CHAPTER LII
Paris fashions rarely get a good word from men or a bad word from women. The satirists and the clergy and native dressmakers who do not import have delivered tirades in all languages against them for centuries. They are still giving delight and refreshment from the harems on the Bosporus to the cottages on the Pacific and the rest of the way around the world.
The doctors have not seemed to recognize their medicinal value. They recommend equally or even more expensive changes of occupation or of climate which work a gradual improvement at best in the condition of a failing woman.
But for instant tonic and restorative virtue there is nothing to match the external application of a fresh Paris gown. For mild attacks a Paris hat may work, and where only domestic wares are obtainable they sometimes help, if fresh. For desperate cases both hat and gown are indicated.
Mustard plasters, electric shocks, strychnia, and other remedies have nothing like the same potency. The effect is instantaneous, and the patient is not only brought back to life, but stimulated to exert herself to live up to the gown. Husbands or guardians should be excluded during the treatment, as the reaction of Paris gowns on male relatives is apt to cause prostration. There need be no fear, however, of overdosing women patients.
As a final test of mortality, the Paris gown has been strangely overlooked. Holding mirrors before the lips, lifting the hands to the light, and like methods sometimes fail of certainty. If, however, a Paris gown be held in front of the woman in question, and the words “Here is the very newest thing from Paris just smuggled in” be spoken in a loud voice, and no sign of an effort to sit up is made, she is dead, and no doubt of it.
Bret had decoyed Sheila to New York with an elaborate story of having to go on business and hating to go alone. When they arrived she was so weak that Bret wanted to send a red-cap for a wheeled chair to carry her from the train to the taxicab. Her pride refused, but her strength barely sufficed the distance.
Bret chose the Plaza for their hotel, since it required a ride up Fifth Avenue. His choice was justified by the interest Sheila displayed in the shop windows. She tried to see both sides of the street at once.
She was as excited as a child at Coney Island. She astounded Bret by gifts of observation that would have appalled an Indian scout.
After one fleeting glance at a window full of gowns she could describe each of them with a wealth of detail that dazzled him and a technical terminology that left him in perfect ignorance.
At the hotel she displayed unsuspected vigor. She needed little persuasion to spend the afternoon shopping. He was afraid that she might faint if she went alone, and he insisted that his own appointments were for the next day.
He followed her on a long scout through a tropical jungle of dressmakers’ shops more brilliant than an orchid forest. Sheila clapped her hands in ecstasy after ecstasy. She insisted on trying things on and did not waver when she had to stand for long periods while the fitters fluttered about her. She promenaded and preened like a bird-of-paradise at the mating season. She was again the responsive, jocund Sheila of their own seaside mating period.
She found one audacious gown and a more audacious hat that suited her and each other without alterations. And since Bret urged it, she let him buy them for her to wear that night at the theater. She made appointments for further fittings next day.
On the way to the hotel she tried to be sober long enough to reproach herself for her various expenditures, but Bret said:
“I’d mortgage the factory to the hilt for anything that would bring back that look to your face—and keep it there.”
At the hotel they discussed what play they should see. The ticket agent advised the newest success, “Twilight,” but Sheila knew that Floyd Eldon was featured in the cast and she did not want to cause Bret any discomfort. She voted for “Breakers Ahead” at the Odeon, though she knew that Dulcie Ormerod was in it. Dulcie was now established on Broadway, to the delight of the large rural-minded element that exists in every city.
Bret bought a box for the sake of the new gown. It took Sheila an age to get into it after dinner, but Bret told her it was time well spent. When they reached the theater the first act was well along, and in the otherwise deserted lobby Reben was talking to Starr Coleman concerning a learned interview he was writing for Dulcie.
Both stared at the sumptuous Delilah floating in at the side of Bret Winfield. They did not recognize either Bret or Sheila till Sheila was almost past them. Then they leaped to attention and called her by name.
All four exchanged greetings with cordiality. Time had blurred the old grudges. The admiration in the eyes of both Reben and Coleman reassured Sheila more than all the compliments they lavished.
