Sarah and I had a flat together on Thirty-first Street. The second winter we had played together, in a comedy Jerry had written for us, with so much success that it was impossible that we should remain together long. To have kept together two players of such distinguished5 and equal quality would have been to miss the lustre6 of achievement which they might each shed on a lesser7 group, wholly without any other excuse for coherence8. Our managers, too, contrived9 to get us not a little advertisement out of the circumstance of our being friends and undivided by success. There was, however, one fact known to us both, though without any conscious communication, which we would not for worlds have made known to an unsuspecting public; and that was that while I was still on the hither side of my full power, Sarah had come to the level of hers.
Sarah was always wonderful in what I call static parts, parts all of one mood and consistency10. She was notable as Portia; as Hermione, absolute. Perhaps the greatest favourite with her public was Galatea, which, besides being well within the average taste, allowed the greatest display of her bodily perfection. Yet with all this, Sarah knew that she was nearing the end of her contribution; knew it perhaps with that prescience of the Gift itself, folding up its wings for withdrawal11. I have never been able to make up my mind whether she abandoned her talent because she had no more use for it, or if it left her because its time was served.
I think we arrived at this certainty about our powers, night by night, that year as we came together after the performance, Sarah as though she had come back from a full meal, with a sense of things accomplished12, but I—I came hungry—always! Sometimes it was merely with the feeling of interrupted capacity, as when one has left off in the middle of the course; when I would continue acting13 in my room, going over my part, recalling others, trying experiments with them, pouring myself out until Sarah, poor dear, fell asleep in the midst of her effort to be interested. Other times I would rage up and down, all my soul baffled and aching with incompletion.
I do not mean to say I hadn't taken a healthy satisfaction in what had come to me, the knowledge of being worth while, of contributing something; not less in sheer bodily well-being14, leisure, beautiful clothes, conscious harmony with my background. I had more feeling of home for that little flat of ours than I had ever known in my mother's house, or my husband's, for the plain reason that its lines and colours and adjustments were in tune2 with my temperament15, as nothing I had had before had been. It wasn't until I had the means to give my personal preference full scope, that I discovered how much of gracelessness in myself had been but the unconscious reaction to inharmonies of colour and line. I had developed, in response to my environment, the quality called charm.
And I was a successful actress. I have to go back to that to get anything like the effect of solidity which my world took on with that certainty. I was developing too, as my critics allowed, and gave promise of steady growth. I was well paid and well friended. I don't mean to say, either, that I did not get something out of being a part of the dramatic movement of my time, knowing and known of the best it afforded. I was integrally a part of that half-careless, hard-working, well-living crowd so envied of the street: I knew a great many notables by their first names. And all the time I wanted something! At last I knew what I wanted.
"It will come," Sarah had faith for me. "Everything comes if it is called hard enough. But you mustn't allow yourself to be persuaded by your wanting it so much, to take any sort of substitute."
That was on an occasion when my Taylorville training had revolted against some of the things that, though they passed current in my world, wore to me the indelible stamp of cheapness. Every now and then some aspect of it struck across my hereditary16 prejudices, and gave me a feeling of isolation17, of separateness which drove me back in time, to condone18 the offences which set me apart in an inviolable loneliness. It was something my manager had said in my hearing about liking19 his leading woman to have a liaison20 with the leading man because "it kept her limbered up."
"I might as well," I said to Sarah. "I could have my leading man any minute." This was true, though it was by no means the inevitable21 situation, and Sarah in acknowledging it had not spared to point out to me the probable outcome of such a relation.
"This is the way we all end, isn't it?" I demanded. "Why should I go looking for an exceptional experience. We both of us know that I shall never come to my full power without passion and I have a notion that with experiences as with everything else, we have to eat as we are helped. And my leading man is the only thing on the plate." And then Sarah had replied to me with the advice I set down a moment ago.
