A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

There were times when he almost made me share in his distaste for it. That was when I had drawn him into the circle of my professional acquaintances which somehow shrivelled at his touch like spiders in the heat. Understand that I hold by my art, that I have poured myself a libation on that altar, that I value it above all other means of expressing the drama of man's relation to the Invisible, and that I do not think you do enough for it, prize it enough, or use it rightly. But I suppose there is a yellow streak in me, or I wouldn't sicken so as I do at what it brings to pass in the personalities by which it is most forwarded. For since it must be that art cannot be served to the world, except by a cup emptied of much that is most desirable in the recipients, it ill becomes them as long as they fatten their souls at it, to take exception to the vessel from which it is drunk. Nevertheless I used to find myself, when Helmeth was with me, sniffing at the spiritual garments of my friends for the smell of burning. I resented Mr. Lawrence the most; it was not altogether for the incongruity of his possessing Sarah, her fine smudgeless personality and her lovely body, delicate and shapely as a pearl, but for the incontestable evidence he offered me of how low I had stooped. From the peak of my present prosperity, my troubles in Chicago, showed the merest accident, and the distance I had sprung away from them seemed somehow expressive of the strength with which I had sprung from all that Lawrence represented. Not all the care Sarah bestowed on him—and I think the best he could do for her was to provide her in his impaired health with an occasion for mothering—could quite distract the attention from the ineradicable mark of his cheapness.

He was as much out of key with the society in which Sarah's success and mine had placed him, as he was flattered to find himself there. It had brought out in him in the way privation had not, that touch of theatricality which intrigued Sarah's unsophisticated fancy in the first place. He let his hair grow into curls and made a mysterious and incurable pain of his broken health. And though he offered it as the best he had to offer, with humility, he suffered an accession of that devoted manner which had won his way among women of his own class, but which among the sort he met at my rooms was ridiculous. Jerry too, with his married life in dissolution, for what looked to Helmeth, and in the light of his strong sense, was beginning to look to me like an aimless folly; out of all these blew a wind witheringly on the fine bloom of my happiness. We did best when we shut it out in a profound, exalted intimacy of passion.

What leads me to think that Polatkin must have watched me rather closely all this time, is the fact that he waited until Mr. Garrett was gone to London again in the latter part of February, to put it to me that if I really meant to leave the stage permanently, and it was a contingency which, in speaking to me of it, he had the wit to speak seriously, I could do no better for myself than to take flight from it from the roof of my own theatre. He put it to me in his own dialect, mixed of the green room and Jewry, that I had torn a large hole in the surrounding professional atmosphere by the vitality of my acting that winter, and that it would be a great shame to go out into the obscurity of marriage without this final pyrotechnic burst.

I could have, by his calculation, a short season to open with, and a whole year of brilliant success before—well before anything happened. I think by this time I must have known subconsciously that nothing would happen. It must be because no man naturally can imagine any more compelling business for a woman than being interested in him, that Helmeth failed to understand that he could as well have torn himself from the enterprise for which he had starved and sweated, as separate me from the final banquet of success. I had paid for it and I must eat.

We opened in May, not the best time of year for such an adventure; but I suppose Polatkin was afraid to trust me to the distractions of another vacation. It occurs to me now, though at the time I didn't suspect him, that we couldn't have opened even then if he had not been much more forward with the plan than at any time he had permitted me to guess. At the last I came near, in his estimation, to jeopardizing the whole business by opening with "The Winter's Tale" with Sarah in the part of Hermione and myself as Perdita. Jerry was writing me a new play, but in the process of breaking off a marriage that ought never to have been begun, he had found no time to complete it; but why, urged Polatkin, if we must fall back on Shakespeare, choose a part that did not introduce me to the audience until the play was half done? He stood out at least for Juliet or Cleopatra. "Why, indeed," I retorted, "have a theatre of my own if it is not to do as I please in it?" I knew however that what I could put into Perdita of Willesden Lake and the woods aflame, would have sustained even a more inconsiderable part.

Effie and her husband came on to my opening night. I want to say here, if I have not explicitly said it, that my sister is a wonderful, an indispensable woman. When I think of her, the mystery of how she came out of Taylorville, full-fledged to her time, is greater than the mystery of how I came to be at all. For Effie is absolutely contemporaneous. She lives squarely not only in her century, but in the particular quarter of it now going. No clutch of tradition topples her toward the generation of women past. Most women of my acquaintance are either sodden with left-over conventions, or blowsy with racing after the to-be, but Effie is compacted, tucked in, detached from but distinctly related to her background of Montecito. She was president of the Woman's Club, chairman of the book committee of the circulating library, and though she had a letter every morning and a telegram every night from the woman with whom she had left her two babies, it didn't prevent her in the week she spent with me, from getting into touch with more Forward Movements than I was aware were in operation in New York.

"But, good heavens, Effie, how can you find time for them? It's as much as I can do to attend to my own job."

"Oh, you! You're a forward movement yourself. All I am doing is herding the others up to keep step with you. You know, Olivia, I've wondered if you didn't feel lonely at times, so far ahead that you don't find anybody to line up with. Every time I see a woman step out of the ranks in some achievement of her own, I think, 'Now, Olivia will have company.'"

"But, heavens!" I said again. "I'm not thinking of the others at all. I don't even know that there are others, or at least who they are. I'm a squirrel in a cage. I go round because I must. I don't know what comes of it."

"I'll tell you what comes—women everywhere getting courage to live lives of their own. Do you remember what you went through in Higgleston? Well, the more women there are like you, the less there will be of that for any of them. It is the conscious movement of us all toward liberty that's going round with you." I was dashed by the breadth and brightness of her view.