Past all misguiding of our youth, past all time and distance and unlikelihood, the god who would be worshipped most by the welding of spirit into spirit, had brought us two together only to be rived apart by the necessity which tied us each, not only to our own, but to other people's means of making a living. The two or three hours following on Helmeth's announcement of the accident which had, who knows but at the instance of the Powers which was bent2 upon uniting us, shattered the point of his attachment3 to the Mexican scheme, we spent in that drowning realization4 of the source of being and delight for each in the other, which is the process and the end of loving. And then the withdrawing of whole electric constellations5 from the city skyline and the clatter6 of the morning traffic in the street, and the dispersing7 blueness, let in with them the considerations which whipped us apart.
If there is a god of business he is of a superior subtlety8, for even then we proposed to one another that the best way of being quit of the obligation was to serve our time to it; and it was in pursuance of some such idea that I found myself, toward the latter part of June, going out to Los Angeles to meet Mr. Garrett who would by that time, have come up the coast from Mazatplan to make purchases of supplies. I should have gone much farther than that merely to have touch with him, the warm pressure of his hand, his voice at my ear; all my dreams even, were tinged9 by the loss out of my life of his bodily presence. It was a singular flame-touched circumstance that the assured success of my new venture set up in me a fiercer need.
There had not been time for much in his letters but accounts of his struggle with conditions at the mine and his slow conquest of the water that flooded all the lower levels, of disheartening, incompetent10 labour and the multiplied difficulty of distance from any base of supplies. But that little was all timed to our meeting again. "I will explain all that when I see you," "We will talk of that later," were phrases that cropped out in his letters many times. I did not know, even in the act of going there, just what he expected to bring to pass in our affairs by my being in Los Angeles. I only know that I wanted desperately11 to see him.
One thing I gathered from his letters, that in the preoccupation and haste of his stay in New York he had wholly missed the significance of my new entanglement12 with Morris Polatkin. I have to suppose, to account for his never having any other conception of what my work was to me, that he had never known a professional woman or one who worked at anything except as a stop-gap between the inconsequence of youth and marriage. He felt himself, humbly13, rather a poor substitute for the colour, the excitement and gayety of my career—why should so many people suppose that an actress's life is gay—but he balanced that with what he meant to purchase for me by his own achievement. He had, without thinking it necessary to account for it, the idea that is so generally and unexcusedly entertained that I am sometimes hypnotized into thinking it must be the right one, that a woman in becoming a man's wife ceases to be her own and becomes somehow mysteriously and inevitably14 his. It was not that in all our talk about it, he had any conclusions about the stage as an unsuitable profession for women, but that he was inherently unable to think of it as possible for his wife. We were saved from dispute by the proof I had had in Italy that his inability to think of me as having a life apart, arose chiefly in his need of me, which had in it something of the absolute quality of a child's need of its mother. I am glad now, in view of all that came of it, that I was spared the bitterness of not seeing, in his inability to accept the finality of my relation to my work, anything nobler than an insufferable male egotism.
I have thought since, that we might have made more of our love, if we had but seen somewhere in the world the process of its being so made; if we could have moved for a time in a footing of intimacy15 among other pairs who had produced out of as unlikely material, a competent and satisfying frame of life. We did not know any but theatrical16 people among whom the wife had interests apart from her husband. That is where Taylorville betrayed us. And now you know what I meant when I said in the beginning that the social ideal, in which I was bred, is the villain17 of my plot; for we wished sincerely for the best, and the best that we knew was cast only in one mould. I have begun to think indeed, that this, more than anything else, accounts for the personal disaster which waits so often on the heels of genius, that we assume it to be the inalienable condition. For genius tends to spring from that stratum18 of society for which, when it has come to its full flower, it is most unfit, and it comes up slanting19 and aside like a blade of grass under a potsherd of the broken mould of unrelated ideals. Somewhere there must have been men and women working out our situation and working it out successfully, but the only example life afforded us was not of the acceptable pattern. Still my agreement with Mr. Garrett, that it was after all the pattern, saved us from mutual20 accusation21 and recrimination.
