jerry's play, which had had its premier while i was away, was going on successfully. one of the first items of news sarah told me about him was that his wife was expecting another child, undertaken in the hope that, if she couldn't hold her husband's roving fancy, she could at least fix his attention on her situation. all that she had got out of it so far, was a reason for staying at home, which left jerry the freer to bestow his society where it was most acceptable.
"does she know—miss filette, i mean—about the child."
"not unless jerry has told her—which he'd hardly do." sarah laughed a little, and that was not usual with her; she had very little humour. "fancy is so up in the air about the success of the play, she thinks she inspired it. i imagine they'd feel it an indelicacy of mrs. mcdermott to have intruded her condition on their relation. of course it is understood that there's nothing really wrong about it...."
"it is wrong if his wife is made unhappy by it." i hadn't sarah's reason for being lenient. "somebody ought to speak to jerry."
"you might—he would listen to you. it is just because there is so little in it that it is so hard to deal with."
i suppose i took to interfering in the mcdermott's affairs because i had so little of my own to interest me. besides, i was fond of jerry and didn't see how he was to be helped by getting his family into a muddle.
"but after all," sarah reminded me, "it is his own wife and his own inspiration." it wasn't in me to tell her, even if i had understood it myself at the time, that the secret of my resentment was that it should be so accepted on all sides that one must choose between them. i wanted, oh, i immensely wanted, what jerry was getting out of his relation to miss filette, but i wanted it free of the implication that my abandonment of my husband to the village dressmaker put me in anything like the same case.
"the real trouble with you," jerry told me, "is that you are trying to live in chicago and taylorville at the same time."
not being able to make any headway with him, i went to call on miss filette. i wasn't on terms with her that would admit of an assault on her confidence, i didn't know her well enough to call on her in any case, but i wasn't to be thwarted of good intention by anything so small as a breech of manners in doing it. it wasn't so much the offense of my undertaking it that counted, i found, as miss filette's determination not to hear anything that would ruffle the surface of her complacency. i had to drop plumb into my revelation out of the opportunity she made for me in the question, as to whether the play would or would not go on the road before christmas.
"i should hope so," i dropped squarely on her; "jerry's wife needs him. there's a child coming in april."
"yes," said miss filette; she was giving me tea and she poised the second lump over my cup with an inquiring eyebrow. "have you seen what we have done with the second act lately?"
"anyway," i said to myself as i went, "she knows. she can't skid over the facts as she has my telling her."
but it was the certainty that, knowing, she kept right on with jerry, that drove me back on pauline and henry mills. i fled to them to be saved from what, in the only other society i had access to, fretted all my finer instincts; to be ricocheted by them again on to that reef of moral squalour upon which the artist and woman in me were riven asunder.
what i should have done was to take my courage in my hands and have gone on from taylorville to new york. but the most i was equal to was a fixed determination to accept anything which would take me nearer broadway, which, even then, was to the player world all that the lamp is to the moth. in the meantime i had settled in two housekeeping rooms in a street that i wouldn't have dared to give to a manager as an address; one of those neighbourhoods where there are always a great many perambulators, and waste paper blowing about. there was never anything for me, in the frame of life called bohemian, more than a picturesque way of begging the question of poverty. what i looked for in a lodging, was escape from the bedraggled professionalism which went on in what were called studios, by means of a cot bed, an oil stove, and a few yards of art muslin. that i hadn't managed it so successfully as i hoped, was made plain to me a few days after i had moved in, by the discovery of a card tacked on the opposite door, that read, "leon griffin, the varieté." it was the same theatre at which cecelia brune was playing the chief attraction in song and dance. in the glimpses i had of mr. griffin in the dark hall going in and out, i was aware that he gave much the same impression of unprofitable use that was associated in my mind with the shamrocks.
all this time i kept going through the motions of looking for an engagement. now and then some shining bubble of opportunity seemed to float toward me, to dissolve in thin air as soon as i put my hand out to it. one of these brought me to cline and erskine's waiting room on the day that cecelia brune elected to register her complaint against what she considered a slight of her turn at the varieté. she flounced about more than a little, not to let the rest of us escape the inference that she was not used to being kept waiting. when she had hooked and unhooked her handsome furs for the fourth time, she introduced me to leon griffin, who except for the name, i shouldn't have recognized for my hall neighbour. it was like being slapped in the face with my own hard condition to have him crowded on me in that character before the whole roomful. life seemed so to have beggared him. in broad day he looked the sort of a man who has failed to sustain himself in the man's world, and must reinforce his value with the favour of women. little touches of effeminacy about his dress failed to take the attention away from its shabbiness. his hair had the traditional thespian curl in spite of being cropped short, to allow of various make-ups, one surmised, and his very blue eyes were in a perpetual state of extenuating the meagreness of his other features. being ashamed of my shame at meeting him there, i began to be very nice to him. cecelia, in spite of her magnificent raiment, perhaps on account of it, had been disposed to graciousness. she drew us together with a wave of her hand.
