A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

"Effie," I said, "is this a new kind of toy to dangle before your intelligence to keep it from realizing it isn't getting anywhere?"

"Like the love affairs of your friends?" she came back at me promptly. "No, it isn't; it's—well, I guess it's a religion."

I believed as I dressed at the theatre that night, that it was the contagion of Effie's enthusiasm that keyed me up to a pitch that I thought I shouldn't have reached without Helmeth. I had counted so on his being there for the first night, but he was still in London, and for a week I hadn't heard from him.

I needed something then to account, as I proceeded with my part, for the extraordinary richness of power, the delicacy and precision with which I put it over line by line to my audience. I played, oh, I played! I felt the audience breathing in the pauses like the silent wood; the lights went gold and crimson and the young dreams were singing. So vivid was the mood that, when from time to time I was swept out on billows of applause before the curtain, I fancied I saw him there, leaning to me, now from a balcony, or standing unobserved in a box behind the Sandersons' and some friends of his who had pleased, on his introduction, to take a great interest in me. It was a wonderful night, flooded with the certainty of success as by a full moon; we danced under it in spirit—I believe that Polatkin kissed me; two of my young men I saw with their hands on one another's shoulders, capering in the wings as I was being drawn before the curtain again and again to bob and smile like a cuckoo out of a clock, striking the perfect hour. And through it all was the sense of my beloved, the leaf-light touch of his kiss on my cheek, the pressure of his arm, so poignant that as I came out of the theatre late with Effie and her husband, I thought I could not bear it to go back to my room and find it empty.

"Willis," I said to my brother-in-law, "you must lend me my sister to-night." I was sitting between them in the carriage, each of them holding a hand. I do not know what they were able to get of my acting, but nothing could have kept from them the knowledge of my tremendous success. I could see though, that in his excited state it wasn't going to be easy for him to spare his young wife, and that made it easier for me as we drew up in front of my door to change my mind suddenly and send her back with him. What really influenced me was the certainty that I could not bear even for Effie to disturb the sense of my lover's presence which I seemed to feel brooding over the room. I went up the steps warm with it.

I had a moment of thinking as I opened the door and found the lights turned on, that my maid had left them so in anticipation of my return, and then I saw him. He was sitting by the dying fire; he had not heard me come up the stair, for his head was in his hands. He turned then at my exclamation, and I had time, before we crossed the width of the room to one another, to think that the attitude in which I had found him and the new writing of anxiety in his face, as he turned it to me, had its source in his finding me in what looked like a permanent relation to a theatre of my own. For a moment I thought that, and then my apprehension was buried on his breast.

"Oh, my love, my love!" He held me off from him to let his eyes rove tenderly over my face, my breast, my hair. I do not know if he remembered the words he had spoken to me so long ago, or if they came spontaneously to the command of the old desire: "Oh, you beauty—you wonder...."

Presently we moved to sit down, and stumbled over his bag upon the floor beside his chair. It brought me back to the miracle of his being there and to the certainty that he must have come to me direct from the steamer.

"On the Cunarder," he admitted, "six days and a half. O Lord!" His gesture was expressive of the extreme weariness of impatience. "I came ashore with the quarantine officers. I couldn't cable. I left at two hours' notice."

It occurred to me that he must have at least come ashore before sunset, and in that case he couldn't have come straight to me. I began to feel something ominous in the presence there of his bag. His overcoat, though the evening was so warm, lay beyond him on another chair. It flashed over me in a wild way that he had come to some sudden determination—he had been at the theatre that night—he had taken my being there in that circumstance as final—perhaps he meant to abandon me to my art, to surrender me at least to its more importunate claim. He followed my thought dully from far off.