I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September. Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction.
The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it very aptly.
"I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me.
CHAPTER IX
We had the good fortune that year, Sarah and I, to be with a manager who redeemed many O'Farrells. The Hardings—for his wife, under her stage name of Estelle Manning, played with him and was the better half of all his counsels—were of the sort of actor-managers to whom, if the American stage ever arrives at anything commensurate with its opportunity, it will owe much. They were not either of them of the stripe of genius, but up to the limit of their endowment, sound, sincere and able to interpret life to the people through the virtue of being so humanly of the people themselves. It was very good for me to be with them, not only for the stage craft they taught me, but for the healing of my mind against the contagion of irresponsibility. The Hardings taught me my way about the professional world, the management of my gift, its market value, but I am not sure I do not owe much more to the fact that they loved one another quite simply and devotedly, and to the certainty which they seemed to make for us all that loyalty, truth, and forbearance were part of the natural order of things.
I was aware, when I was with the Shamrocks, of a subconscious current against which any mention of my husband appeared a kind of gaucherie; it was wholesome for me then, to find it expected of me by the Hardings that I should act better after I had received a long, affectionate letter from Tommy, and to be able to refer to it quite unaffectedly. Everybody in the company took the greatest interest in his coming on at Christmas to spend four days with me.
We had a carefully chosen company, and clean, straightforward plays which met with gratifying success. At the end of February, when traffic was tied up during the great ice storm, I was near enough to get home to Taylorville and spend a week there.
Tommy came to meet me and we were all happy together, mother sitting nearly inarticulate in her chair, pleased as a child to see me doing all the parts in our repertory, and Effie reading my press notices to whoever could be got to listen to them. I seemed to have found the groove in which the wheels of my life went round smoothly; I was justified of much that in my girlhood I had been made to feel so sorely, set me reprehensibly apart. I remember Forester telling how he had heard Charlie Gowers retailing the incident of my having slapped him when he tried to kiss me, getting a kind of reflected glory out of the incident being so much to my credit.
I went back to Higgleston in May and was happier than I had been in the six years of my married life. I had my work and my husband; all that I wanted now was to bring the two into closer relation; it seemed not unlikely of accomplishment. With what I had saved of my salary, Tommy was able to make quite a payment on the business, and with the release of that pressure the whole grip of Higgleston seemed to be loosed from him. When I suggested that I might get permanent engagements in Chicago or St. Louis, where he could establish himself, he was disposed to view it as not unthinkable in connection with what might be expected from a live business man.