Concerned as I was to make the most and the best of him, I kept looking out all the way after the train struck into the southwest, for every intimation of the life there which would have helped me to get at the springs of his behaviour, and was by turns shocked away from its bleakness23 and drawn24 with a rush of sympathy toward what a man must endure to live in it. If I saw myself as he had sometimes sketched25 me, filling its bleak22 and unprofitable reaches with my gift as with flame and flower, I was as many times shudderingly26 brought face to face with the question as to where, in the wilderness27, I was to find wherewithal to go on burning. At Los Angeles, a town of which I had heard him speak as a place with a spirit with which he was in sympathy, I had nothing to look at for a week but a great deal of rather formless, wooden architecture expressing nothing so much as the attempt to reconcile Taylorvillian tastes and perceptions with a subtropical opportunity.
I do not know what that city may have become since I visited it, but at the time it was notable for a disposition28 to take the amplitude29 of its pretension30 for performance. Its theatrical season, if it had any, had dwindled31 to that execrable sort of entertainment which comes up in any community like a weed when the women are out of town; and if there had been anybody I knew there, I should have been debarred from making myself known to them until I had seen Mr. Garrett and learned his plans. I took to spending my time as far out of town as I could manage, and by degrees a strange, seductive beauty began to make itself felt with me, a large, unabashed kind of beauty that disdained32 prettiness and dared to dispense33 with charm. It was a land ribbed and sinewed with all I had set my hand to, making free with it as kings do with their dignity, and the moment Helmeth came, before the warmth of renewal34 had its way with us, I saw that the land had set its mark on him.
He was thinner, his manner hurried, obsessed35. There are times, no doubt, when loving must be set aside for the sterner business of living, but it wasn't what I had come to Los Angeles for. I was flushed with success, I had spread the crest36 of my femininity, I was prepared to be adorable, enchanting37; and I found that what was expected of me, was to sit by in my room in the hotel on the chance of his having time for me between the exigencies38 of buying cog-wheels and iron piping. He was so tired at times that I was made to feel that my demand upon him for the lover's attitude was an additional harassment39. And there was so little else I could do for him! Not that I wouldn't have been glad to have done him a wifely service, laid out his clothes and seen to it that he had his meals regularly, but what I could do was subservient40 to the necessity of keeping our relation secret. It struck witheringly on all my sweet illusion of what I could be to him, to have it so brought home to me that the uses of affection are largely dependent on the habit of living together.
"At any rate," I said, consoling myself for his scant41 hours with me, "we shall have all day Sunday together. Helmeth, you don't mean to say——" something curiously42 like embarrassment43 suffused44 him.
"I shall have to spend most of Sunday at Pasadena ... at the Howards' ... the girls are there, you know." I didn't know, and the circumstance of its having been kept from me smacked45 of offence. Why, since I had been good enough to come all this distance to comfort him with loving, had he not explained to me that I must share him with the children; ... why not have at least included me in a community of interest with them?
"I thought," he extenuated46, "that the girls were the chief obstacle to your marrying me; that you might get to feel differently about them if you didn't have them thrust too much upon you."
"Oh, Helmeth!" I began to imagine a perversity47 in his avoidance of the main issue. "It isn't the girls—it isn't anything of yours, it is something of mine. It is my art you aren't willing for me to bring into the family with me."
"It is because, then, I'm not accustomed to think of the stage as being the sort of thing that belongs in a family. I thought you agreed with me about that?"
He had me there; if I had seen a way to separate all that I loved in my art, from all that was most objectionable in the practice of it, I should have married him and trusted to carrying my point afterward48. I had a vision of Helmeth's girls overhearing Polatkin advising me about the fit of my corsets, and me calling him Poly. I came back on another path to my recently awakened49 resentment50.
"Just the same you ought to have told me. Mrs. Howard is Miss Stanley's sister, isn't she?"
"They don't live together." He had answered my unspoken question, as though the ideas that were forming in my head had been in juxtaposition51 in his own before. "Miss Stanley and the young brother—you remember him at Cadenabbia?—live at the old place. She has been a mother to him."
"Ah," I couldn't forbear to suggest, "and she's mothering your children now."
"Good heavens, Olivia! you are not jealous, are you?"
