of a child's need of its mother. I am glad now, in view of all that came of it, that I was spared the bitterness of not seeing, in his inability to accept the finality of my relation to my work, anything n.o.bler than an insufferable male egotism.
I have thought since, that we might have made more of our love, if we had but seen somewhere in the world the process of its being so made; if we could have moved for a time in a footing of intimacy among other pairs who had produced out of as unlikely material, a competent and satisfying frame of life. We did not know any but theatrical people among whom the wife had interests apart from her husband. That is where Taylorville betrayed us. And now you know what I meant when I said in the beginning that the social ideal, in which I was bred, is the villain of my plot; for we wished sincerely for the best, and the best that we knew was cast only in one mould. I have begun to think indeed, that this, more than anything else, accounts for the personal disaster which waits so often on the heels of genius, that we a.s.sume it to be the inalienable condition. For genius tends to spring from that stratum of society for which, when it has come to its full flower, it is most unfit, and it comes up slanting and aside like a blade of gra.s.s under a potsherd of the broken mould of unrelated ideals. Somewhere there must have been men and women working out our situation and working it out successfully, but the only example life afforded us was not of the acceptable pattern. Still my agreement with Mr. Garrett, that it was after all _the_ pattern, saved us from mutual accusation and recrimination.
Concerned as I was to make the most and the best of him, I kept looking out all the way after the train struck into the southwest, for every intimation of the life there which would have helped me to get at the springs of his behaviour, and was by turns shocked away from its bleakness and drawn with a rush of sympathy toward what a man must endure to live in it. If I saw myself as he had sometimes sketched me, filling its bleak and unprofitable reaches with my gift as with flame and flower, I was as many times shudderingly brought face to face with the question as to where, in the wilderness, I was to find wherewithal to go on burning. At Los Angeles, a town of which I had heard him speak as a place with a spirit with which he was in sympathy, I had nothing to look at for a week but a great deal of rather formless, wooden architecture expressing nothing so much as the attempt to reconcile Taylorvillian tastes and perceptions with a subtropical opportunity.
I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at the time it was notable for a disposition to take the amplitude of its pretension for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had dwindled to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans.
I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained prettiness and dared to dispense with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal had its way with us, I saw that the land had set its mark on him.
He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed. There are times, no doubt, when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I had spread the crest of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable, enchanting; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the exigencies of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's att.i.tude was an additional hara.s.sment. And there was so little else I could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient to the necessity of keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living together.
”At any rate,” I said, consoling myself for his scant hours with me, ”we shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say----”
something curiously like embarra.s.sment suffused him.
”I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena ... at the Howards' ... the girls are there, you know.” I didn't know, and the circ.u.mstance of its having been kept from me smacked of offence. Why, since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the children; ... why not have at least included me in a community of interest with them?
”I thought,” he extenuated, ”that the girls were the chief obstacle to your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if you didn't have them thrust too much upon you.”
”Oh, Helmeth!” I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the main issue. ”It isn't the girls--it isn't anything of yours, it is something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into the family with me.”
”It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me about that?”
He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another path to my recently awakened resentment.
”Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's sister, isn't she?”
”They don't live together.” He had answered my unspoken question, as though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition in his own before. ”Miss Stanley and the young brother--you remember him at Cadenabbia?--live at the old place. She has been a mother to him.”
”Ah,” I couldn't forbear to suggest, ”and she's mothering your children now.”
”Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?”
”Yes, I am,” I told him. ”I'm jealous of every minute you spend away from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear----” I put my hands up to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there.
”Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our feelings count for something.”
”I couldn't,” I protested, ”you don't understand; there's Polatkin and Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw.”
”A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband--” he broke out, ”think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she should or shouldn't do!” We went over that ground again until we ceased from sheer exhaustion.
It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go back to my work until he could claim me.