Reben ended a speech of Oriental floweriness with a gracious implication: “You are coming in at the wrong door of the theater. This is the entrance for the sheep. The artists—Ah, if we had you back there now!”
Bret whitened and Sheila flushed. Then they moved on. Reben called after her, laughingly:
“I’ve got that contract in the safe yet.”
It was a random shot, but the arrow struck. When the Winfields had gone on Reben said to Coleman:
“She’s still beautiful—she is only now beautiful.”
Coleman, whose enthusiasms were exhausted on his typewriting machine, agreed, cautiously: “Ye-es, but she’s aged a good deal.”
Reben frowned. “So you could say of a rosebud that has bloomed. She was pretty then and clever and sweet, but only a young thing that didn’t know half as much as she thought she did. Now she has loved and suffered and she has had children and seen death maybe, and she has cried a lot in the night. Now she is a woman. She has the tragic mask, and I bet she could act—my God! I know she could act—if that fellow didn’t prevent.”
“Fellow” was not the expression he used. Reben abhorred Bret even more than Bret him.
Once more Sheila was in the Odeon, but as one of the laity. When she entered the dark auditorium her eyes rejoiced at the huge, dusty, gold arch of the proscenium framing the deep brilliant canvas where the figures moved and spoke. It was a finer sight to her than any sunset or seascape or any of the works of mere nature, for they just happened; these canvas rocks and cloth flowers were made to fit a story. She preferred the human to the divine, and the theatrical to the real.
The play was good, the company worthy of the Odeon traditions. Even Dulcie was not bad, for Reben had subtly cast her as herself without telling her so. She played the phases of her personality that everybody recognized but Dulcie. The play was a comedy written by a gentle satirist with a passion for making a portrait of his own times. The character Dulcie enacted was that of a pretty and well-meaning girl of a telephonic past married into a group of snobs, through having fascinated a rich man with her cheerful voice. Dulcie could play innocence and amiability, for she was not intelligent enough to be anything but innocent, even in her vices, and she usually meant well even when she did her worst.
The author had selected Dulcie as his ideal for the rôle, but he had been at a loss how to tell her to play herself without hurting her feelings. She saved him by asking:
“Say, listen, should I play this part plebean or real refined?”
He hastened to answer, “Play it real refined.”
And she did. She was delicious to those who understood; and to those who didn’t she was admirable. Thus everybody was pleased.
Sheila would have enjoyed the rôle as atour de force, or what she called a stunt, of character-playing. But she was glad that she was not playing it. She felt immortal longings in her for something less trivial than this quaint social photograph; something more earnest than any light satire.
She did not want to play that play, but she wanted to play—she smoldered with ambition. Her eyes reveled in the splendor of the theater, the well-groomed informality of the audience so eager to be swayed, in the boundless opportunity to feed the hungry people with the art of life. She felt at home. This was her native land. She breathed it all in with an almost voluptuous sense of well-being.
Bret, eying her instead of the stage, caught that contentment in her deep breathing, the alertness of her very nostrils relishing the atmosphere, the vivacity of her eager eyes. And his heart told him what her heart told her, that this was where she belonged.
He leaned close to her and whispered, “Don’t you wish you were up there?”
She heard the little clang of jealousy in his mournful tone, and for his sake she answered, “Not in the least.”
He knew that she lied, and why. He loved her for her love of him, but he felt lonely.
Dulcie did not send for Sheila to come back after the play. Broadway stars are busy people, with many suppliants for their time. Dulcie had no time for ancient history.
Sheila was glad to be spared, but did not misunderstand the reason. As she walked out with the audience she did not feel the aristocracy of her wealth and her leisure. She wanted to be back there in her dressing-room, smearing her features into a mess with cold-cream and recovering her every-day face from her workaday mask.
Bret and she supped in the grand manner, and Sheila had plenty of stares for her beauty. But she could see that nobody knew her. Nobody whispered: “That’s Sheila Kemble. Look! Did you see her in her last play?” It was not a mere hunger for notoriety that made her regret anonymity; it was the artist’s legitimate need of recognition for his work.