"Yes, I am," I told him. "I'm jealous of every minute you spend away from me. I'm jealous of the men you do business with, men who can talk with you, hear your voice. Oh, my dear, my dear——" I put my hands up to his shoulders and cried a little upon his breast; his arms were about me; for me all time and place dissolved only to keep them there.
"Look here, Olivia, if you feel this way, let us go and be married to-day and then we can spend Sunday all together. I did not mean to urge you just now; things are pretty rough with me; it will be a year or two before I can straighten them out, but, after all, I guess our feelings count for something."
"I couldn't," I protested, "you don't understand; there's Polatkin and Jerry; he has written this play for me, we are all tied up together; you know how it would be if any of your partners should withdraw."
"A woman has no business to be tied up to any man but her husband—" he broke out, "think of any other man being able to tell my wife what she should or shouldn't do!" We went over that ground again until we ceased from sheer exhaustion52.
It came to this at last, that he proposed that I should marry him at once; I could go back to Mexico with him. I hadn't to begin rehearsals53 until September; we could have the summer together and then I could go back to my work until he could claim me.
For a wild moment I yielded to the suggestion ... if I could have him and my art ... but I hope I am not altogether a cad. I saw what all his efforts could not keep me from seeing, that even to do that for me, to get me into his place in Mexico and back again would be a tax on him, and to ask him to do it with a reservation in my mind would be more than I would stand for.
"It isn't fair, Helmeth, my letting you think that anything could pull me away from the stage. It isn't that I don't agree with you about how a husband and wife ought to be with one another, nor that I am not entirely54 of the opinion that the atmosphere of the stage is not the place to bring up children the way you want yours brought up; it is because not even the kind of marriage you offer me would hold me."
"You mean that you'd leave me? That you'd go back to it?"
"Well, why not? I left my first husband. I know that wasn't the way it seemed to me then, but that's what it amounted to ... and he fell in love with the village dressmaker." I had never told him that part of my life; I had never thought of it in the terms in which I had just stated it, I saw him grow slowly white under the sun-brown of his skin.
"I see ... if your only idea in staying with me is that I might——Good God, Olivia, do you know what you've said to me?"
"Nothing except what is right for you to know. Do you remember, Helmeth, what I told you Mark Eversley called me?"
"A Woman of Genius; I remember." He was looking at me now as though the phrase were a sort of acid test which brought out in me traits unsuspected before.
"Well, then, I'm those two things, a woman and a genius, and the woman was meant for you; don't think I don't know that and am not proud of it with every fibre of my brain and body. I should have been glad once; if it were possible I'd be glad now to have kept your house and borne your children, and see to it that they brushed their teeth and had hair ribbons to match their clothes."
"Their mother thought that was important." He snatched at this as at an incontestable evidence of my being all that I was trying to show him that I was not.
"It is important.... I remember to this day the effect on me of my hair ribbons——" He broke in eagerly.
"If you can see that ... if you understand what their mother wanted ... things I missed out of my life through having no mother, that I've heard you say you missed partly out of yours ... birthdays and Christmas and good chances to marry when they grow up——"
"I do understand, Helmeth, but what I'm trying to tell you is that I can't go through with it. Those are the things that belong to the woman, that it takes all the woman's time to do the way their mother would have them done, and for me the woman has been swamped in the genius. Oh, I don't say that I'm not a better actress for having tried so long to be merely a woman, for being able even now, to know all that you mean when you say 'woman'; but there it is. I am an actress and I can't leave off being one just by saying so."
"And I can't leave off being a proper father to my girls. I owe them the things we've been talking about just as I owe them a living. I suppose I should have married for their sakes, supposing I could get anybody to have me, even if I hadn't found you. And I don't want finding you to mean anything but the best to them." I had nothing to say to that, and he went back to a thought that had often been between us. "We ought to have married when we were young," he insisted as though somehow that made a better case of it, "if you hadn't begun you wouldn't have been called on to leave it off."
"The point is that it won't leave me. Genius—I don't know what it is except that it is nothing to be conceited55 about because you can't help it—isn't a thing you can pick up or lay down at your pleasure; it's a possession."