It wasn't, however, that I hadn't seen clearly and enough of the cheapness and betrayal that comes of such irregular relations, to be warned; if only it were possible for women to be warned against trusting. What I wanted, of course, was some such sane22 and open passion as I appreciated between the Hardings and Mark Eversley and his wife, noble, extenuating23, without a shadow of wavering. How, when I was able to conceive such a relation and to discriminate24 it so readily from the ruck of affairs like Jerry's and my leading man's, I came finally to miss it, is one of the things that must have been written in my destiny. Perhaps the Distributers of the Gift were jealous.
The beginning of the new coil of my affairs was in Sarah's going on the road early in January and my finding myself rather lonely in consequence, and going out rather too often to the McDermotts'. Jerry had settled his family at Sixty-seventh Street, then in that intermediate region which was at that time neither city nor suburb. Mrs. Jerry insisted that it was for the sake of the park for the children, though most of Jerry's friends were of the opinion that it was rather for the very thing for which they made use of it, an excuse for calling infrequently.
No one could be on a footing of any intimacy25 with Mrs. Jerry without being set upon by the little foxes of suspicion and jealousy26 which gnawed27 upon the bosom28 that nursed them. Connubial29 misery30 was a kind of drug with her, the habit of which she could no more leave off than any drunkard, or than Jerry could his sentimentalized, innocuous infatuations. All this comes into my story, for slight as my connection was with Jerry's affairs, in my capacity as confidante, it served to set in motion the profound, confirming experience of my art. Or perhaps I merely seized on it objectively to excuse what was really the compulsion of the gods. I could have gone anywhere out of New York to separate myself from Jerry's affair; that I should have chosen to go to London is the best evidence perhaps, that I was not really choosing at all.
It began with my spending mornings in the park with Jerry's children, who were nice children except for the way in which they continually reflected in their attitude toward their father, a growing consciousness of slighting and bitterness at home. Mrs. Jerry made a point of her generosity31 in rather forcing him on me on these occasions, and on the long walks which I fell in the habit of taking very early, or in the pale twilight32 whenever affairs at the theatre would permit me.
I remember how the spring came on in the city that year. I saw it go with the children to school in a single treasured blossom, or trailing the Sunday trippers in dropped sprays of hepatica and potentilla back from the Jersey33 shore. Soft airs and scents34 of the field invaded the town and played in the streets in the hours when men were not using them. A spirit out of Hadley's pasture came and walked beside me. But it was not due to any suggestion of what there was in the invading season for me, that Jerry occasionally walked along with me, for the chief use Jerry had of the earth was to build cities upon.
Jerry drew the sap of his being out of asphalt pavements, and the light that fanned out from the theatre entrances on Broadway was his natural aura. He had developed, he had branched and blossomed in the degree to which the inspiration of his work had been squeezed and strained through layers and layers of close-packed humanity; and the more he was played upon by the cross-bred, striped and ring-streaked passions and affections of society, the more delicate and fanciful and human his work became. His lean figure, now that it had filled out a little, was built to be the absolute excuse for evening clothes, and never showed to such an advantage as in their sleek35, satiny blackness, with a good deal of white front, and the rather wide black ribbon to his glasses which brought out the natural pallor of his skin. His hair, which he wore parted very far at one side, and made to curve glossily36 to the contour of his head, was more like a raven's wing than ever, and had still its little trick of erecting37 slightly and spreading in excitement, especially when he was up for a curtain speech, and was, in the way he looked the part of the successful dramatist, a good half of the entertainment. His contribution to the occasion on which I was good enough to take his children for an outing to the Bronx or Van Cortlandt Park, was made by lying flat on his back with his hands clasped under his head waiting until I had exhausted38 myself with games before he was able to take any interest in me. I would come back to him after a while and sit on the grass beside him. Jerry's way of acknowledging the pains I had been at to amuse his offspring, was to pat one of my elbows with a hand which he immediately restored to its business of propping39 his head.
"Jerry," I said, "I am convinced that something very nice is about to happen to me. Run your hands over the tops of the grass here and you can feel news of it coming up through the stems."
"Well, at any rate you can take it when it comes," he reminded me. "There won't be anybody to be hurt by your good times but yourself."
"Jerry, is it as bad as ever?"
"So bad that if she doesn't let up on it soon I shall do something to bring on a crisis."