She went back to the hotel and took off her fine plumage. It had lost most of its warmth for her. She had not earned it with her own success. It was the gift of a man who loved her body and soul, but hated her mind.
Sheila was very woman, and one Paris gown and the prospect of more had lifted her from the depths to the heights. But she was an ambitious woman, and clothes alone were not enough to sustain her. In her situation they were but gilding on her shackles. The more gorgeously she was robed the more restless she was. She was in the tragi-comic plight of the man in the doleful song, “All dressed up and no place to go!”
Fatigue enveloped her, but it was the fag of idleness that has seen another day go by empty, and views ahead an endless series of empty days like a freight-train.
She tried to comfort Bret’s anxiety with boasts of how well she was, but she fell back on the pitiful refrain, “I’m all right.” If she had been all right she would not have said so; she would not have had to say so.
Both lay awake and both pretended to be asleep. In the two small heads lying as motionless on the pillows as melons their brains were busy as ant-hills after a storm. Eventually both fell into that mysterious state called sleep, yet neither brain ceased its civil war.
Bret was wakened from a bitter dream of a broken home by Sheila’s stifled cry. He spoke to her and she mumbled in her nightmare. He listened keenly and made out the words:
“Bret, Bret, don’t leave me. I’ll die if I don’t act. I love you, I love my children. I’ll take them with me. I’ll come home to you. Don’t hate me. I love you.”
Her voice sank into incoherence and then into silence, but he could tell by the twitching of her body and the clutching of her fingers that she was still battling against his prejudice.
He wrapped her in his arms and she woke a little, but only enough to murmur a word of love; then she sank back into sleep like a drowning woman who has slipped from her rescuer’s grasp.
He fell asleep again, too, but the daybreak wakened him. He opened his eyes and saw Sheila standing at the window and gazing at her beloved city, her Canaan which she could see but not possess.
She shook her head despairingly and it reminded him of the old gardener’s farewell to the birch-tree that must die.
She looked so eery there in the mystic dawn; her gown was so fleecy and her body so frail that she seemed almost translucent, already more spirit than flesh. She seemed like the ghost, the soul of herself departed from the flesh and about to take flight.
Bret thought of her as dead. It came to him suddenly with terrifying clarity that she was very near to death; that she could not live long in the prison of his love.
He was the typical American husband who hates tyranny so much that he would rather yield to his wife’s tyranny than subject her to his own. He took no pride in the thought of sacrificing any one on the altar of his self, and least of all did he want Sheila’s bleeding heart laid out there.
The morning seemed to have solved the perplexities of the night; chill and gray, it gave the chill, gray counsel: “She will die if you do not return her where you found her.” He vowed the high resolve that Sheila should be replaced upon the stage.
The pain of this decision was so sharp that when she crept back to bed he did not dare to announce it. He was afraid to speak, so he let her think him asleep.
That morning Sheila was ill again, old again, and jaded with discontent. He reminded her of her appointments with the dressmakers, but she said that she would put them off—or, better yet, she would cancel the orders.
He had their breakfast brought to the room, and he chose the most tempting luxuries he could find on the bill of fare. Nothing interested her. He suggested a drive in the Park. She was too tired to get up.
Suddenly he looked at his watch, snapped it shut, rose, said that he was late for his conference. She asked him what time it was, and he did not know till he looked at his watch again. He kissed her and left her, saying that he would lunch down-town.
CHAPTER LIII
Though there was a telephone in their rooms, Bret went down to the public booths. He remembered Eugene Vickery’s tirade about the crime of Sheila’s idleness. He telephoned to Vickery’s apartments and told Vickery that he must see him at once. Vickery answered:
“Sorry I can’t ask you up or come to where you are this morning, but the fact is I’m at the last revision of my new play and I can’t leave it while it’s on the fire. Meet me at the Vagabonds Club and we’ll have lunch, eh?—say, at half past twelve.”
