That he had so held it, transpired in less than a year, in the reappearance of a former wife who turned up at his lodging one night to wait his return from the theatre, where, no one knew by what diabolical agency, Lawrence had word of her, and made what Cecelia called a "get away." What passed between the two women on that occasion must have been noteworthy, but it was sunk forever under Sarah's unfathomable rurality. O'Farrell, who of his class was a very decent sort, had been so little able to bear the sight of beauty in distress that he offered the poor girl an unimportant part as an alternative to starvation, and Sarah had very quickly settled what was to become of her by developing extraordinary talent.
I think no one of us at that time quite realized how good she was; Cecelia Brune, I know, did not even think her beautiful.
"No style," she said, settling her corset at the hips and fluffing up her pompadour with my comb, "and no figgur." But myself, I seemed to see her the mere embodiment of a gift which had snatched at this chance encounter with an actor, to swing into opportunity, regardless of its host. Whenever I watched her acting, some living impulse deep within me reared its head.
I have set all this down here because with the exception of Manager O'Farrell and Jimmy Vantine, the comedian, who was thirty-five, objectionable, and in love with Cecelia, these two women were all I ever saw again of the Shamrock players. Miss Dean I did not meet on this occasion, for though at the end of three weeks, before I had time to tire of travel and new towns and nightly triumphs, she wrote she would return to her work, it fell out that she did not actually return until I was well on my way home.
"I thought she would have a quick recovery when she found out what a sweep you'd been makin'," remarked Cecelia. That was all the comment that passed on the occasion. If Mr. O'Farrell made no motion toward making me a permanent member of his company, there were reasons for it that I understood better later. I had to own to a little disappointment that nobody came to the station to see me off except Cecelia and Sarah Croyden. It is true Jimmy Vantine was there, but he left us in no doubt that he only came because Cecelia had promised to spend the interval between their train and my own in his company. He fussed about with my luggage in order to get me off as quickly as possible.
The very bread-and-buttery relation of the Shamrocks to what was for me the community of Art, had never struck so sourly upon me as at the casual quality of their good-byes. I remembered noticing that morning how very little hair there was on the top of Jimmy Vantine's head, and that he did not seem to me quite clean. I found myself so let down after the three weeks' excitement that I thought it necessary at Springfield, where I changed, to interpose two days' shopping between me and Higgleston. Among other things I bought there was a spirit lamp and a brass teakettle.
CHAPTER V
Understand that up to this time I had not yet thought of the stage as a career for myself. I hadn't yet needed it. I had not then realized that the insight and passion which have singled me out among women of my profession couldn't be turned to render the mere business of living beautiful and fit. I hardly understand it now. Why should people pay night after night to see me loving, achieving, suffering, in a way they wouldn't think of undertaking for themselves? Life as I saw it was sufficiently dramatic: charged, wonderful. I at least felt at home in the great moments of kings, the tender hours of poets, and I hadn't thought of my participation in these things rendering me in any way superior to Higgleston or even different. If I had, I shouldn't have settled there in the first place. If I had glimpsed even at Tommy's exclusion from all that mattered passionately to me, I shouldn't have married him. It was because I had not yet begun to be markedly dissatisfied with either of them that I presently got myself the reputation of having trampled both Tommy and Higgleston underfoot. I must ask your patience for a little until I show you how wholly I offered myself to them both and how completely they wouldn't have me.
The point of departure was of course that I didn't accept the Higglestonian reading of married obligations to mean that my whole time was to be taken up with just living with Tommy. It was as natural, and in view of the scope it afforded for individual development, a more convenient arrangement than living with my mother, but not a whit more absorbing. I couldn't, anyway, think of just living as an end, and accordingly I looked about for a more spacious occupation; I thought I had found it in the directing of that submerged spiritual passion which I had felt in the sustaining drama of the war. I had a notion there might be a vent for it in the shape of a permanent dramatic society by means of which all Higgleston, and I with them, could escape temporarily from its commonness into the heroic movement. It was all very clear in my own mind but it failed utterly in communication.