CHAPTER IV
That was a tremendous week for the children of Braywood. As some quiet bayou harbors for a time a few birds of passage restlessly resting before they fly on into the sky, so the domestic poultry of Braywood was stirred by the Kemble wild fowl.
Four generations were gathered at the Burbage home. Sheila’s great-grandmother was always there at the home of Clyde Burbage, senior, who had fallen out of the line of strollers, and become a merchant. His wife’s mother, who was Polly Farren’s mother, too, was there for a visit. The old lady and the older lady had left the stage and now spent their hours in regretting the decadence of earlier glories, as their elders had done before them, and as their children would do in their turn.
The Kembles and Farrens and Burbages were all peers in the aristocracy of the theater, which, like every other world, has its princes and peasants, its merchants and vagabonds, saints and sinners.
None of this line dated back, however, to the time when Holy Week was a period of industry for the churchly actors who prepared their miracles and moralities for the edification of the people. Nowadays Holy Week is a time when most of the theaters close, and the others entertain diminished audiences and troupes whose enthusiasm is diminished by the halving of their salaries.
It is a period when so many people desire to be seen in church or fear to be seen in the playhouse, that the receipts drop off amazingly, though the same people feel it no sin to crowd the same theater the week before or the week after the Passion sennight.
Sometimes a play is strong enough in draught to pack the theater in spite of the anniversary. This year the Farren-Kemble play was not quite successful enough to justify the risk of half-filled auditoriums. So they “rested.”
But to the children, as to the other animals, there are no holy days, or rather no unholy days. The children of Braywood made a theatrical week of it, and Sheila reveled in her opportunity. She had an audience everywhere she went.
The other children stood about her and wondered. She fascinated them, and they were eager to do as she bade, though they felt a certain uneasiness; as if they had wished for a fairy queen to play with and had got their wish.
The other children commanded in their own specialties and in their turns. At outdoor romps and sports Clyde Burbage led the way, and endangered future limbs or present lives by his fearless banter. At household games with dolls and diseases Dorothy had a matronly authority and Sheila was like a novice. In hospital games, Dorothy, the head nurse, must show her how babies should be handled, punished, and medicined.
It should be set down to Sheila’s credit that she was meek as Moses in the presence of domestic genius. But it must be added that the things she learned from Dorothy were likely to be exploited later in some drama where Sheila took full sway. In Dorothy’s games the dolls always recovered when Dr. Eugene was called in with his grandmother’s spectacles on. In Sheila’s dramas the dolls almost always perished in agony, while the desperate mother clung to the embarrassed doctor, at the same time screaming to him to save the child and whispering him to pronounce it dead.
Roger Kemble happened to be passing Mrs. Vickery’s front yard during one of these tragedies, and paused to watch it across the fence while Mrs. Vickery attended from the porch. One of those startling unconscious scandals in which children’s plays abound was suddenly developed, and Roger moved on rapidly while Mrs. Vickery vanished into the house.
All the while the young Shakespeare of Braywood wrought upon his play for Sheila. But the moment he thought he had it perfected, he would hear her toss off one of the dramatic principles that she had overheard her father and mother discussing after some rehearsal. Then Eugene would blush to realize that his drama had violated this dictum and was unworthy of the great actress. And he would steal away to unravel his fabric and knit it up again.
At last it began to shape itself according to her ideals as he had gleaned them. He sat up finishing it until he was sent to bed for the fourth time, then he worked in his room till his mother knocked on his door and ordered his light out and forbade him to leave his bed again.
He waited till he knew that his parents were asleep, then he cautiously renewed his light and, sitting up in bed, wrote with that grasshopper-legged finger of his till he could keep his eyes ajar no longer. Then he held one eye open with his left hand till the hand itself went to sleep. He never knew it when his head rolled over to the pillow. He knew nothing more till he woke, shivering, to find the daylight in the room and the light still burning expensively.
He put out the light and worked till breakfast and his play were ready. After he had spooned up his porridge and chewed down his second glass of milk he made haste toward Clyde Burbage’s house. He hesitated at the nearest corner till he found courage to proceed. He mounted the steps with his precious manuscript buttoned against his swinging heart. He rang the bell. Mrs. Burbage came to the door, and he peeled his cap from his burning head:
“Is—is Clyde at home, Mis’ Burbage?”
Mrs. Burbage was surprised at the formality of the visit. Boys usually stood outside and whistled for Clyde or called “Hoo-oo!” or “Hay, Clyde—oh, Cly-ud!” till he answered. In fact, he had only recently answered just such a signal from another boy and slammed the door after him.
When Eugene learned that Clyde was abroad he made as if to depart, then paused and, with a violent carelessness, mumbled, “I don’t suppose Sheila is home, either?”
