A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world, wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some aspect of it struck across my hereditary prejudices, and gave me a feeling of isolation, of separateness which drove me back in time, to condone the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking his leading woman to have a liaison with the leading man because "it kept her limbered up."

"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to me the probable outcome of such a relation.

"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.

It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane and open passion as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife, noble, extenuating, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able to conceive such a relation and to discriminate it so readily from the ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny. Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.

The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs. Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children, though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling infrequently.

No one could be on a footing of any intimacy with Mrs. Jerry without being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy which gnawed upon the bosom that nursed them. Connubial misery was a kind of drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.

It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children, who were nice children except for the way in which they continually reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her generosity in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the pale twilight whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.

I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back from the Jersey shore. Soft airs and scents of the field invaded the town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.

Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such an advantage as in their sleek, satiny blackness, with a good deal of white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily to the contour of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its little trick of erecting slightly and spreading in excitement, especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under his head waiting until I had exhausted myself with games before he was able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping his head.

"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can feel news of it coming up through the stems."