I could see that he didn't altogether follow me, that he was not very far removed, and that only by his admiration56 for me, from the Taylorvillian idea that to speak of yourself as a genius was to pay yourself an unwarrantable compliment, and that the most I could get him to understand of the meaning of my work, was what grew out of his being a most competent workman himself. He went back to the original proposition.
"Does that mean, then, that you are not going to marry me?"
"It means that I'm not going to leave the stage to do it."
"It seems to me to mean that you don't love me as you have professed57 to. Oh, I know how women love ... good women."
"Helmeth!"
"I beg your pardon, Olivia." We stood aghast at what we had brought upon ourselves; across the breach58 of dissension we rushed together with effacing59 passion. After all, I believe I should have gone with him if he had had the wit to know that the point at which a woman is most prepared for yielding is the next instant after she has just stated the insuperable objection. Whether he knew or not, the whole of his outer attention was taken up with the purchase of pump fittings.
Understand that I didn't for a moment suppose that I had lost him, that I didn't believe anything but that I could go to him at any moment if the whim60 seized me, that I couldn't in reason pull him back if the need of him arose. I finished out my vacation at resorts up and down the California coast, warm with the certainty that I should see him in New York the next winter.
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1
fumbling
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| n. 摸索,漏接 v. 摸索,摸弄,笨拙的处理 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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realization
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| n.实现；认识到，深刻了解 | |
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constellations
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| n.星座( constellation的名词复数 )；一群杰出人物；一系列（相关的想法、事物）；一群（相关的人） | |
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clatter
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| v./n.(使)发出连续而清脆的撞击声 | |
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7
dispersing
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| adj. 分散的 动词disperse的现在分词形式 | |
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8
subtlety
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| n.微妙，敏锐，精巧；微妙之处，细微的区别 | |
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9
tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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10
incompetent
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| adj.无能力的，不能胜任的 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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entanglement
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| n.纠缠，牵累 | |
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humbly
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| adv. 恭顺地，谦卑地 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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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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theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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17
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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18
stratum
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| n.地层，社会阶层 | |
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slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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mutual
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| adj.相互的，彼此的；共同的，共有的 | |
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accusation
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| n.控告，指责，谴责 | |
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bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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bleakness
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| adj. 萧瑟的, 严寒的, 阴郁的 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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sketched
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| v.草拟（sketch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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shudderingly
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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amplitude
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| n.广大；充足；振幅 | |
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pretension
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| n.要求；自命，自称；自负 | |
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31
dwindled
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| v.逐渐变少或变小( dwindle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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disdained
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| 鄙视( disdain的过去式和过去分词 )； 不屑于做，不愿意做 | |
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33
dispense
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| vt.分配，分发；配(药)，发(药)；实施 | |
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34
renewal
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| adj.(契约)延期，续订，更新，复活，重来 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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enchanting
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| a.讨人喜欢的 | |
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exigencies
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| n.急切需要 | |
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harassment
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| n.骚扰，扰乱，烦恼，烦乱 | |
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subservient
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| adj.卑屈的，阿谀的 | |
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41
scant
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| adj.不充分的，不足的；v.减缩，限制，忽略 | |
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42
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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43
embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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44
suffused
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| v.（指颜色、水气等）弥漫于，布满( suffuse的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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45
smacked
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| 拍，打，掴( smack的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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46
extenuated
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| v.（用偏袒的辩解或借口）减轻( extenuate的过去式和过去分词 )；低估，藐视 | |
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47
perversity
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| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
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48
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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49
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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50
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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51
juxtaposition
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| n.毗邻，并置，并列 | |
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52
exhaustion
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| n.耗尽枯竭，疲惫，筋疲力尽，竭尽，详尽无遗的论述 | |
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53
rehearsals
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| n.练习( rehearsal的名词复数 )；排练；复述；重复 | |
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54
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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55
conceited
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| adj.自负的，骄傲自满的 | |
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56
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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57
professed
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| 公开声称的，伪称的，已立誓信教的 | |
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58
breach
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| n.违反，不履行；破裂；vt.冲破，攻破 | |
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59
effacing
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| 谦逊的 | |
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whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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