“Sheila? Oh no! She and her father and mother left on the midnight train.”
“Is that so?” said Eugene as casually as if he had just learned that all his relatives were dead or that he had overslept Christmas.
He tried to make a brave exit, but he was so forlorn that Mrs. Burbage forgot to smile as grown-ups smile at the big tragedies of the little folk. She watched him struggling overlong at the gate-latch. She saw him break into a frantic run for home as soon as he had gained the sidewalk. Then she went inside, shaking her head and thinking the same words that were clamoring in the boy’s sick heart:
“Oh, Sheila! Sheila!”
CHAPTER V
The big young man with the shoulders of a bureau would never have been taken for a student if he had not been crossing the campus with a too small cap precariously perched on his too much hair, and if he had not been swinging a strapful of those thin, weary-worn volumes that look to be text-books and not novels. The eye-glasses set on his young nose mainly accented his youth. If he had not depended on them he would have made a splendid center rush. Instead, he was driven to the ’varsity crew, where he won more glory than in the class-room. He paused before a ground-floor window of the oldest of the old dormitories. That window-seat as usual displayed the slim and gangling form of a young man who was usually to be found there stretched out on his stomach and reading or writing with solemn absorption. It was necessary to call him repeatedly before he came back from the mist he surrounded himself with:
“Hay! ’Gene! Oh, Vick! ’Gene Vickery! Hay you!”
“Hay yourself! Oh, hey-o, Bret Winfield, h’are you?”
“Rotten! Say—you going to the theater to-night?”
“I usually do. What’s the play?”
“ ‘A Friend in Need.’ Ran six months in New York.”
“All right, I’ll go.”
“Better get a seat under cover of the balcony.”
“Why?”
“Looks like a big night to-night. The Freshmen are going to bust up the show.”
“Really? Why?”
Vickery was only a post-graduate, in his first year at Leroy University. He had gone through the home-town schools and a preparatory school and a smaller college, before he had moved on to Leroy to earn a Ph.D. He had long ago given up his ambitions to replace Shakespeare. So now he asked in his ignorance why the Freshmen of Leroy must break up the play. And Winfield answered from his knowledge:
“Because about this time of year the Freshman class always busts up a show. It’s one of the sacredest traditions of our dear old Alum Mater. Last year’s Freshies put a big musical comedy on the blink. Kidnapped half the chorus girls. This year there’s no burlesque in view, so the cubs are reduced to pulling down a high comedy.”
“Won’t the faculty do anything about it?”
“Faculty won’t know anything about it till the morning papers tell how many policemen were lost and how much damage was done to the theater. If you’re going, either take an umbrella or sit under the balcony, for there will be doings.”
“I’ll be there, Bret.”
“I wish I could have you with me, but a gang of us Seniors have taken a front box together. S’long!”
“S’long!”
Vickery went back to his text-book. He was to be a professor of Greek. He had almost forgotten that he had ever fallen in love with an actress. He had kept no track of stage history.
His acquaintance with Bret Winfield had been casual until his sister Dorothy came on to spend a few days near her brother. Dorothy had grown up to be the sort of woman her childhood prophesied—big, beautiful, placid, very noble at her best and stupid at her worst. Her big eyes were the Homeric “ox-eyes,” and Eugene in the first flush of his first Greek had called her thence Bo-opis, which he shortened later to “Bo.”
The bo-optic Dorothy made a profound impression on Bret Winfield, and he cultivated Eugene thereafter on her account. He had a rival in the scientific school, Jim Greeley, a fellow-townsman of Winfield’s. Greeley’s matter-of-fact soul was completely congenial to Dorothy, but the two young men hated each other with great dignity, and Dorothy reveled in their rivalry. She was quite forgotten, however, when matters of real college moment were under way—such as the Freshman assault on the drama.
The news of the riot-to-be percolated through the two thousand students without a word reaching the ears of the faculty or the officers of the theater. There was no reason to expect trouble on this occasion. There had been no football or baseball or other contest to excite the students. They made a boisterous audience before the curtain rose—but then they always did. They called to each other from crag to crag. They whistled and stamped in unison when the curtain was a moment late; but that was to be expected in college towns. Strangely, students have been always and everywhere rioters.
The first warning the audience had of unusual purposes came when a round of uproarious applause greeted a comedian’s delivery of a bit of very cheap wit which had been left in because the author declined to waste time polishing the seat-banging part of his first act. In this country an audience that is extremely displeased does not hiss or boo; it applauds sarcastically and persistently. The poor actor who had aimed to hurry past the line found himself held up by the ironic hand-clapping. When he tried to go on, it broke out anew.