"And spend the rest of your life regretting it. Besides there is Miss Doran; you'd have to think of her." Miss Doran was a dancer with a spirit in her feet and a South Jersey accent, whose effect on him Jerry was translating into quite the best thing he had done. It wasn't, however, that I cared in the least what became of her that I had thrown out that saving suggestion, but because it had been little more than a year since Jerry had disturbed the peace and broken the——not heart——let us say the organ of her literary ineptitudes—of Mineola Maxon Freear who had interviewed him once, and taken him with the snare40 of a superior comprehension. Mineola had advanced ideas as to the relation of the sexes, and a conviction that she was fitted to be the mentor41 of a literary career, and had missed the point of Jerry's philanderings quite as much as his wife missed them. With Mineola in mind and the tragedy she came near making out of it for herself, I ventured on a word of caution.
"You don't want to forget, Jerry, that there's one good thing about your marriage; it keeps you from making another one just like it."
"You think I'd do that?"
"It is written in your forehead, Jerry, that you are to be attracted to the sort of woman whom you have the least use for. The kind that would make you a good wife, you couldn't possibly love well enough to live with her."
"I could live with you," he affirmed.
"Then it would be because you have never been in love with me. Look here, Jerry, what does the other all amount to? If you didn't have any one ... like Miss Doran, I mean ... do you mean that you wouldn't write plays at all?"
"I'd write them harder and I'd write them different. How can a man tell? This thing is. Once you know it is to be had, you just can't hold back from it."
"Not even if somebody else has to pay?"
"Why should they?" Jerry sat up and began to pull up the grass by the roots and throw it about. "Why can't they see that all a man wants is to do his work?" I could see at any rate that he was near the breaking point, and I knew that if the break came from Jerry himself, it would be irrevocable. That was what put me in the notion of going away immediately. I had barely saved my face with Mrs. Jerry in the Mineola affair, and I thought if there was to be another crisis I had better clear out before it.
I had put off deciding about my vacation until I could hear from Sarah, who was playing in the West and rather expected to go on to the coast, but now the idea of getting off quite by myself began to appeal to me. It was about a week after that at Rector's, where I had gone with a party of players on the spur of the moment, we saw Jerry come in with the dancer, and an air that said plainly that he knew very well what a married man laid himself open to when he came into a place like that with Clare Doran. I watched them by snatches all through the supper before I made up my mind to send the waiter to touch him on the sleeve and apprise42 him that I was there. What deterred43 me was the reflection that if it came into Mrs. Jerry's poor, befuddled44 head to make a case of his being seen there, the fact that I had stood her friend wouldn't in the least prevent her from having me up as a witness to her husband's private entertainments. I seemed to see in the set of Jerry's shoulders that he expected that his wife would do something, and that it would be unpleasant. The necessity of taking some stand myself, of living myself for or against Jerry's connubial independence, had cleared my soul of sundry45 vagrant46 impulses and left the call of destiny sounding plain above the din4 of supper and the gurgle of soft, sophisticated laughter. The authority of that call, coupled no doubt with some annoyance47 at Jerry for putting me in a place where I had to decide against him, led me to break it to him there that I was about to leave him with his situation on his hands, rather than at a less public occasion.
He came at once with his napkin trailing from his hand and his raven's wing falling forward over his pale forehead, as he stooped to me.
"I was wanting to see you," I said, as I put up my hand to him over the back of the chair. "I shall be leaving the next day after we close."
"For where?"
"London," I told him. "I shall be in time for the best of the theatrical48 season there." I hadn't thought of that as a reason until that moment. "Besides I am crazy to go; I smell primroses49."
"Nonsense, that's Moet '85. Besides, you've never smelled them, so how should you know?" That was true enough; Sarah and I had had six weeks of Paris the summer before and a week in London in August, where it rained most of the hours of every day, but as I said the word I realized that what had been pulling at my heart was the feel of the London pavements with the smell of the dust in the hot intervals50 between the showers, and the deep red of the roses the boys cried in the street.
Jerry stood looking down on me, and his face was troubled.
"I don't blame you for going."
