A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin

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СКАЧАТЬ same thing that Forester does," I maintained, and then quickly to forestall another objection which I saw rising in her face. "If you were old enough to be married at nineteen, I guess I am old enough to be trusted with a few hundred dollars."

      But there I had struck again on the structure of tradition that kept Taylorville from direct contact with the issues of life; anybody was old enough to be married at eighteen, but money was a serious matter. Whenever I said things like that I could see my mother waver between a shocked wonder at having produced such unnaturalness, and the fear that somebody might overhear us. And I didn't know myself what I wanted with that money, except that I craved the sense of being important that went with the possession of it. And of course now that I had been refused it on the ground of sex, it was part of the general resistance that I opposed to things as they were, to have it on principle. Just when I had mother almost convinced that she ought to give it to me, she made it nearly impossible for me to accept, by asking Forester what she ought to do about it. When I had demanded it as the evidence of my taking rank with my brother as a personage, it was insufferable that it should come to me as a concession of his amiability.

      What I really wanted of course was to have it put under my plate with an affectionate speech about its being the legacy of a soldier and the witness of his integrity, coupled with the hope that I would spend it in a manner to give pleasure to my dear father, who was no doubt looking on at this happy incident.

      There was nothing in me then – there is nothing now – which advised me of being inappropriately the object of such an address, or my replying to it as gallantly as the junior clerk of the Coöperative. To do Forester justice, he came out squarely on the question of my being entitled to the money if he was, but he contrived backhandedly to convey his sense of my obtuseness in not deferring sentimentally to a male ascendancy that I did not intrinsically feel; and I can go back now to these disquieting episodes as the beginning of that maladjustment of my earlier years, in not having a man about toward whom I could actually experience the deference I was expected to exhibit.

      Well, I had my check for the same amount and on the same occasion as my brother's, but the feeling in the air of its being merely a concession to my forwardness, prevented me from making any return for it that interfered with Forester's carrying off the situation of coming into his father's legacy on coming of age, quite to my mother's satisfaction. What it might have made for graciousness for once in my life to have been the centre of that dramatic affectionateness, I can only guess. Firm in the determination that since no sentiment went to its bestowal none should go to its acknowledgment, I carried my check upstairs and shook all of the rugs out of the window to account for my eyes being red at ten o'clock in the morning. And that was the way the Powers took to provide against the complete submergence of the actress in the young lady, for though it turned out that I did spend the greater part of the money on my wedding clothes, a portion of it went for the only technical training I ever had.

      The real business of a young lady in Taylorville was getting married, but to avoid an obviousness in the interim, she played the piano or painted on satin or became interested in missions. If my money had fallen in eight months earlier I should undoubtedly have spent it on the third year at Montecito; as it was I decided to study elocution. It appeared a wholly fortuitous choice. I was not supposed to have any talent for it, but I burned to spend some of my money sensibly, and it was admittedly sensible for a young lady to take lessons in something. Effie was having music, Flora Haines painted plaques; when Olivia joined Professor Winter's elocution classes at Temperance Hall mother said it looked like throwing money away, but of course I could teach in case anything happened, which meant in case of my not being married or being left a widow with young children.

      Professor Winter was the kind of man who would have collected patch boxes and painted miniatures on ladies' fans; not that he could have done anything of the sort on his income, but it would have suited the kind of man he was. He had small neat ways and nice little tricks of discrimination, and microscopic enthusiasms that hovered and fluttered, enough of them when it came to the rendering of a favourite passage, to produce a kind of haze of appreciation like a swarm of midges. Not being able to afford patch boxes or Louis XV enamels, he collected accents instead. The man's memory for phonic variations was extraordinary; all our accustomed speech was a wild garden over which he took little flights and drops and humming poises, extracting, as it were by sips, your private history, things you would have probably told for the asking, but objected to having wrested from your betraying tongue. He would come teetering forward on his neat little boots, upon the toes of which he appeared to elevate himself by pressing the tips of his fingers very firmly together, and when you committed yourself no farther than to remark on the state of the weather or the election outlook, he would want to know if you hadn't spent some time of your youth in the South, or if it was your maternal or paternal grandfather who was Norwegian. Either of which would be true and annoying, particularly as you weren't aware of speaking other than the rest of the world, for if there was anything quite and completely abhorrent to the Taylorville mind it was the implication of being different from other Taylorvillians.

      Somewhere the Professor had picked up an adequate theory and practice of voice production, though I never knew anything of his training except that he had been an instructor in a normal school and was aggrieved at his dismissal. After he had advertised himself as open for private instruction and tri-weekly classes at Temperance Hall, there was something almost like a concerted effort at keeping him in the town, because of the credit he afforded us against Montecito. With the exception of a much-whiskered personage who came over from the business college in the winter to conduct evening classes in penmanship, he was the only man addressed habitually as Professor, and the only one who wore evening dress at public functions.

      His dress coat imparted a particular touch of elegance to occasions when he gave readings from "Evangeline" and "The Lady of the Lake" (Taylorville choice), and thoroughly discredited a disgruntled Montecitan who, on the basis of having been to Chicago on his wedding trip, insisted that such were only worn by waiters in hotels.

      It would be interesting to record that Professor Winter lent himself with alacrity to the unfolding of my Gift, but, in fact, his imagination hardly strayed so far. He taught phonics and voice production and taught them very well; probably he had no more practical acquaintance with the stage than I had. Certainly he never suggested it for me, and for my part I could hardly have explained why with so little encouragement I was so devoted to the rather tedious drill. Pauline was still at the seminary, and the regular hours of practice made a bulwark against an insidious proprietary air which Tommy Bettersworth began to wear. Besides the voice training, I had a system of physical culture, artificial and unsound as I have since learned, but serving to restrain my too exuberant gesture, and much memorizing of poems and plays for practice work. I hardly know if the Professor had any dramatic talent or not; probably not, as he made nothing, I remember, of stopping me in the middle of a great passion for the sake of a dropped consonant, and deprecated original readings on my part.

      It was his relish for musical cadence as much as its intellectual appreciation that led him to select the Elizabethan drama, in the great scenes of which I was letter perfect by the time I had come to the end of the Professor's instruction, and at the end too, it seemed, of my devices for dodging the destiny of women.

      CHAPTER VIII

      I have tried to sketch to you how in Taylorville we were allowed to stumble on the grown-up consciousness of sex, but I can give you no idea of the extent to which we were prevented from the grown-up judgment.

      Somewhere between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, one was loosed on a free and lively social intercourse from which one was expected to emerge later, triumphantly mated. This was obligatory; otherwise your family sighed and said that somehow Olivia didn't seem to know how to catch a husband, and then painstakingly refrained from the subject in your presence; or your mother, if she was particularly loyal, said she had always thought there was no call for a girl to marry if she didn't feel to want to. But anything resembling maternal interference in your behalf was looked upon as worldly minded, СКАЧАТЬ