An actor cannot disclaim or apologize for the lines he has to speak, however his own prosperities are involved in them. So poor Mr. Tuell had now to stand and perspire while the line he had begged the author to delete provoked the tempest.
Whenever the fuming comedian opened his mouth to speak the applause drowned him. It soon fell into a rhythm of one-two, one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three. Tuell could only wait till the claque had grown weary of its own reproof. Then he went on to his next feeble witticism, another play upon words so childish that it brought forth cries of, “Naughty, naughty!”
The other members of the company gathered in the wings, as uncomfortable as a band of early martyrs waiting their turns to appear before the lions. To most of them this was their first encounter with a mutinous audience.
Audiences are usually a chaos of warring tastes and motives which must somehow be given focus and unity by the actors. That was the hardest part of the day’s work—to get the house together. To-night they must face a ready-made audience with a mind of its own—and that hostile.
The actors watched the famous “first old woman,” Mrs. John Vining, sail out with the bravery of a captive empress marching down a Roman street in chains. She was greeted with harsh cries of, “Grandma!” and, “Oh, boys, Granny’s came!”
Mrs. Vining smiled indulgently and went on with her lines. The applause broke out and continued while she and Mr. Tuell conducted a dumb-show. Then an abrupt silence fell just in time to emphasize the banality of her next speech.
“You ask of Claribel? Speaking of angels, here she comes now.”
At the sound of her name the actress summoned clutched the cross-piece of the flat that hid her from the audience. She longed for courage to run away. But actors do not run away, and she made ready to dance out on the stage and gush her brilliant first line: “Oh, auntie, there you are. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Sheila had always hated the entrance because of its bustling unimportance. It was exciting enough to-night. No sooner had Mrs. Vining announced her name than there was a salvo of joy from the mob.
“Oh, girls, here comes Claribel!”
Some one stood up and yelped, “Three hearty cheers and a tigress for Claribel.”
Sheila fell back into the wings as the clamor smote her. But she had been seen and admired. There was a hurricane of protest against her retreat:
“Come on in, Claribel; the water’s fine!” “Don’t leave the old farm, Claribel; we need you!” “Peekaboo! I see You Hiding behind the chair.”
Each of the mutineers shrieked something that he thought was funny, and laughed at it without heeding what else was shouted. The result was deafening.
Eugene Vickery’s heart was set aswing at the glimpse of Sheila Kemble. The sight of her name on the program had revived his boyhood memories of her. He rose to protest against the hazing of a young girl, especially one whose tradition was so sweet in his remembrance, but he was in the back of the house and his cry of “Shame!” was lost in the uproar, merely adding to it instead of quelling it.
Bret Winfield in a stage box had seen Sheila in the wings for some minutes before her entrance. He knew nothing of her except that her beauty pleased him thoroughly and that he was sorry to see how scared she was when she retreated.
He saw also how plucky she was, for, angered by the boorish unchivalry of the mob, she marched forth again like a young Amazon. At the full sight of her the Freshmen united in a huge noise of kisses and murmurs of, “Yum-yum!” and cries of, “Me for Claribel!” “Say, that’s some gal!” “Name and address, please!” “I saw her first!” “Second havers!” “Mamma, buy me that!” She was called a peach, a peacherino, a pippin, a tangerine, a swell skirt—anything that occurred to the uninspired.
Sheila felt as if she were struck by a billow. Her own color swept past the bounds of the stationary blushes she had painted on her cheeks. She came out again and began her line: “Oh, auntie—”
It was as if echo had gone into hysterics. Two hundred voices mocked her: “Oh, auntie!” “Oh, auntie!” “Oh, auntie!”
She wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry, she wanted to run, she wanted to fight. She wished that the whole throng had but one ear, that she might box it.
The stage-manager was shrieking from the wings: “Go on! Don’t stop for anything!”
She continued her words with an effect of pantomime. The responses were made against a surf of noise.
Then Eric Folwell, who played the hero, came on. He was handsome, and knew it. He was a trifle over-graceful, and his evening coat fitted his perfect figure almost too perfectly. He was met with pitiless implications of effeminacy. “Oh, Clarice!” “Say, Lizzie, are you busy?” “Won’t somebody slap the brute on the wrist?” “My Gawd! ain’t he primeval?” “Oh, you cave-girl!”
As if this were not shattering enough, some of the students had provided themselves with bags of those little torpedoes that children throw on the Fourth of July. One of these exploded at Folwell’s feet. At the utterly unexpected noise he jumped, as a far braver man might have done, taken thus unawares.
This simply enraptured the young mob, and showers of torpedoes fell about the stage. It fairly snowed explosives. The gravel scattered in all directions. A pebble struck Sheila on the cheek. It smarted only a trifle, but the pain was as nothing to the sacrilege.
