A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

That I should have felt it so, was no doubt a part of that Taylorvillian fallacy in which I had been reared, that all that was precious and desirable was shed as the natural flower and fruit of goodness. Here confronted with the concrete preciousness of the shop windows, I realized that if there had been anything originally sound in that proposition, I had at least missed the particular kind of goodness to which it was chargeable. I wanted, I absurdly wanted just then to collect my arrears of privilege and consideration in terms of hardwood furniture and afternoon teakettles, in graceful, feminine leisure, all the traditional sanctity and enthronement of women, for which I had paid with my body, with maternal anxieties and wifely submission. What glimmered on my horizon was the realization that it was not in such appreciable coin the debt was paid, the beginning of knowledge that seldom, except by accident, is it paid at all. What I learned from Pauline was that most of it came by way of the bargain counter. Not even the Shining Destiny was due to arrive merely by reason of your own private conviction of being fit, but demanded something to be laid down for it; though if you had named the whole price to me at that juncture, I should have refused to pay.

Besides all this, the most memorable thing that came of my visit to Pauline was that I went to the theatre. It was Henry's suggestion; he thought I wanted cheering. Pauline was not going out much that season and her reluctance to claim my attention, in the face of my bereavement, to her own approaching Event, threw at times a shadow of constraint on our quiet evenings. Henry had fallen into a way of taking me out for timid and Higglestonian glimpses of the night sights of the city, but I am not sure it was the obligation of hospitality which led him to propose the theatre. I recall that he displayed a particular knowingness about what he styled "the attractions." What surprised me most was that I discovered no qualms in myself over a proceeding so at variance with my bringing up; and the piece, a broad comedy of Henry's selection, made no particular impression on me other than the singular one of having known a great deal about it before. My criticism of the acting brought Pauline around with a swing from the City Cousin attitude in which she had initiated the experience for me, to one æsthetically sympathetic.

"The things men choose, my dear—and to anybody who has been saturated in Shakespeare as you have! You really must see Modjeska; it will be an inspiration to you. Henry, you must take her to see Modjeska."

I had not yet made up my mind as to whether I liked Henry Mills, but I was willing to go and see Modjeska with him; we had orchestra seats and Pauline insisted on my wearing her black silk wrap. On the way, Henry told me a great deal about Madam Modjeska with that same air of knowingness which fitted so oddly with his assumption of the model husband. I had accustomed myself to think of Henry as an attorney, which in Taylorville meant a man who could be trusted with the administration of widows' property and Fourth of July orations. Henry, it transpired, was a sort of junior partner in one of those city firms whose concern is not with people who have broken the law, but with those who are desirous to sail as close to the wind as possible without breaking it. They had a great deal to do with stock companies, in connection with which Henry had found some personal advantage. He always referred to it as "our office" so that I am in doubt still as to the exact nature of his connection with it; its only relation to his private life was to lead to his habitually appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air of shrewd reliability. If in the beginning he had any notions of his own as to what a husband ought to be, he had discarded them in favour of Pauline's, and if as early as that he had devised any system of paying himself off for his complicity in her ideals, I didn't discover it.

I saw Modjeska with Henry, in "Romeo and Juliet," and afterward stole away to a matinée by myself and saw her as Rosalind. I do not know now if she was the great artist she seemed, it is so long since I have seen her, but she sufficed. I had no words in which to express my extraordinary sense of possession in her, the profound, excluding intimacy of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial pillow I remained walking up and down in my room in a state of intense, inarticulate excitement. I did not think concretely of the stage nor of acting; what I had news of, was a country of large impulses and satisfying movement. I felt myself strong, had I but known the way, to set out for it. When I found sleep at last, it was to dream, not of the theatre, but of Helmeth Garrett. I was made aware of him first by a sense of fulness about my heart, and then I came upon him looking as he had looked last in the Willesden woods, writing at a table, a pale blur about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red boughs of sycamore and oak depended through the dream-fogged atmosphere. I stood and read over his shoulder what he wrote, and though the words escaped me, the meaning of them put all straight between us. He turned as he wrote and looked at me with a look that set us back in the wrapt intimacy of the flaming forest ... somehow we had got there and found it softly dark! In the interval between my dream and morning, that kiss which had been the source of so much secret blame and secret exultation was somehow accounted for: it was a waif out of the country of Rosalind and Juliet. The sense of a vital readjustment remained with me all that day; there had been after all, in the common phrase, "something between us." But I explained the recrudescence of memory on the basis that it was from Helmeth Garrett that I had first heard of Chicago and Modjeska.