"Come too, Jerry; bring the wife and babies," Miss Doran was tired of sitting alone so long, she stood up as if for going. A flicker51 of consternation52 passed in his face between his divided interest and a suspicion of the reason for my desertion.
"Look here, Olivia—oh, impossible!" It was plain that the dancer was going to make it uncomfortable for him for taking so much time to his good-bye. "I'll see you at your steamer." He clasped my hand with a detaining gesture. I could see him looking back at me from the doorway53 as though for the moment he had seen my destiny hovering54 over me. I have often wondered if Jerry hadn't provided me with an excuse, what the Powers would have done about getting me to London on this occasion.
I had almost a mind the next day to go out to his house and persuade him to drop everything here and take his family abroad with me. That I did not was, I think, not so much due to what I thought such a plan might contribute toward the saving of Jerry's situation, as the conviction as soon as I had decided55, that whatever it was that lay at the end of my journey, I was called to it. I was as certain that in London I would find what I went to seek as though it had been printed in my steamer ticket. I shut up the house and left the key of the flat at the bank. A letter I wrote to Sarah crossed hers to me saying that she thought she would stay on in the West for her vacation. Two days after the theatre closed for the season I sailed for London.
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1
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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2
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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3
replicas
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| n.复制品( replica的名词复数 ) | |
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4
din
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| n.喧闹声，嘈杂声 | |
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5
distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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6
lustre
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| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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7
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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8
coherence
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| n.紧凑；连贯；一致性 | |
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9
contrived
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| adj.不自然的，做作的；虚构的 | |
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10
consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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11
withdrawal
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| n.取回，提款；撤退，撤军；收回，撤销 | |
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12
accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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13
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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14
well-being
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| n.安康，安乐，幸福 | |
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15
temperament
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| n.气质，性格，性情 | |
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16
hereditary
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| adj.遗传的，遗传性的，可继承的，世袭的 | |
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17
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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18
condone
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| v.宽恕；原谅 | |
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19
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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20
liaison
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| n.联系，（未婚男女间的）暖昧关系，私通 | |
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21
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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22
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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23
extenuating
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| adj.使减轻的，情有可原的v.（用偏袒的辩解或借口）减轻( extenuate的现在分词 )；低估，藐视 | |
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24
discriminate
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| v.区别，辨别，区分；有区别地对待 | |
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25
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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26
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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27
gnawed
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| 咬( gnaw的过去式和过去分词 )； （长时间） 折磨某人； （使）苦恼； （长时间）危害某事物 | |
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28
bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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29
connubial
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| adj.婚姻的，夫妇的 | |
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30
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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31
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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32
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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33
jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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34
scents
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| n.香水( scent的名词复数 )；气味；（动物的）臭迹；（尤指狗的）嗅觉 | |
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35
sleek
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| adj.光滑的，井然有序的；v.使光滑，梳拢 | |
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36
glossily
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| 光滑地 | |
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37
erecting
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| v.使直立，竖起( erect的现在分词 )；建立 | |
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38
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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39
propping
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| 支撑 | |
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40
snare
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| n.陷阱，诱惑，圈套；（去除息肉或者肿瘤的）勒除器；响弦，小军鼓；vt.以陷阱捕获，诱惑 | |
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41
mentor
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| n.指导者，良师益友；v.指导 | |
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42
apprise
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| vt.通知，告知 | |
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43
deterred
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| v.阻止，制止( deter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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44
befuddled
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| adj.迷糊的，糊涂的v.使烂醉( befuddle的过去式和过去分词 )；使迷惑不解 | |
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45
sundry
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| adj.各式各样的，种种的 | |
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46
vagrant
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| n.流浪者，游民；adj.流浪的，漂泊不定的 | |
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47
annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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48
theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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49
primroses
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| n.报春花( primrose的名词复数 )；淡黄色；追求享乐（招至恶果） | |
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50
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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51
flicker
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| vi./n.闪烁，摇曳，闪现 | |
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52
consternation
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| n.大为吃惊，惊骇 | |
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53
doorway
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| n.门口，(喻)入门；门路，途径 | |
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54
hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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55
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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