Bret reached the club a little before the hour. Vickery had not come. The hall captain ushered Bret into the waiting-room. He sat there feeling a hopeless outsider. “The Vagabonds” was made up chiefly of actors. From where he sat he could see them coming and going. He studied them as one looking down into a pool to see how curious fish behave or misbehave. They hailed each other with a simple cordiality that amazed him. The spirit was rather that of a fraternity chapter-house than of a city club, where every man’s chair is his castle. Everything was without pose; nearly everybody called nearly everybody by his first name. There were evidences of prosperity among them. Through the window he could see actors, whose faces were familiar even to him, roll up in their own automobiles.
At one o’clock Vickery had not come, and a friend of Bret’s, named Crashaw, who had grown wealthy in the steel business, caught sight of Bret and took him under his wing, registered him in the guest-book and led him to the cocktail desk. Then Crashaw urged him to wait for the uncertain Vickery no longer, but to lunch with him. Bret declined, but sat with him while he ate.
Bret, still looking for proof that actors were not like other people, asked Crashaw what the devil he was doing in that galley.
“It’s my pet club,” said Crashaw, “and I belong to a dozen of the best. It’s the most prosperous and the most densely populated club in town, and the only one where a man can always find somebody in a cheerful humor at any hour of the day or night, and I like it best because it’s the only club where people aren’t always acting.”
“What!” Bret exclaimed.
“I mean it,” said Crashaw. “In the other clubs the millionaire is always playing rich, the society man always at his lah-de-dah, the engineer or the painter or the athlete is always posing. But these fellows know all about acting and they don’t permit it here. So that forces them to be natural. It’s the warmest-hearted, gayest-hearted, most human, clubbiest club in town, and you ought to belong.”
Bret gasped at the thought and rather suspected Crashaw than absolved the club.
Bret was introduced to various members, and even his suspicious mind could not tell which were actors and which business men, for there are as many types of actor as there are types of mankind, and as many grades of prosperity, industry, and virtue.
Some of the clubmen joined Bret’s group, and he was finally persuaded to give Vickery up for lost and eat his luncheon with an eminent tragedian who told uproarious stories, and the very buffoon who had conquered him at the benefit in the Metropolitan Opera House. The buffoon had an attack of the blues, but it yielded to the hilarity of the tragedian, and he departed recharged with electricity for his matinée, where he would coerce another mob into a state of rapture.
It suddenly came over Bret that this club of actors was as benevolent an institution in its own way as any monastery. Even the triumphs of players, which they were not encouraged to recount in this sanctuary, were triumphs of humanity. When an actor boasts how he “killed ’em in Waco” it does not mean that he shot anybody, took anybody’s money away, or robbed any one of his pride or health; it means that he made a lot of people laugh or thrilled them or persuaded them to salubrious tears. It is the conceit of a benefactor bragging of his philanthropies. Surely as amiable an egotism as could be!
Bret was now in the frame of mind that Sheila was born in. He felt that the stage did a noble work and therefore conferred a nobility upon its people.
All this he was mulling over in the back of his head while he was listening to anecdotes that brought the tears of laughter to his eyes. He needed the laughter; it washed his bitter heart clean as a sheep’s. Most of the stories were strictly men’s stories, but those abound wherever men gather together. The difference was that these were better told.
Gradually the clatter decreased; the crowd thinned out. It was Wednesday and many of the actors had matinées; the business men went back to their offices. Still no Vickery.
By and by only a few members were left in the grill-room.
Bret had laughed himself solemn; now he was about to be deserted. Vickery had failed him, and he must return to that doleful, heartbroken Sheila with no word of help for her.
He had come forth to seek a way to compel her to return to the stage as a refuge from the creeping paralysis that was extinguishing her life. He hated the cure, but preferred it to Sheila’s destruction. Now he was persuaded that the cure was honorable, but beyond his reach. He had heard many stories of the hard times upon the stage, and of the unusual army of idle actors and actresses, and he was afraid that there would be no place for Sheila even though he was himself ready to release her.
Crashaw rose at length and said: “Sorry, old man, but I’ve got to run. Before I go, though, I’d like to show you the club. You can choose your own spot and wait for Vickery.”
