Part 37 (1/2)

The next season was a brilliant one, made so by the strength of my wanting him, and by the sense of completeness and finality which came to me out of the faith that we had been ordained to be lovers from the beginning. It began to seem, in the fas.h.i.+on in which we had been brought together as boy and girl and then mated in ways which, creditable as they had been, yet offered no obstacle to the freshness and vitality of our pa.s.sion, that we had been guided by that intelligence which in any emergency of my gift, I felt rush to save it. That I had been prevented from any absorbing interest until it had grown and flowered in me, appeared now to have come about by direct manipulation of the Powers. I had curious and interesting adventures that winter in the farthest unexplored territory of the artistic consciousness, which tempt me at every turn to put by my story for the purpose of making them plain to you, and I am only deterred from it by the certainty that you couldn't get it plain in any case.

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Dante and found myself convicted of shallowness in never having taken his pa.s.sion for the cold-blooded Beatrice seriously, by finding the evidence of its absolute quality in the circle within circle of his h.e.l.ls and paradisos, the rhythm of aches and exaltations. And if you couldn't get that from Dante, how much less from anything I might have to say to you. After all these years I do not know what is the relation of Art to Pa.s.sion, but I have experienced it.

If I said anything it would be by way of persuading you that loving is not an end in itself, but the pull upward to our native heaven, which is no hymn-book heaven, but a world of the Spirit wherein things are made and remade and called good.

What I made out of it at that time was the material of a satisfying success, and though I got on without him much better than I could have expected, the fact that after all, he did not get any nearer to me than the Pacific coast, had its effect in the year's adventures.

That I missed my lover infinitely, that I was thinned in the body by the sheer want of him, that I had moments of mad resolve, of pa.s.sionate self-abandoning cry to him, goes without saying. One need not in a certain society, say more of love than that one has it, to be understood as well as if one displayed a yellow ribbon in the company of Orangemen, but since I couldn't say it, an opinion pa.s.sed current among my friends that I was working too hard and in need of a holiday. It came around at last to Polatkin himself noticing it, though I believe with a better understanding of the reason why I should be restless and sleepless eyed. It was just after I had heard from Helmeth that he couldn't possibly hope to be in New York for another year, that my manager suggested that it might be good business policy for me to play a short tour in three or four of the leading cities, a strictly limited season which would be enough to whet the public appet.i.te without satisfying it.

”What cities?”

I believe that I jumped at it in the hope somehow that it might be stretched to include Los Angeles, where Helmeth was at that moment, and where I felt sure he would come to me. When I learned, however, that nothing was contemplated farther west than Chicago, I lost interest.

That very day I had a telegram:

”Will you marry me?

”Signed: GARRETT.”

It was dated at Los Angeles, and as I could think of no reason for this urgency, I concluded that it must be because the a.s.sociation there with the idea of me, had been too much for him, and in that new yielding of mine to the beguiling circ.u.mstance, I was disposed to interpret it as evidence that he was coming round. I wired back:

”If you marry my work.

”OLIVIA.”

and prepared myself for the renewal of that dear struggle which, if it got us no further, at least involved us in coil upon coil of emotion, making him by the very force he spent on it, more completely mine. I expected him in every knock on the door, every foot on the stair, and had he come to me then, would no doubt have provoked him to that traditional conquest which, as it has its root in a situation made, affected for the express purpose of provocation, is the worst possible basis for a successful marriage.

On the day on which at the earliest, I could have expected him from Los Angeles, I sent my maid away in order that, if I should find him there in the old place waiting for me, there should be no constraint on the drama of a.s.sault and surrender for which I found myself primed.

Then by degrees it began to grow plain to me that he did not mean to come, that the question and my answer to it, had carried some sort of finality to his mind that was not apparent to mine. By the time I had a letter from him, written at the mine, with no reference in it to what had pa.s.sed so recently between us, I understood that he would not ask me to marry him again. He had accepted the situation of being my lover merely, and I was not any more to be vexed by the alternative. I said to myself that it was better to have it resolved with so little pain, and that it should be my part to see that what we were to one another was to yield its proper fruit of happiness. I found myself at a loss, however, in the application; for though you may have satisfied yourself of the moral propriety of dispensing with the convention of publicity, you cannot very well, with a week's journey between you, get forward in the business of making a man happy. About this time Jerry began to be anxious about what I couldn't prevent showing in my face, the wasting evidence of love divided from its natural use of loving.

”You'll break down altogether,” he expostulated, ”and then where will I be?” He was tremendously interested in his new play, which was by far the best thing he had done, and in the process of getting it to the public he had so identified it with my interpretation that he was no longer able to think of the one without the other. There had come into his manner a new solicitude very pleasing to me, born of his sense of possession in me, in as much as I was the lovely lady of his play, and a sort of awe of all that I put into it that transcended his own notion and yet was so integral a part of it. It had brought him out of his old acceptance of me as a foil and relief for the shallow iridescence that other women produced in him. He had begun to have for me a little of that calculating tenderness with which a man might regard the mother of his nursing child. Night by night then as he came hovering about me he could not fail to observe, though he could hardly have understood it, the wearing hunger with which I came from my work, pushed on by it to more and more desperate need of loving, and drawn back by its unrelenting grip from the artistic ruin in which the satisfaction of that hunger would involve me. Now at his very natural expression of concern, I felt myself unaccountably irritated.

”Jerry,” I demanded of him, ”would it matter so much if we left off altogether writing plays and playing them? _What_ would it matter?”

”You are in a bad way if you've begun to question that? What does living matter? We are here and we have to go on.”

”Yes, but when we go on at such pains? Is there any more behind us than there is behind a ball when it is set rolling? Are we aimed at anything?”

”Oh, Lord, Olivia, what has that got to do with it?” He was sitting in my most commodious chair with his long knees crossed to prop up a ma.n.u.script from which he was reading me the notes of a tragedy he was about to undertake, and his quills were almost erect with the tweaking he had given them in the process of arriving at his climax. It was a curious fact that the breaking off of his marriage, which in the nature of the case could not be broken off sharp but had writhed and frayed him like the twisting of a green stick, by setting Jerry free for those light adventures of the affections which had been so largely responsible for the rupture of his domestic relations, instead of multiplying his propensity by his opportunity, had landed him on a plane of self-realization in which they were no longer needful. The poet in Jerry would never be able to resist the attraction of youth and freshness, but the man in him was forever and una.s.sailably beyond their reach. I was never more convinced of this than when he turned on this occasion from the preoccupation of his creative mood, to offer whatever his point of attachment life had provided him, to bridge across the chasm of my spirit.

”I don't see why it is important that we should know what we are working for; we might, in our confounded egotism, not approve of it, we might even think we could improve on the pattern. I write plays and you act them and a bee makes honey. I suppose there's a beekeeper about, but that's none of our business.”

”Ah, if we could only be sure of that--if He would only make himself manifest; that's what I'm looking for, just a hint of what He's trying to do with us.”

”Well, I can tell you: He'll smoke you out of New York and into a sanitarium, if you don't know enough to take a change and a rest.”

”Poly wants me to go on the road for a while; sort of triumphal progress. He thinks applause will cure me.”

”You're getting that now. What would bring you around would be a good frost.”

”You wouldn't want that in Chicago?” Jerry disentangled his limbs and sat up sniffing the wind of success.