Somehow the play struggled on to the cue for the entrance of the heroine of the play. Miss Zelma Griffen was the leading woman. She was supposed to arrive in a taxicab, and the warning “honk” of it delighted the audience. She was followed on by a red-headed chauffeur who asked for his fare, which she borrowed from the hero, then passed to the chauffeur, who thanked her and made his exit.
Miss Griffen was a somewhat sophisticated actress with a large record in college boys. While she waited for her cue, she had cannily decided to appease the mob by adopting a tone of good-fellowship. She had also provided herself with a rosette of the college colors. She waved it at the audience and smiled.
This was a false note. It was resented as a familiarity and a presumption. This same college had rotten-egged an actor some years before for wearing a ’varsity sweater on the stage. It greeted Miss Griffen with a storm of angry protest, together with a volley of torpedoes.
Miss Griffen, completely nonplussed, gaped for her line, could not remember a word of it, then ran off the stage, leaving Sheila and Mrs. Vining and Tuell to take up the fallen torch and improvise the scene. Sheila made the effort, asked herself the questions Miss Griffen should have asked her, and answered them. It was her religion as an actress never to let the play stop.
With all her wits askew, she soon had herself snarled up in a tangle of syntax in which she floundered hopelessly. The student body railed at her:
“Oh, you grammar! ’Rah, ’rah, ’rah, night school!”
This insult was too much for the girl. She lost every trace of self-control.
All this time Bret Winfield had grown angrier and angrier. Bear-baiting was one thing; but dove-baiting was too cowardly even for mob-action, too unfair even for a night of sports, unpardonable even in Freshmen. He was thrilled with a chivalrous impulse to rush to the defense of Sheila, whose angry beauty had inflamed him further.
He stood up in the proscenium box and tried to call for fair play. He was unheard and unseen; all eyes were fastened on the stage where the fluttering actress besought the howling stage-manager to throw her the line louder.
Winfield determined to make himself both seen and heard. Fellow Seniors in the box caught at his coat-tails, but he wrenched loose and, putting a foot over the rail, stepped to the apron of the stage. In his struggle he lost his eye-glasses. They fell into the footlight trough, and he was nearly blind.
Sheila, who stood close at hand, recoiled in panic at the sight of this unheard-of intrusion. The rampart of the footlights had always stood as a barrier between Sheila and the audience, an impassable parapet. To-night she saw it overpassed, and she watched the invader with much the same horror that a nun would experience at seeing a soldier enter a convent window.
Winfield advanced with hesitant valor and frowned fiercely at the dazzling glare that beat upward from the footlights.
He was recognized at once as the famous stroke-oar of the crew that had defeated the historic rivals of Grantham University. He was hailed with tempest.
Sheila knew neither his fame nor his mission. She felt that he was about to lay hands on her; all things were possible from such barbarians. Her knees weakened. She turned to retreat and clung to a table for support.
Suddenly she had a defender. From the wings the big actor who had played the taxicab-driver dashed forward with a roar of anger and let drive at Winfield’s face. Winfield heard the onset, turned and saw the fist coming. There was no time to explain his chivalric motive. He ducked and the blow grazed his cheek, but the actor’s impetus caught him off his balance and hustled him on backward till one foot slid down among the footlights. Three electric bulbs were smashed as he went overboard into the orchestra.
He almost broke the backs of two unprepared viola-players, but they eased his fall. He caromed off their shoulder-blades into the multifarious instruments of the “man in the tin-shop.” One foot thumped bass-drum with a mighty plop; the other sent a cymbal clanging. His clutching hands set up a riot of “effects,” and he lay on the floor in a ruin of orchestral noises, and a bedlam of din from the audience.
By the time he had gathered himself together the curtain had been lowered and the whole house was in a typhoon.
A dozen policemen who had been hastily summoned and impatiently awaited by the manager charged down the aisles and seized each a double arm-load of the nearest rioters. The foremost policeman received Winfield as he clambered, shamefaced, over the orchestra rail.
Winfield started to explain: “I went up there to ask the fellows to be quiet.”
The officer, indignant as he was, let out a guffaw of contemptuous laughter: “Lord love you, kid, if that’s the best lie you can tell, what’s the use of education?”
Winfield realized the hopelessness of such self-defense. It was less shameful to confess the misdemeanor than to be ridiculed for so impotent a pretext. He suffered himself to be jostled up the aisle and tossed into the patrol-wagon with the first van-load of prisoners. He counted on a brief stay there, for it was a custom of the college to tip over the patrol-wagon and rescue the victims of the police.