He led Bret from place to place, pointing out the portraits of famous actors and authors, the landscapes contributed by artist members, the trophies of war presented by members from the army and navy, the cups put up for fearless combatants about the pool-tables. He gave him a glimpse of the theater, where, as in a laboratory, experiments in drama and farce and musical comedy were made under ideal conditions before an expert audience.
Last he took him to the library. It was deserted save by somebody in a great chair which hid all but his feet and the hand that held a big volume of old plays. Crashaw went forward to see who it was. He exclaimed:
“What are you doing here, you loafer? Haven’t you a matinée to-day?”
A voice that sounded familiar to Bret answered, “Ours is Thursday.”
“Fine. Then you can take care of a friend of mine who’s waiting for Vickery.”
The voice answered as the man rose: “Certainly. Any friend of Vickery’s—” Crashaw said:
“Mr. Winfield, you ought to know Mr. Floyd Eldon. Famous weighing-machine, shake hands with famous talking-machine.”
The two men shook hands because Crashaw asked them to. He left them with a hasty “So long!” and hurried to the elevator.
It is a curious contact, the hand-clasp of two hostile men. It has something of the ritual value of the grip that precedes a prize-fight to the finish.
Once Bret’s and Eldon’s hands were joined, it was not easy to sever them. There was a kind of insult in being the first to relinquish the pressure. They looked at each other stupidly, like two school-boys who have quarreled. Neither could say a harsh word or feel a kind one. They had either to fight or to laugh.
Eldon was more used than Bret to speaking quickly in an emergency. He ended what he would have called a “stage wait” by lifting his left hand to his jaw, rubbing it, and smiling.
“It’s some time since we met.”
“Nearly five years, I guess,” said Bret, and returned the compliment by rubbing his own jaw.
“We meet every few years,” said Eldon. “I believe it’s my turn to slug now.”
“It is,” said Bret. “Go on. I’ve found that I didn’t owe you that last one. I misunderstood. I apologize.” Bret said this not because of any feeling of cordiality, but because he believed it especially important not to be dishonest to an enemy.
Eldon, with equal punctilio and no more affection, answered: “I imagine the offense was outlawed years ago. I never knew what the cause of your anger was, but I’m glad if you know it wasn’t true.”
Silence fell upon them. Bret was wondering whether he ought to describe the injustice he had done Eldon. Eldon was debating whether it would be more conspicuous to ask about Sheila or to avoid asking about her. Finally he took a chance:
“And how is Mrs. Winfield?”
The question cleared the air magically. Bret said, “Oh, she’s well, thank you, very well—that is, no, she’s not well at all.”
Bret had attempted a concealment of his cross, but the truth leapt out of him. Eldon was politely solicitous:
“Oh, I am sorry! Very sorry! She’s not seriously ill, I hope.”
“She’s worse than ill. I’m worried to death!”
Eldon’s alarm was genuine. “What a pity! Have you been to see a specialist? What seems to be the trouble?”
“She’s pining away. She—I think I made a mistake in taking her off the stage. I think she ought to be at work again.”
Eldon was as astounded at hearing this from Winfield as Bret at hearing himself say it. But Bret was in a panic of fear for Sheila’s very life and he had to tell some one. Once he had betrayed himself so far, he was driven on:
“She won’t admit it. She’s trying to fight off the longing. But the battle is wearing her out. You see, we have two children. We have no quarrel with each other. We’re happy—ideally happy together. She feels that she ought to be contented. She insists that she is. But—well, she isn’t, that’s all. I’ve tried everything, but I believe that the only hope of saving her is to get her back where she belongs. Idleness is killing her.”
Eldon hid in his heart any feeling that might have surged up of disprized love finding itself vindicated. His thoughts were solemn and he spoke with earnestness:
“I believe you are right. You must know. I can quite understand. People laugh a good deal at actresses who come back after leaving the stage. They think it is a kind of craze for excitement. But it is better than that. The stage is still the only place where a woman’s individuality is recognized and where she can be really herself.
“Sheila—er—Miss Kemble—pardon me—Mrs. Winfield has the theater in her blood, of course. Almost all the Kemble women have been actresses, and good ones. Your wife was a charming woman to act with. We fought each other—for points. I feel very grateful to her, for she gave me my first encouragement. She and her aunt, Mrs. Vining, taught me my first lessons. I grew very fond of them both and very grateful.
