A Woman of Genius. Mary Hunter Austin
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of experience from which his youth prevented him. My mother always thought it was made up to her in affection; what came out of it for Forester is still on the knees of the gods.
I began to say how it was that the Gift took care of itself while Forester was engrossing the family attention. He had had a year at the business college in Montecito, which was considered quite sufficient, and rather more, in fact, than his accepted vocation as the support of his mother seemed to call for. Any question that might naturally come up of a profession for him, seemed to have been quashed beforehand by the general notion of an immediate salary as the means to that end. I do not recall a voice lifted on behalf of a life of his own. He had worked up from driving the delivery wagon in vacations to being dry goods clerk at the Coöperative, where his affability and easy familiarity with the requirements of women, made him immensely popular. Everybody liked to trade with Forester because he took such pains in matching things, and he was such a good boy to his mother. He paid the largest portion of his salary for his board, and took Effie, who adored him, about with him. I don't mean to say that he was not also good friends with Olivia, or that there was anything which prevented my doing my best with the three chocolate layer cakes and the angel's food I made for his party on his twenty-first birthday.
The real unpleasantness on that occasion came of my mother's notion of distinguishing it among all other birthdays by paying over to Forester a third of the not very considerable sum left by my father, derived chiefly from his back pay as an officer, which she had always held as particularly set aside for us children. It was owing perhaps to a form of secretiveness that in unprotected woman does duty for caution, that Effie and I had scarcely heard of this sum until it was flourished before us on the day before the birthday, much as if it had been my father's sword, supposing the occasion to have required it being girded on his son.
Forester was to have a third of that money in the form of a check under his plate on the morning of his birthday. Effie and I did full justice to the magnificence of the proposal. I was beating the whites of thirteen eggs by Pauline's recipe for angel food—mine called for only eleven—and Effie was rubbing up Mrs. Endsleigh's spoons, which had been borrowed for the party.
I was always happier in the kitchen than in any room of the house, with its plain tinted walls, the plain painted woodwork (the parlour was hideously "grained"), and the red of Effie's geraniums at the window ledge. The stir of domesticity, all this talk of my father, intrigued me for the moment into the sense of being a valued and intrinsic part of the family.
"His father would have wanted Forester to have that money," said my mother, "now that he's of age."
"And when," I questioned, raised by the mention of thirds to the joyous inclusion, "are Effie and I to have ours?"
"Oh," my mother's interest waned, "when you are married, perhaps."
It had grown in my mind as I spoke, that I had been of age now more than a year and nothing had come of it. The suggestion that my father could have taken a less active interest in the event on my behalf, pressed upon a dying sensibility; I resented his being so committed to this posthumous slight and meant to defend him from it.
"He'd have wanted me to have mine on my birthday, the same as Forester," I insisted.
"Oh, Olivia!" My mother's tone intimated annoyance at my claim to being supported by my father in my absurdities, but her good humour was proof against it. "Girls have theirs when they are married," she soothed.
I held up the platter and whisked the stiff froth with the air of doing these things very dexterously; I wasn't going to admit by taking it seriously, that my brother's coming of age was any more important than mine, but I spare you the flippancies by which I covered the hurt of realizing that to everybody except myself, it was.
"It is so like you, Olivia," said my mother, with tears in her eyes, "to want to spoil everything." What I had really spoiled was the free exercise of partiality by which she was enabled to distinguish Forester over her other children, according to her sense of his deserts; and, besides, what in the world would the child do with all that money?
"The 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