I came back to Higgleston reasonably well, with some fine points of achievement twinkling ahead of me, to have my new-found sense of direction put all at fault by the trivial circumstance of Tommy's having papered the living room. The walls when we took the house, had been finished hard and white, much in need of renewing, from the expense of which our immediate plunge into the cares of a family had prevented us. Casting about for any way of ridding it against my return, of the sadness of association, Tommy had hit upon the idea of papering the room himself in the evenings after closing hours, and by way of keeping it a pleasant surprise, had chosen the paper to his own taste. Any one who kept house in the early 80's will recall a type of paper then in vogue, of large unintelligent arabesques of a liverish bronzy hue, parting at regular intervals upon Neapolitan landscapes of pronounced pinks and blues. Tommy's landscapes achieved the added atrocity of having Japanese ladies walking about in them, and though the room wanted lighting, the paper was very dark. It must have cost him something too! From the amount of his salary which he had remitted for my hospital expenses he could hardly have left himself money to pay for his meals at Higgleston's one doubtful restaurant. The appearance of the kitchen, indeed, suggested that he had made most of them on crackers and tinned ham.

I was glad to have discovered this before I said to him how much better it would have been for him to send me the money and let me select the paper in Chicago. What leaped upon me as he waved the lamp about to show me how cleverly he had matched the borders, was the surprising, the confounding certainty that after all our shared sorrow and anxiety we hadn't in the least come together. I had lived in the house with him for two years, had borne him a child and lost it, and he had chosen this moment of heartrending return, to give me to understand that he couldn't even know what I might like in the way of wall papers.

I suppose all this time when the surface of my attention was taken up with the baby, I had been making unconscious estimates of my husband, but that night just as we had come from the station, the moment of calculating that on a basis of necessary economy, I should have to live at least three years with the evidence of his ineptitude, was the first of my regarding him critically as the instrument of my destiny. And I hadn't primarily selected him for that purpose. I do not know now exactly why I married Tommy, except that marriage seemed a natural sort of experience and I had taken to it as readily as though it had been something to eat, something to nourish and sustain. I hadn't at any rate thought of it as entangling. I did not then; but certainly it occurred to me that for the enlarged standard of living I had brought home with me, a man of Tommy's taste was likely to prove an unsuitable tool.

Slight as the incident of the wall paper was, it served to check my dawning interest in domesticity, and set my hungering mind looking elsewhere for sustenance. We were still a little in arrears on account of the funeral expenses and my illness, and no more improvements were to be thought of; Tommy and I were of one mind in that we had the common Taylorvillian horror of debt. There were other things which seemed to put off my conquest of the harmonious environment, things every woman who has lost a child will understand ... starting awake at night to the remembered cry ... the blessed weight upon the arm that failed and receded before returning consciousness. I recall going into the bedroom once where a shawl had been dropped on the pillow, like ... so like ... and the memories of infinitesimal neglects that began to show now preposterously blamable.

In my first year at Higgleston I had been rather driven apart from the community by the absorption of my condition and the intimation that instead of being the crown of life it merely saved itself by not being mentioned. Now, in my desperate need of the social function, I began to imagine, for want of any other likeness between us, a community of lack. I thought of Higgleston as aching for life as I ached, and began to wonder if we mightn't help one another.