This year’s Freshmen, however, lacked the necessary initiative and leadership, and before the lost opportunity could be regained the wagon had rolled away, leaving the class to eternal ignominy.
CHAPTER VI
Deprived of its ringleaders, the mob fell into such disarray that it was ready to be cowed by the manager of the theater. He had waited for the police to remove the chief pirates, and now he addressed the audience with the one speech that could have had success:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve lowered the curtain and I’m going to keep it lowered till the hoodlums settle down or get thrown out. The majority of people here to-night have paid good money to see this show. It is a good show and played by a company of ladies and gentlemen from one of the best theaters in New York, and I propose to have them treated as such while they are in our city. We are going to begin the play all over again, but if there is any further disturbance I’ll ring down the asbestos and put out the house lights. And no money will be returned at the box-office.”
This last argument converted the mob into a sheriff’s posse. The house-manager received a round of applause and the first Freshman who rose in his place was subdued by his own fellow-classmen.
Bret Winfield spent the night in a cell. He slept little, because the Freshmen hardly ceased to sing the night long; they were solacing themselves with doleful glees. Winfield could not help smiling at his imprisonment. Don Quixote was tasting the reward of misapplied chivalry.
The next morning he made no defense before the glowering judge who had played just such pranks in his college days and felt, therefore, a double duty to repress it in the later generation. He excoriated Bret Winfield especially, and Winfield kept silence, knowing that the truth would gain him no credence and only added contempt. The judge fined the young miscreants five dollars each and left their further punishment to the faculty.
On his way back to his rooms after his release, Winfield met Eugene Vickery, and said, with a wry smile, “Hello, ’Gene! I’ve just escaped from the penitentiary.”
To his astonishment, Vickery snapped back, “I’m sorry to hear it.”
Winfield, seeing that he was in earnest, fumbled for words: “What the—Why the—Well, say!”
The slight and spindling youth confronted the bureau-chested giant and shook his finger in his face: “If you weren’t so much bigger than I am I’d give you worse than that actor gave you. To think that a great big hulk like you should try to attack a little girl like that! Don’t you ever dare speak to me or my sister again.”
Winfield gave an excellent imitation of incipient apoplexy. He seized Vickery by the lapels to demand: “Good Lord, ’Gene, you don’t think I—Say, what do you think I am, anyway? Why—Well, can you beat it? I ask you? Ah, you can all go plumb to—Ah, what’s the good!”
Winfield never was an explainer. He lacked language; he lacked the ambition to be understood. It made him an excellent sportsman. When he lost he wasted no time in explaining why he had not won. To him the martyrdom of being misunderstood was less bitter than the martyrdom of justifying himself. He was so dazed now by the outcome of his knight-errantry that he resolved to leave the college to its own verdict of him. Eugene Vickery’s ruling passion, however, was a frenzy to understand and to be understood. He caught the meaning in Winfield’s incoherence and seized him by the lapel:
“You mean that you didn’t go out on the stage to scare the girl, but to—Well, that’s more like you! I’m a lunkhead not to have known it from the first. Why, a copper collared me, too, and accused me of being one of the Freshmen! I talked him out of it and proved I was a post-graduate, or I’d have spent the night in a dungeon, too. Well, well! and to think I got you so wrong! You write a statement to the papers right away.”
“Ah, what’s the good?”
“Then I will.”
“Just as much obliged, but no, you won’t.”
“You ought to square yourself with the people who—”
“There’s just two people I want to square myself with—that little actress who didn’t realize what I was there for, and that damned actor who knocked me through the bass-drum. Who were they, anyway? I didn’t get a program.”
“I didn’t see the man’s name; but the girl—I used to know her.”
“You did! Say!”
“She was only a kid then, and so was I. She could act then, too,—for a kid, but now—You missed the rest of the show, though, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I was called away.”
“After you left, the audience was as good as a congregation. Sheila Kemble—that’s the girl—was wonderful. She didn’t have much to do, but, golly! how she did it! She had that thing they call ‘authority,’ you know. I wrote a play for her as a kid.”
“You did! Say! Did she like it?”
“She never saw it. But I’m going to write her another. I planned to be a professor of Greek—but not now—ump-umm! I’m going to be a playwright. And I’m going to make a star out of Sheila Kemble, and hitch my wagon to her.”
“Well, say, give me a ride in that wagon, will you? Do you suppose I could meet her? I’ve got to square myself with her.”
Eugene looked a trifle pained at Bret’s interest in another girl than Dorothy, but he said: “I’m on my way to the theater now to find out where she’s stopping and leave this note for her. I don’t suppose she’ll remember me; but she might.”
“Do you mind if I tag after you? I might get a swipe at that actor, too.”
“Oh, well, come along.”
