A Woman of Genius

by Mary Austin

"You'll pull up," they assured me; "it's because you are really an artist that you show what you've been through!" And they didn't know the half of what that was.

To Henry Mills my engagement with Cline and Erskine, was a step forward into that blazoned and banal professionalism which passes in America for dramatic success; but Sarah knew, and I think I knew myself, that the dance they led us in the spotlight of copious advertisement, was a dance of death to much that the plastic art should be. In this instance it was demonstrated even to the hopeful eye of Henry Mills, for the play chosen proved so little suited to the semi-rural, Middle West cities where we played it, that before the season was half over we were recalled, and, after an empty interval, finished out the engagement in one of those sensation mongering shows with which such combinations as Cline and Erskine clutch at the fleeing skirts of a public they never understand.

It was about a month after the closing of this engagement that I took Sarah's suggestion about applying to Gerald McDermott, but not before I had tried several other things. The truth was, as I knew very well when I faced it, that I had at the time nothing in me. To those who haven't it, a gift is a sort of extra possession, like an eye or a hand that can be commanded to its accustomed trick on any occasion; but to the owners of it it is a libation poured to the Unknown God. I had emptied my cup of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder experience from which it should be fed and filled again, and I had no technique to supply the insufficiencies of my inspiration. Somewhere within me I felt the stuff of power, stiff and unworkable, needing the flux of passion and the shaping hand of skill.

Looking back now from the vantage of a tolerable success, if you were to ask me what, more than any other thing, prevents the fulness of our native art, I should say the blank public misapprehension of its processes. Turning every way to catch the favourable wind, what met me then, was the general conviction on the part of my friends that if you had talent you succeeded anyway, and if you weren't succeeding it was because you hadn't any talent. I suffered many humiliations before I learned how absolutely, by that same society that so liberally resents the implication of any separateness in art, the artist is thrust back upon himself. To do what seemed necessary for the development of my gift, to have a year or two to travel and study, to connote its powers with its limitations, required money; and though there in Chicago there was money for every sort of adventure that stirred the imagination of man, there was none for the particular sort of investment I represented. At least not at the price I was prepared to pay.

The half of what had been put into setting my brother on his feet would have served me, but I learned from Effie, that as much of my mother's capital as had been put into Forester's business, was not only impossible to be withdrawn from keeping him upright, but threatened not to hold him so for as long as it was necessary for mother to see in him the figure of a provider. This had been made plain at Christmas, when Effie had written me that a particular wheeled chair which my mother had set her heart upon because of a hope it held out of church-going, would be impossible unless I came forward handsomely. I did come forward on a scale commensurate with the Taylorville estimate of my salary, which was by no means comparable to its purchasing power in Chicago; and now I was beginning to realize that unless some one came forward for me, I stood to lose the Shining Destiny to which I felt myself appointed. I was slow in understanding that it was not to be looked for by any of the paths by which interest and succour are traditionally due. Not, for instance, from Pauline and Henry Mills.

I was seeing a great deal of them since I had come to Chicago, not only because of our earlier friendship, but because I found myself constantly thrown back on all that they stood for, by my distaste for much that I saw myself implicated in as a theatrical star who had not quite made good. I hated, quite unjustly, I believe, the players with whom for the time I was professionally classed; I loathed the shallow shop talk, the makeshift rooms we lived in, the outward smartness and the pinch of anxiety it covered. I was irritated by my external and circumstantial resemblance to much that I felt instinctively, kept them where they were, and vexed at some cheapness in myself which seemed to be revealed by the irritation. I had been thrown up out of the freemasonry of the preliminary struggle into a kind of backwater of established second-rateness, where there were also second-rate manners and morals and social perceptions. It was a great relief to get away from it to Pauline's home in Evanston, and the air it had of being somehow established at the pivot of existence. Pauline had two children by now, and a manner of being abundantly equal to the world in which she moved, a manner which I was only just realizing was largely owing to the figure of her husband's income. What Pauline furnished me at her home, over and above the real affection there was still between us, was a sort of continuous performance of the domestic virtues.

That faculty for knowing exactly what she wanted, which had led her to make the most of her housekeeping allowance in the days when making the most of it was her chief occupation, now that the centres of her activity had been shifted from the practical to the social and cultural, stood her in remarkable stead. I was so constantly amazed by the celerity and sureness with which she seized on just the attitude or opinion which suited best with the part she had cast herself for as the perfect wife and mother, that it was only when I discovered its complete want of relativity to the purpose of the play or to the rest of the company, that I was not taken in by it. I doubt now if Pauline ever had an idea or permitted herself a behaviour which was not conditioned by the pattern she had set for herself, which she intrigued both Henry and myself into believing was the only real and appreciable life.

At the time of which I write it was a great comfort to me to get away from my own dreary professionalism, to the nursery at Evanston, or to add my small flourish to the scene à faire of Henry's homecoming, made every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, from which, indeed, it took its excuse for being. For all of this was so well in line with what Henry, who with the amplification of his income had taken on a due rotundity of outline and a slight tendency to baldness, conceived as proper for a man's home to be, that he played up to it as much as was in him. He had still his air of knowingness about the theatre, and if there was at times in his manner a suggestion that he might have found it pleasanter to adjust his relation to me on the basis of what I was as an actress, if I had not been quite so much the friend, it was so far modified by his genuine admiration for his wife and his cession to her of every right of judgment in the home, that I was inclined to accept him at his own and Pauline's estimate as the model husband.

It was only a few days before my visit to Gerald McDermott, that I had undertaken to state to Pauline the nature of the help I required and my title to it. I had gone out to dinner and found her putting on a new gown, one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of evening dress and the intimacy of negligée, in which Evanston ladies of that period were wont to receive their lords.

"I'm needing something new myself," I said for a beginning, "and I'm divided between the certainty that if I don't get an engagement I can't afford it, and if I don't afford it I probably won't get an engagement." Pauline stopped in the process of hooking up, to take stock of me.