CHAPTER VI
"And you never seem to think I might not want my wife to go on the stage?"
I do not know what unhappy imp prompted Tommy to take that tone with me; but whenever I try to fix upon the point of reprehensibleness which led on from my writing to O'Farrell that I would join him in ten days in Chicago, to the tragic termination of my marriage, I found myself whirled about this attitude of his in the deep-seated passionate Why of my life. Why should love be tied to particular ways of doing things? What was this horror of human obligation that made it necessary, since Tommy and I were so innocently fond of one another, that one of us should be made unhappy by it? Why should it be so accepted on all sides that it should be I? For my husband's feeling was but a single item in the total of social prejudice by which, once my purpose had gone abroad by way of the Rathbones, I found myself driven apart from the community interest as by a hostile tide, across which Higgleston gazed at me with strange, begrudging eyes. I recall how the men looked at me the first time I went out afterward, a little aslant, as though some ineradicable taint of impropriety attached in their minds to any association with the stage.
Whatever attitude Tommy finally achieved in the necessity of sustaining the situation he had created for himself by his backing of my first professional venture, was no doubt influenced by the need of covering his hurt at realizing, through my own wild rush to embrace the present opportunity, how far I was from accepting life gracefully at his hands, the docile creature of his dreams. Little things come back to me ... words, looks ... sticks and straws of his traditions made wreckage by the wind of my desire, which my resentment at his implication in the general attitude, prevented me from fully estimating. My mother too, to whom I wrote my decision as soon as I had arrived at it, in a long letter designed to convince me that a wife's chief duty and becomingness lay in seeing that nothing of her lapped over the bounds prescribed by her husband's capacity, contributed to the exasperated sense I had of having every step toward the fulfilment of my natural gift dragged at by loving hands. Poor mother, I am afraid I never quite realized what a duckling I turned out to her, nor with what magnanimity she faced it.
"But I suppose you think you are doing right," she wrote at the end, and then in a postscript, "I read in the papers there is a church in New York that gives communion to actors, but I don't expect you will get as far as that."
It was finally Miss Rathbone who relieved the situation by pulling Tommy over to a consenting frame of mind in consideration of the neat little plumlet she extracted from it for herself by making me a travelling dress in three days. She brought it down to the house for me to try on, and it was pathetic to see the way my husband hung upon the effect she made for him of turning me out in a way that was a credit to them both.
"You'll see," she seemed to be saying to him by nothing more explicit than an exclamation full of pins and a clever way of squinting at the hang of my skirt, "that when we two take a hand at the affairs of the great world we can come up to the best of them." And all the time I could hear the Higgleston ladies drumming up trade for her out of Newton Centre with their "Stylish? Oh, very. She makes all her clothes for Mrs. Bettersworth—Olivia Lattimore, the actress, you know."
Just at the end though, when we were lying in bed the last morning, afraid to go to sleep again lest we shouldn't get up early enough to catch the train, I believe if Tommy had risen superior to his traditional objection to a married woman having interests outside her home, and claimed me by some strong personal need of his own, I should have answered it gladly. The trouble with my husband's need of me was that it left too much over.
"But of course," he reminded me at the station, "you can give it up any minute if you want to." I think quite to the last he hoped I would rise to some such generous pretence and come back to him, but we neither of us had much notion of the nature of a player's contract.
I had arranged to stay with Pauline until I could look about me, and from the little that I had been able to tell her of my affairs I could see she was in a flutter what to think of me. During the five days I was in her house I watched her swing through a whole arc of possible attitudes, to settle with truly remarkable instinct on the one which her own future permitted her most consistently to maintain.