I found her living in one of those curious, compressed city houses, one room wide and three deep, which, after the rambling6, scattered7 homes of Higgleston, induced a feeling of cramp8, until I discovered a kind of spaciousness9 in the life within. It was really very little else than relief from the accustomed inharmonies of rurality, a sort of scenic10 air and light that answered perfectly11 so long as you believed it real. Pauline's wall papers were soft, unpatterned, with wide borders; her windows were hung with plain scrim and the furniture coverings were in tone with the carpets. When ladies called in the afternoon, Pauline gave them tea which she made in a brass12 kettle over a spirit lamp. You can scarcely understand what that kettle stood for in my new estimate of the graciousness of living: a kind of sacred flame, round which gathered unimagined possibilities for the dramatization of that eager inward life which, now that the strictures of bodily pain were loosed, began to press toward expression. It rose insistently13 against the depressing figure my draggled and defeated condition must have cut in the face of Pauline's bright competency and the quality of assurance in her choice of the things among which she moved. Whatever her standards of behaviour or furniture, they were always present to the eye, not sunk below the plane of consciousness like mine, and she could always name you the people who practised them or the places where they could be bought and at what price. My expressed interest in the teakettle, led at once to the particular department store where I saw rows of them shining in the ticketed inaccessibility14 of seven dollars and ninety-eight cents. From point to point of such eminent15 practicability I was pricked16 to think of preëmpting some of these new phases of suitability for myself, finding myself debarred by the flatness of my purse. The effect of it was to throw me back into the benumbing sense of personal neglect with which the city had burst upon me. From the first, as I began to go about still in my half-invalided condition, I had been tremendously struck with the plentitude of beauty. Here was every article of human use made fair and fit so that nobody need have lacked a portion of it, save for an inexplicable17 error in the means of distribution. I, for instance, who had within me the witness of heirship18, had none of it.
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 arrears19 of privilege and consideration in terms of hardwood furniture and afternoon teakettles, in graceful20, feminine leisure, all the traditional sanctity and enthronement of women, for which I had paid with my body, with maternal21 anxieties and wifely submission22. What glimmered23 on my horizon was the realization24 that it was not in such appreciable25 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 juncture26, I should have refused to pay.
Besides all this, the most memorable27 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 reluctance28 to claim my attention, in the face of my bereavement29, to her own approaching Event, threw at times a shadow of constraint30 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 qualms31 in myself over a proceeding32 so at variance33 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 acting34 brought Pauline around with a swing from the City Cousin attitude in which she had initiated35 the experience for me, to one æsthetically sympathetic.
"The things men choose, my dear—and to anybody who has been saturated36 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 orations37. Henry, it transpired38, 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 habitually39 appearing in what is known as a business suit, and an air of shrewd reliability40. 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 afterward41 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 intimacy42 of her art. Long after Henry Mills had gone to his connubial43 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 blur44 about him of the causeless light of dreams. I recognized the carpet underfoot as a favourite Taylorvillian selection, but overhead, red boughs45 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 interval46 between my dream and morning, that kiss which had been the source of so much secret blame and secret exultation47 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 immediate48 plunge49 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 vogue50, of large unintelligent arabesques51 of a liverish bronzy hue52, parting at regular intervals53 upon Neapolitan landscapes of pronounced pinks and blues54. Tommy's landscapes achieved the added atrocity55 of having Japanese ladies walking about in them, and though the room wanted lighting56, the paper was very dark. It must have cost him something too! From the amount of his salary which he had remitted57 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 crackers58 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 ineptitude60, 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 entangling61. 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 sustenance62. 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 harmonious63 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 receded64 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 preposterously65 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 likeness66 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.
As the colder weather shut me more into the haunted rooms, Tommy thought it might be a good thing if I took an interest in the entertainment which the I. O. O. F., of which he was a Fellow, was undertaking67 for the benefit of their new hall. As the sort of service counted on from the wives of prominent members, it might also be beneficial to trade. On this understanding I did take an interest, with the result that the entertainment was an immense success. It led naturally to my being put in charge of the annual Public School Library theatricals69 and a little later to my being connected with what was the acute dramatic crisis of the Middle West.
There should be a great many people still who remember a large, loose melodrama70 called "The union Spy," or "The Confederate Spy," accordingly as it was performed north or south of Mason and Dixon's line, participated in by the country at large; a sort of localized Passion play lifted by its tremendous personal interest free of all theatrical68 taint59. There was a Captain McWhirter who went about with the scenery and accessories, casting the parts and conducting rehearsals71, sharing the profits with the local G. A. R. The battle scenes were invariably executed by the veterans of the order, with horrid72 realism. Effie wrote me that there had been three performances in Taylorville and Cousin Judd had been to every one of them.
With the reputation I had acquired in Higgleston, it came naturally when the town, by its slighter hold on the event, achieved a single performance, for me to be cast for the principal part, unhindered by any convention on behalf of my recent mourning. Rather, so close did the subject lie to the community feeling, there was an instinctive73 sense of dramatic propriety74 in my sorrow in connection with the anguish75 of war-bereaved women. One can imagine such a sentiment operating in the choice of players at Oberammergau. In addition to my acting, I began very soon to take a large share of the responsibility of rehearsals.
I do not know where I got the things I put into that business. Where, in fact, does Gift come from, and what is the nature of it? I found myself falling back on my studies with Professor Winter, on slight amateurish76 incidents of Taylorville, on my brief Chicago contact even, to account to Higgleston for insights, certainties, that they would not have accepted without some such obvious backing. Nevertheless the thing was there, the aptitude77 to seize and carry to its touching78, its fruitful expression, the awkward eagerness of the community to relive its most moving actualities. Never in America have we been so near the democratic drama.