"she ought to be doin' ophelia on broadway," she introduced me handsomely; "wouldn't that get you!"
"i saw you with the hardings last year," griffin assented, almost as though i might think it a liberty. "where are you playing now?" he had the stamp of too many reverses on his face not to estimate mine at its proper worth. he had fine instincts too, for as soon as i told him that i was out of an engagement that season, he put himself on record quite simply. "my turn goes off next week—i'm trying to get cline to put it on the circuit." when we came out of the office together he fell into step with me. one of the young women ahead of us made the shape of a bubble with her hands and blew it from her. "pouff" she said. "there goes another of my chances." she laughed with a fine courage.
"they all go through with it," griffin affirmed. "there's eversley——" i have forgotten which of the well-known incidents he related.
"eversley told me i might come to it. what made you think of him?" i demanded.
"i saw his name in the paper; he's to play here this winter. he's a wonder."
"he said wonderful things to me once." i had just recalled them.
"they'll come true then. eversley never makes a mistake. why, i remember once——" he broke off as though he had changed his mind about telling me. i was wondering if i couldn't get rid of him by stopping in at sarah's, when he broke out again suddenly.
"to think of you being out of an engagement and a girl like cecelia brown—yes, i know her name is brown, cissy brown of milwaukee——"
"i've always suspected it," i admitted, "but it is her looks of course, and the clothes; cecelia has lovely clothes."
"well, so could you if...." he checked himself. "i don't mean to say anything against a lady...."
"i've always suspected that, too," i admitted, "but one doesn't like to say it."
"well, you know what she gets—thirty-five a week. a girl doesn't wear diamond sunbursts on that."
"mr. griffin, i wish you'd tell me what sort of man it is that gives diamond sunbursts to variety girls: i've never seen any of them."
"you have probably, but you don't know it. you meet their wives in society."
"henry mills." i don't know what made me say it; the image of him came tripping along the surface of my mind and slid off my tongue without having more than momentarily perched there.
"is he in business downtown, and has he got a perfectly proper family and too many dinners under his vest?"
"mr. mills's home life is ideal; but i didn't mean——"
"neither did i, but that's the type. they mostly have ideal families, but they couldn't live up to them if they didn't have cecelia brunes on the side.... i beg your pardon."
he had looked up and caught me blushing a deep, painful red, but it wasn't on account of what he had intimated. i was blushing because of the discovery in myself of needs which, compared to the ideal of life i had set for myself, were as much of a defection as anything our conversation had suggested for henry mills. i was conscious in those days of a slow, steady seepage of all my forces toward desperation.
"you'll have to take a company out for yourself," was jerry's solution. "i'll write you a play. i've got a ripping idea—a man, with a gift, and two women, good women both of them—that's where i score against the eternal triangle—each of them trying to save him from the other and breaking him between them." jerry's plays were never anything more than dramatizations of his immediate experience. "you and sarah croyden, you set each other off; i'll write it for both of you." he walked up and down in my little room with his hands in his pockets and his shining black hair rising like quills.
"jerry, how long will it take you to write that play? and how much will it cost to produce it?"
"ten thousand dollars," he answered to the last question. "about eighteen months if i go right at it."
"and i've money enough to last me to the end of february. no," to his swift generous gesture. "you have to live eighteen months on yours—and another child coming." i made up my mind that i should have to speak to pauline and henry mills.
greater than any mystery of creative art to me, is the mystery by which the recipients of its benefits manage to keep ignorant of its essential processes. i have never been able to figure to myself how pauline and henry escaped knowing that the creative mood, the keen hunger of which is more importunate than any need of food or raiment, was to be had for very little more than they spent fattening their souls on its choice products. for it is always to be bought; it is the distinction of genius as against talent, always to know in what far, unlikely market the precious commodity is to be bought. how was it that henry escaped knowing that the appealing femininity which plays so large a part in the success of an actress with an audience of millses, is largely the result of having been the object of that solicitious protection which it is supposed to provoke? with what, since it was agreed between pauline and me that i was not to pay down on that counter what cecelia and jerry parted with cheerfully, was i ultimately to pay for it? now that i had on all sides of me the witness of desperation, i began to be irritated at the way in which, in view of our long friendship, they accepted it for me.
