A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

I have thought since, that we might have made more of our love, if we had but seen somewhere in the world the process of its being so made; if we could have moved for a time in a footing of intimacy among other pairs who had produced out of as unlikely material, a competent and satisfying frame of life. We did not know any but theatrical people among whom the wife had interests apart from her husband. That is where Taylorville betrayed us. And now you know what I meant when I said in the beginning that the social ideal, in which I was bred, is the villain of my plot; for we wished sincerely for the best, and the best that we knew was cast only in one mould. I have begun to think indeed, that this, more than anything else, accounts for the personal disaster which waits so often on the heels of genius, that we assume it to be the inalienable condition. For genius tends to spring from that stratum of society for which, when it has come to its full flower, it is most unfit, and it comes up slanting and aside like a blade of grass under a potsherd of the broken mould of unrelated ideals. Somewhere there must have been men and women working out our situation and working it out successfully, but the only example life afforded us was not of the acceptable pattern. Still my agreement with Mr. Garrett, that it was after all the pattern, saved us from mutual accusation and recrimination.

Concerned as I was to make the most and the best of him, I kept looking out all the way after the train struck into the southwest, for every intimation of the life there which would have helped me to get at the springs of his behaviour, and was by turns shocked away from its bleakness and drawn with a rush of sympathy toward what a man must endure to live in it. If I saw myself as he had sometimes sketched me, filling its bleak and unprofitable reaches with my gift as with flame and flower, I was as many times shudderingly brought face to face with the question as to where, in the wilderness, I was to find wherewithal to go on burning. At Los Angeles, a town of which I had heard him speak as a place with a spirit with which he was in sympathy, I had nothing to look at for a week but a great deal of rather formless, wooden architecture expressing nothing so much as the attempt to reconcile Taylorvillian tastes and perceptions with a subtropical opportunity.

I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at the time it was notable for a disposition to take the amplitude of its pretension for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had dwindled to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans. I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained prettiness and dared to dispense with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal had its way with us, I saw that the land had set its mark on him.

He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed. There are times, no doubt, when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I had spread the crest of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable, enchanting; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the exigencies of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's attitude was an additional harassment. And there was so little else I could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient to the necessity of keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living together.

"At any rate," I said, consoling myself for his scant hours with me, "we shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say——" something curiously like embarrassment suffused him.

"I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena ... at the Howards' ... the girls are there, you know." I didn't know, and the circumstance of its having been kept from me smacked of offence. Why, since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the children; ... why not have at least included me in a community of interest with them?

"I thought," he extenuated, "that the girls were the chief obstacle to your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if you didn't have them thrust too much upon you."

"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity in his avoidance of the main issue. "It isn't the girls—it isn't anything of yours, it is something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into the family with me."

"It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me about that?"

He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward. I had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another path to my recently awakened resentment.