They marched to the theater, stepping high and hoping higher. The stage door-keeper brought them to ground with the information that the company had left on a midnight train after the performance. He had no idea where they had gone.
The two youths, ignorant of the simple means of following theatrical routes, went back to their dismal university with a bland trust that fate would somehow arrange a rencounter for them.
Winfield was soon called before the faculty. He had rehearsed a speech written for him by Eugene Vickery. He forgot most of it and ruined its eloquence by his mumbling delivery.
The faculty had dealt harshly with the Freshmen, several of whom it had sent home to the mercy of their fathers. But Winfield’s explanation was accepted. In the first place, he was a Senior and not likely to have stooped to the atrocity of abetting a Freshman enterprise. In the second place, he would be needed in the next rowing-contest at New London. In the third place, his millionaire father was trembling on the verge of donating to the university a second liberal endowment.
Winfield and Vickery returned to their daily chores and put in camphor their various ambitions. Winfield endured the multitudinous jests of the university on his record-breaking backward dive across the footlights, but he made it his business to find out the name of the actor who brought him his ignominy. In time he learned it and enshrined “Floyd Eldon” and “Sheila Kemble” in prominent niches for future attention. Somehow his loneliness for Dorothy seemed less poignant than before.
Eugene Vickery could have been seen at almost any hour, lying on his stomach and changing an improbable novel into an impossible play.
CHAPTER VII
It was Sheila Kemble’s destiny to pass like a magnet through a world largely composed of iron filings, though it was her destiny also to meet a number of silver chums on whom her powers exerted no drag whatever. Her father had been greatly troubled by her growth through the various strata of her personality. He had noted with pain that she had a company smile which was not the smile that illumined her face when she was simply happy. He had begun a course of education. He kept taking her down a peg or two, mimicking her, satirizing her. Her mother protested.
“Let the child alone. It will wear off. She has to go through it, but she’ll molt and take on a new set of feathers in due time.”
“She’s got to,” Kemble groaned. “I’d rather have her deformed than affected. If she’s going to be conscious of something, let her be conscious of her faults.”
Sheila had been schooled at school as well as at home. With both father and mother earning large sums, the family was prosperous enough to give its only child the most expensive forms of education—and did. In school she tormented and charmed her teachers; she was so endlessly eager for attention. It was true that she always tried to earn it and deserve it, but the effort irritated the instructors, whose ideal for a girl was that she should be as inconspicuous as possible. That was not Sheila’s ideal. Not at all!
She had soon tired of her classes. She was by nature quick at study. She learned her lessons by a sort of mental photography, as she learned her rôles later. The grind of her lessons irked her, not because she wanted to be out at play like other children, but because she wanted to be in at work. As ambitious young men chafe to run away from school and begin their destinies, so young women are beginning to fret for their own careers.
But Sheila’s father and mother were eager for her to stay a baby. Polly Farren especially was not unwilling to postpone acknowledging herself the mother of a grown-up daughter.
“You must have your childhood,” Roger had said.
“But I’ve had it,” Sheila declared.
“Oh, you have, have you?” her father laughed. “Why, you little upstart kid, you’re only a baby.”
Sheila protested: “Juliet was only thirteen years old when she married Romeo, and Eleonora Duse was only fourteen when she played the part, and here I’m sixteen and I haven’t started yet.”
“Help! help!” cried Roger, with a sickish smile. “But you must prepare yourself for your career by first educating yourself as a lady.”
This argument had convinced her. She consented to play one more season at Miss Neely’s school. She came forth more zealous than ever to be an actress. Polly and Roger had wheedled her along as best they could, tried to interest her in literature, water-colors, needlework, golf, tennis, European travel. But her cry for “work” could not be silenced.
When the autumn drew on they had urged her to try one year more at school, pleaded that there was no opening for her in their company. She was too young, too inexperienced.
She murmured “Yes?” with an impudent uptilt of inflection.
She left the house, and came home that afternoon bringing a contract. She handed it to her father with another of those rising inflections, “No?”
He looked at the paper, gulped, called, “Polly!”
They looked it over together. The party of the first part was J. J. Cassard.
“And who is J. J. Cassard?” said Polly, trying not to breathe fast. Roger growled:
“One of those Pacific-coast managers trying to jimmy a way into New York.”
Hoping to escape the vital question by attacking the details, Roger glanced through the various clauses. It was a splendid contract—for Sheila. The hateful “two-weeks’ clause” by which she could be dismissed at a fortnight’s notice was omitted and in its place was an agreement to pay for her costumes and a maid.
“Do you mean to say,” Kemble blustered, “that Cassard handed you a document like that right off the reel?”