as the holiday season approached, without any change in my circumstances other than a steady diminution of my bank account, i came to the conclusion that the only possible move was toward new york and that i should have to ask henry to advance me the money for it. in view of what came to me afterward it was a reasonable proposition, but i reckoned without that extraordinary blankness to the processes of art which is common to those most entertained by it.
it was a day or two after christmas, from which i had been excused by my recent bereavement, that i went out to dinner there with the determination to bring something to pass commensurate with their usual attitude of high admiration for and confidence in my gift. we had gone into the library after dinner, at least it was a room that went by that name, though i don't know for what reason except that henry smoked there and the furniture was upholstered in leather, as in evanston it was indispensable that all libraries should be.
here and there were touches that suggested that if henry moved his income up a notch or two, pauline's taste might not be able to keep pace with it. henry warmed his back at the gas log and wished to know how things went with me.
"as well as i could expect them here. i've made up my mind to try for new york as soon as i can manage it."
"what's the matter with chicago?" henry's manner implied that whatever you believed about it, you'd have to show him.
"well, i'd have to be capitalized to do anything here the same as in new york, and the field there is larger." i went on to explain something of what the metropolis had to offer.
"i guess the worst thing about chicago is that you're out of a job. people don't get sore on a place where they are doing well."
"no. they generally light out for a place where there are more jobs." i thought i should get on better if i took henry in his own key, but he forged ahead of me.
"if there's anything the matter with your acting, why don't you ask somebody?"
"there's nobody to ask. besides, there isn't anything the matter with it; the matter is with me."
"well, i must say i don't see the difference."
"oh!" i cried. i hadn't realized that they wouldn't just take my word for it. "it is because i am empty—empty!" i trailed off, seeing how wide i was of his understanding. i shouldn't have questioned henry mills's word about the capitalization of a joint stock company; and i resented their discounting my own statement of my difficulties. pauline got hold of my hand and patted it. i wondered if it was because all her own crises were complicated with henry mills that she always thought that affectionateness was part of the answer.
"it is only that, with all your gift, henry can't understand how you need anything else," she extenuated.
"i need food and clothes," i blurted out; "pretty soon i shall need a lodging."
"oh, my dear!" pauline was shocked at the indelicacy. i don't know if she didn't understand how poor i was, or if it was only the general notion of the sheltered woman, to find in complaint a kind of heresy against the institution by which they are maintained. "after all," she caught up with her accustomed moral attitude, "there's a kind of nobility in suffering for your art. it's what gives you your spiritual quality." i thought i recognized the phrase as one that was current in the women's clubs of that period. i took hold of my courage desperately.
"well, i'm offering you a chance to suffer two thousand dollars' worth." pauline's tact was proof even against that.
"you comedy child!" she laughed indulgently.
"you're getting ideas," henry burbled on cheerfully; "all these long-hairs and high-brows you've been associating with, they've filled you up. that friend of yours, mcdermott, somebody had him to the club the other day, talking about the conservation of genius. nothing in it. let them work for their money the same as other people, i say."
"you know you didn't have any money to begin with," pauline reminded me. i was made to feel it a consideration that she hadn't pressed the point that if i couldn't do again what i had done then, there was something lacking in the application. they must have taken my gesture of despair for surrender.
"i guess you were just getting it out of your system," henry surmised comfortably.
it was not the first nor the last time that i was to come squarely up against the lay conviction that whatever might be known about the processes of art, it wasn't the artist that knew it. later, when henry took me out to the car, he came round to what had been back of the whole conversation.
"i suppose you could use more money in your business; most of us could," he advised me, "but you don't want to let people find it out. there's nothing turns men against a woman so much as to have her always thinking about money."
it was a very cold night as i came down the side street to my door, deserted as a country road. the narrow footpath trodden in the pavement looked like the track of desolation, the cold flare of the lamps was smothered in sodden splashes of snow. there had been the feeling of uneasiness in the air that goes before a storm all that forenoon, and in the interval that i had been revaluing a lifelong friendship in terms of what it wouldn't do for me, it had settled down to a heavy clogging snow. i was startled as i turned in at the entry to find a man behind me. he had come up unsuspected in the soft shuffle and turned in with me.
by the light that filtered through the weather-fogged transom i saw that he was griffin of the varieté. now as i fumbled blindly at the latch he came close to me.
"beg pardon!" he had put out his hand over mine and turned the key for me.
"my fingers are so cold," i apologized. i turned my face toward him with the stiffness of cold and tears upon it and there was an answering commiseration in his eyes. i reached out for the key and he took my hand in his, holding it to his breast with a movement of excluding human kindness. if the gesture was at all theatrical i did not feel it. i let him hold it there for a moment before i went in and shut the door.