In the final performance I surprised Tommy and myself with my success, most of all I surprised Captain McWhirter. He was arranging a production of "The Spy" at the twin towns of Newton and Canfield, about two hours south of us, and asked me to go down there for him and attend to alternate rehearsals. Tommy was immensely flattered, pleased to have me forget my melancholy79, and the money was a consideration. I saw the captain through with two performances in each town, and three at Waterbury. All this time I had not thought of the stage professionally. I returned to Tommy and the wall paper after the final performance with a vague sense of flatness, to try to pull together out of Higgleston's unwilling80 materials the stuff of a satisfying existence.
Suddenly in April came a telegram and a letter from Captain McWhirter at Kincade, to say that on the eve of production, his leading lady had run away to be married, and could I, would I, come down and see him through. The letter contained an enclosure for travelling expenses, and a substantial offer for my time. No reasonable objection presenting itself, I went down to him by Monday's train.
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1
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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2
disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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expectancy
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| n.期望，预期，（根据概率统计求得）预期数额 | |
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obsession
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| n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感) | |
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convalescence
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| n.病后康复期 | |
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rambling
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| adj.[建]凌乱的，杂乱的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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cramp
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| n.痉挛；[pl.](腹)绞痛；vt.限制，束缚 | |
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spaciousness
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| n.宽敞 | |
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scenic
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| adj.自然景色的，景色优美的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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insistently
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| ad.坚持地 | |
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inaccessibility
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| n. 难接近, 难达到, 难达成 | |
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eminent
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| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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pricked
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| 刺，扎，戳( prick的过去式和过去分词 )； 刺伤； 刺痛； 使剧痛 | |
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inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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heirship
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| n.继承权 | |
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arrears
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| n.到期未付之债，拖欠的款项；待做的工作 | |
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graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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maternal
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| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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23
glimmered
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| v.发闪光，发微光( glimmer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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realization
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| n.实现；认识到，深刻了解 | |
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appreciable
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| adj.明显的，可见的，可估量的，可觉察的 | |
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juncture
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| n.时刻，关键时刻，紧要关头 | |
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memorable
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| adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的 | |
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reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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bereavement
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| n.亲人丧亡，丧失亲人，丧亲之痛 | |
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constraint
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| n.(on)约束，限制；限制(或约束)性的事物 | |
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qualms
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| n.不安；内疚 | |
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proceeding
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| n.行动，进行，(pl.)会议录，学报 | |
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variance
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| n.矛盾，不同 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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initiated
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| n. 创始人 adj. 新加入的 vt. 开始，创始，启蒙，介绍加入 | |
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saturated
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| a.饱和的，充满的 | |
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orations
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| n.（正式仪式中的）演说，演讲( oration的名词复数 ) | |
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transpired
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| （事实，秘密等）被人知道( transpire的过去式和过去分词 )； 泄露； 显露； 发生 | |
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habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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reliability
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| n.可靠性，确实性 | |
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afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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connubial
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| adj.婚姻的，夫妇的 | |
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blur
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| n.模糊不清的事物；vt.使模糊，使看不清楚 | |
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45
boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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46
interval
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| n.间隔，间距；幕间休息，中场休息 | |
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exultation
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| n.狂喜，得意 | |
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48
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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49
plunge
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| v.跳入，(使)投入，(使)陷入；猛冲 | |
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50
Vogue
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| n.时髦，时尚；adj.流行的 | |
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51
arabesques
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| n.阿拉伯式花饰( arabesque的名词复数 )；错综图饰；阿拉伯图案；阿拉贝斯克芭蕾舞姿（独脚站立，手前伸，另一脚一手向后伸） | |
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52
hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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53
intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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54
blues
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| n.抑郁，沮丧；布鲁斯音乐 | |
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atrocity
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| n.残暴，暴行 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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57
remitted
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| v.免除（债务），宽恕( remit的过去式和过去分词 )；使某事缓和；寄回，传送 | |
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58
crackers
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| adj.精神错乱的，癫狂的n.爆竹( cracker的名词复数 )；薄脆饼干；（认为）十分愉快的事；迷人的姑娘 | |
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59
taint
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| n.污点；感染；腐坏；v.使感染；污染 | |
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ineptitude
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| n.不适当；愚笨，愚昧的言行 | |
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entangling
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| v.使某人（某物/自己）缠绕，纠缠于（某物中），使某人（自己）陷入（困难或复杂的环境中）( entangle的现在分词 ) | |
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62
sustenance
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| n.食物，粮食；生活资料；生计 | |
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harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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64
receded
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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preposterously
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| adv.反常地；荒谬地；荒谬可笑地；不合理地 | |
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66
likeness
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| n.相像，相似（之处） | |
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67
undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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68
theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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69
theatricals
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| n.（业余性的）戏剧演出，舞台表演艺术；职业演员；戏剧的( theatrical的名词复数 )；剧场的；炫耀的；戏剧性的 | |
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70
melodrama
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| n.音乐剧；情节剧 | |
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71
rehearsals
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| n.练习( rehearsal的名词复数 )；排练；复述；重复 | |
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72
horrid
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| adj.可怕的；令人惊恐的；恐怖的；极讨厌的 | |
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73
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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74
propriety
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| n.正当行为；正当；适当 | |
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75
anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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76
amateurish
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| n.业余爱好的，不熟练的 | |
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77
aptitude
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| n.(学习方面的)才能，资质，天资 | |
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78
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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79
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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80
unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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