“Oh no,” perked Sheila; “he gave me a regular white-slave mortgage at first.”
“Where does she learn such language!” gasped Polly.
Sheila went on, “But I whipped him out on every point.”
“It looks almost suspicious,” said Kemble, and Polly protested.
“I was ten years on the stage before I got my modern costumes and a maid.”
“Well,” said Sheila, as blandly as if she were a traveling saleswoman describing her wares, “Cassard said I was pretty, and I reminded him that I had the immense advertising value of the great Roger Kemble’s name, and I told him I had probably inherited some of the wonderful dramatic ability of Polly Farren. I told him I might take that for my stage name—Farren Kemble.”
Father and mother cast their eyes up and shook their heads, but they could not help being pleased by the flattery implied and applied.
Roger said: “Well, if all that is true, we’d better keep it in the family. You’ll go with us.”
“But you said there was no part for me to play.”
“There’s the chambermaid.”
“No, you don’t!” said Sheila. “You don’t hide me in any of those ‘Did you rings?’ and ‘Won’t you sit down, ma’ams?” ’
“We’ll have the author build up the part a little, and there’s a bit in the third act that’s really quite interesting.”
Sheila refused flatly. But her mother cried all that night, and her father looked so glum the next morning that she consented to chaperon them for one more year.
She revealed a genuine gift for the stage, and she had a carrying personality. When she entered as the chambermaid and said, “Did you ring?” the audience felt a strangely vivid spark of reality at once. She needed nothing to say. She just was. Like some of the curiously alive figures in the paintings of the Little Dutch masters, she was perfectly in and of the picture, and yet she was rounded and complete. She was felt when she entered and missed when she left.
Two or three times when her mother fell ill Sheila played her part—that of a young widow. She did not look it yet, of course, but there was that same uncanny actuality that had stirred the people who watched her as an infantile Ophelia.
Seeing that she meant to be a star and was meant to be one, her parents gave her the best of their wisdom, taught her little tricks of make-up, and gesture, and economy of gesture; of emphasis by force and of emphasis by restraint; the art of underlining important words and of seeming not to have memorized her speeches, but to be improvising them from the previous speech or from the situation. They taught her what can be taught of the intricate technique of comedy—waiting for the laugh while seeming to hurry past it; making speed, yet scoring points; the great art of listening; the delicate science of when to move and when not to move, and the tremendous power of a turn of the eyes. And, above all, they hammered into her head the importance of sincerity—sincerity.
“There are hundreds of right ways to read any line,” Roger would say, “and only one way that’s wrong—the insincere way. Insincerity can be shown as much by exaggeration as by indifference. Let your character express what you feel, and the audience will understand you, if it’s only a slow closing of the eyes once or a little shift of the weight. Be sincere!”
Two seasons later, Roger’s manager brought over from Europe a well-tried success that suited Roger and Polly to a T, but included no rôle at all for Sheila. She simply could not play the fat old dowager, and she simply would not play the laconic housemaid. The time had come for the family to part.
Fathers are always frightened to death of their daughters’ welfares in this risky, woman-trapping world. Roger Kemble knew well enough what dangers Sheila ran. Whether they were greater than they would have been in any other walk of life or in the most secluded shelter, he did not know. He knew only that his child’s honor and honesty were infinitely dear to him, and that he could not keep her from running along the primrose path of public admiration. He could not be with her always.
He managed to get Sheila an engagement with the production called “A Friend in Need.” The part was not important, but she could travel with her great-aunt, Mrs. Vining, who could serve as her guardian and teach her a vast deal about acting as an art and a business. Also Polly decided to give Sheila her own maid, Nettie Pennock, a slim, prim, grim old spinster whose very presence advertised respectability. Pennock had spent most of her life in the theater, and looked as if she had never seen a play. Polly said that she “looked like all the Hard-shell Baptist ministers’ wives in the world rolled into one.”
But Pennock was broad-hearted and reticent, and as tolerant as ministers’ wives ought to be. She was efficient as a machine, and as tireless. She could be a tyrant, and her faultfindings were sparse and sharp as drops of vinegar from a cruet. Polly was more afraid of them than of all the thumps of the bladder-swatting critics.
Yet that frosty face could smile with the sudden sweetness of sunlight on snow, and Sheila’s arms about her melted her at once, except when she had done some mischief or malice. And then Pennock could be thawed only by a genuine and lengthy penance.
Roger urged Polly to fill Sheila’s ears with good counsel, but Polly Farren knew how little impression advice makes on those whom no inner instinct impels to do the right thing anyway.
After the usual rehearsals in New York, “A Friend in Need” had the usual preliminary weeks on the road before it was submitted to New York.
