It had been a mistake, a natural but cruel mistake, for Helmeth and me to suppose that a way of living could at any time be worth the very sap and source of life. Love was the central fact around which all modes and occupations should arrange themselves. Let us but love then, and live as we may. In all the world there was no need like the need I had for his breast, his arm.
Always the point of our conclusions had been that I agreed with him, that I had thought that failing to repeat the pattern of their mother in his children, I had failed in all, that I didn't any more than he see my way to keeping on with my work and meeting him at the door every night when he came home, in the sort of garment that, in the ladies' journals, went by the name of house gown. I laughed to think that we had not seen before that it was ridiculous. I had no more doubt now, no more trepidation. What burned in me was so clear a flame that he could not but be illuminated. Only let me find him, let me go to him again. At the hotel desk where I paused for my key I asked them to send up telegraph blanks to my room. With them came letters forwarded from New York. I started, as one does at an unexpected presence, to find an envelope among them with his familiar superscription. For the first time I would rather not have had a letter from him; it would be interposing a fresher picture between me and my new resolution, to put him for the moment farther from me.
I saw then that the letter in my hand had been posted at Los Angeles; it was as though he had leaped suddenly all that distance nearer than his Chilicojote, Mexico. I noticed that it was a very thin letter. A thousand conjectures rushed upon me, not one of them with any relativity to what I would find, for when I tore it open there floated out a printed slip. It was a clipping from a Pasadena newspaper and announced his engagement to Edith Stanley.
CHAPTER IX
There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came, though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ... sometimes even yet....
For I did not understand. I was married to him, much, much more married than I had ever been to Tommy Bettersworth, and it wasn't in me to understand how any man can take a woman as he had taken me, and not feel himself more bound than ever church and state could bind him. It was ten months since I had seen him, but that while my body still ached with the memory of him, he could have given himself to another woman, was an unbelievable offence. There are days yet when I do not believe it.
There was nothing any of my friends could do for me. I had the sense to see that and did not trouble them. Sarah, who was the only one who might have comforted me out of her own experience, was all taken up with her husband's declining health. Mr. Lawrence died the next winter, and by that time my wound had got past the imperative need of speech. Effie was expecting another baby and wasn't to be thought of, so I turned at last, when the first sharp anguish was past, to Mark Eversley. He in all America stood for that high identification of his work with the source of power, that it is the private study of all my days to reach. I repaired to him as did Christians of old to favoured altars. That I did so return for comfort to that Distributer of Gifts by whose very mark on me I was set apart from the happier destiny, was evidence to me, the only evidence I could have at the time, that I had not been utterly mistaken in the choice I had made before I I knew all that the choice involved. Eversley and his wife were Christian Scientists, and, though they did not make me of their opinion, I owe them much in the way of practice and example that keeps me still within the circle of communicating fire. I re-established, never to be broken off again, practical intercourse with the Friends of the Soul of Man. I learned to apply directly for the things I had supposed came only by loving, and I found that they came abundantly. I grew in time even, to think of Helmeth without bitterness. What I was brought to see, over and above the wish to provide a home for his children, must have been at work in him, was much the same thing that had driven me to my work; the very need of me must have hurried him into the relief of being loved. It was the only way which his purblind male instinct pointed him, to find an outlet for what goes from me over the footlights night by night. For a man, to be loved is of the greatest importance, but with women it is loving that is the fructifying act.
That I was able to go on loving him was, I suppose, the reason why the shock I had sustained left no regrettable mark upon my career. The mark it left on me was none other than work is supposed to leave on every woman. What I am sure of now is that it is not work, but the loss of love that leaves her impoverished of feminine graces. I grew barren of manner and was reputed to be entirely absorbed in my profession. It was not however, that I had excluded the more human interests, but they had taken flight. All the forces of my being had been by the shock of loss, dropped into some subterranean pit, where they ran on underground and watered the choicest product of my art. If I had married Helmeth Garrett, I might have grown insensible to him, as it was I seemed to have been fixed, though by pain, in the fruitful relation. The loss of him, the desperate ache, the start of memory, are just as good materials to build an artistic success upon as the joy of having. And I did build. I gathered up and wrought into the structure of my life the pain of loving as well as its delight. I am a successful actress. Whatever else has happened to me, I am at least a success.
I never saw him again. I never saw Henry and Pauline Mills but once, and some bitterness in the occasion, came near to driving me toward that pit into which Pauline was willing to believe I had already descended. It was the second season after I had parted from her in Chicago, that some sort of brokers' convention had brought Henry on to New York and Pauline with him, and to the same hotel where Mark Eversley was shut up with an attack of bronchitis. Jerry and I, going up to call on him, came face to face with them.