When the time came for Sheila to leave home and strike out for herself, it fell to Roger to take her to the train. Polly was suffering from one of those sick headaches of hers which prostrated her when she was not at work, though they never kept her from giving a sparkling performance. Indeed, Kemble used to say that if the Angel Gabriel wanted to raise Polly from the grave on Judgment morning, all the trumpets of the Apocalypse would fail to rouse the late sleeper. But if he murmured “Overture!” she would be there in costume with all her make-up on.
On the way to the station with Sheila, who was as excited as a boy going to sea, Roger was mightily troubled over her. She was indeed going to sea, and in a leaky boat, the frail barge of dreams. He felt that he must speak to her on the Importance of Being Good. The frivolous comedian suffered anguishes of stage-fright, but finally mustered the courage to deliver himself as Polonius might have done if it had been Ophelia instead of Laertes who was setting out for foreign travel.
It was a task to daunt a preachier parent than Roger Kemble, and it was not easy to talk first principles of behavior to a sophisticated young woman who knew as much about things as Sheila did.
Roger made a dozen false starts and ended in gulps, till Sheila finally said: “What’s the matter, old boy? You’re trying to say something, but I can’t make out what it is. Tell me, and I may be able to throw you the line.”
“It’s about you, honey. I’m—That is, Polly is—At least your mother and I—Well, anyway—”
“Yes, and then?” said Sheila.
Roger got the bit in his teeth and bolted. “The fact is, young woman, you are all the daughters of your father’s and mother’s house. We’re awfully proud of you, of course. And we know you’re going to be a big actress. But we’d rather have you Just a good girl than all the stars in the Milky Way squeezed into one. Do you still say your prayers at night, honey?”
“Sometimes,” she sighed, “when I’m not too sleepy.”
“Well, say ’em in the mornings, then, when you first get up.”
“I’m pretty sleepy, then, too.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake, say ’em sometimes.”
“All right, daddy, I promise. Was that all?”
“Yes! No! That is—You see, Sheila, you’re starting out by yourself and you’re awfully pretty, and you’re pretty young, and the men are always after a pretty girl, especially on the stage. And being on the stage, you’re sure to be misjudged, and men will attempt—will say things they wouldn’t dare try on a nice girl elsewhere. And you must be very much on your guard.”
“I’ll try to be, daddy, thank you. Don’t you worry.”
“You know you’ll have to go to hotels and wait in railroad stations and take cabs and go about alone at all hours, and you must be twice as cautious as you’d be otherwise.”
“I understand, dear.”
“You see, Sheila honey, every woman who is in business or professional life or is an artist or a nurse or a doctor or anything like that has to stand a lot of insult, but so long as she realizes that it really is an insult for a man to be familiar or anything like that, why, she’s all right. But the minute she gets to feeling too free or to acting as if she were a man, or tries to be a good fellow and a Bohemian and all that rot—she’s going to give men a wrong impression. And then—well, even a man that is the very decentest sort is likely to—to grow a little too enterprising if a girl seems to encourage him, or even if she doesn’t discourage him right at the jump.”
“I know.”
That little “I know” alarmed him more than ever. He went on with redoubled zeal.
“I want you to remember one thing always, Sheila—you’ve got only one life to live and one soul to take care of and only one body to keep it in. And it’s entirely up to you what you make of yourself. Education and good breeding and all that sort of thing help, but they don’t guarantee anything. Even religion doesn’t always protect a girl; sometimes it seems to make her more emotional and—Well, I don’t know what can protect a girl unless it’s a kind of—er—well, a sort of a—conceitedness. Call it self-respect if you want to or anything. But it seems to me that if I were a girl the thing that would keep me straightest would be just that. I shouldn’t want to sell myself cheap, or give myself away forever for a few minutes of—excitement, or throw the most precious pearl on earth before any swine of a man. That’s it, Sheila—keep yourself precious.”
“I’ll try to, dad. Don’t worry!” she murmured, timidly.
Such discussions are among the most terrifying of human experiences. Roger Kemble was trembling as he went on: “Some day, you know, you’ll meet the man that belongs to you, and that you belong to. Save yourself for him, eh?”
Then the modern woman spoke sternly: “Seems to me, daddy, that a girl ought to have some better reason for taking care of herself than just because she’s saving herself for some man.”
“Of course. You’re quite right, my dear. But I only meant—”
“I understand. I’ll try to save myself for myself. I don’t belong to any man. I belong just to me; and I’m all I’ve got.”
“That’s a much better way to put it. Much better.” And he sighed with immense relief.
The idea of the man that should make his daughter his own was an odious idea to the father. It was odious now to the girl, too, for she was not yet ready for that stormy crisis when she would make a pride of humility and a rapture of surrender.