“There’s a natural enmity between a leading woman and a leading man. They love each other as two rival prize-fighters do. The better boxer each of them is, the better the fight. Sheila—your wife, always gave me a fight—on the stage—and after, sometimes, off the stage. She was a great actress—a born aristocrat of the theater.”
Bret took fright at the word “was.” It tolled like a passing-bell. He had made up his mind that Sheila should not be destroyed on his account. He had determined, after the morning’s relapse, that he would restore his stolen sweetheart to her rightful owners as soon as he could. He would keep as close to her as might be. His business would permit him to make occasional journeys to Sheila. His mother would take care of the children and be enchanted with the privilege. Sometimes they could travel a little with Sheila.
His great-grandmother had crossed the plains in a prairie-schooner with five children, and borne a sixth on the way. That was considered praiseworthy in all enthusiasm. Wherein was it any worse for an actress to take her children with her?
There was no hiding from slander in any case, and he must endure the contempt of those who did not understand. The one unendurable thing was the ruination of his beloved’s happiness, of her very life, even.
He had sought out Vickery as an old friend who knew the theater world. But Vickery had failed him. He dreaded to go back to Sheila without definite news.
Of all men he most hated to ask Eldon’s help, but Eldon was the sole rescuer on the horizon. He threw off his pride and appealed to the man he had fought with.
“Mr. Eldon, you say you think my wife is a great artist. Will you help me to—to set her to work? I’m afraid for her, Mr. Eldon. I’m afraid that she is going to die. Will you help me?”
“Me? Will I help?” Eldon stammered. “What can I do? I’m not a manager, I have no company, no theater, hardly any influence.”
Bret’s courage went to pieces. He was a stranger in a strange land. “I don’t know any manager—except Reben, and he hates me. I don’t know anything at all about the stage. I only know that my wife wants her career, and I’m going to get it for her if I have to build a theater myself. But that takes time. I thought perhaps you would know some way better than that.”
Eldon was stirred by Bret’s resolution. He said: “There must be a way. I’ll do anything I can—everything I can, for the sake of the stage—and for the sake of an old colleague—and for the sake of—of a man as big as you, Mr. Winfield.”
And now their hands shot out to each other without compunction or restraint and wrestled, as it were, in a tug of peace.
CHAPTER LIV
It was thus that Eugene Vickery found them. His gasp of astonishment ended in a fit of coughing as he came forward, trying to express his amazement and his delight.
Bret seized his right hand, Eldon his left. Bret was horrified at the ghostly visage of his friend. Already it had a post-mortem look.
Vickery saw the shock in Bret’s eyes. He dropped into a seat.
“Don’t tell me how bad I look. I know it. But I don’t care. I’ve finished my play! Incidentally my play has finished me. But what does that matter? I put into it all there was of me. That’s what I’m here for. That’s why there’s nothing much left. But I’m glad. I’ve done all I can.J’ai fait mon possible.It’s glorious to do that. And it’s a good play. It’s a great play—though I do say it that shouldn’t. Floyd, I’ve got it!” He turned back to Bret. “Poor Floyd here has heard me read it a dozen times, and he’s suggested a thousand changes. I was in the vein this morning. I worked all day yesterday, and all night till sunrise. Then I was up at seven. When you called me I was writing like a madman. And when the lunch hour came I was going so fast I didn’t dare stop then even to telephone. I apologize.”
“Please don’t,” said Bret.
“I see you’ve had your luncheon. Will you have another with me? I’m famished.”
He rang for a waiter and ordered a substantial meal and then returned to Bret.
“How’s Sheila?”
“She—she’s not well.”
“What a shame! She ought to be at work and I wish to the Lord she were. I may as well tell you, Bret, that I took the liberty of imagining Sheila as the principal woman of my play. And now that it’s finished, I can’t think of anybody who fills the bill except your wife. There are thousands of actresses starving to death, but none of them suits my character. None of them could play it but your Sheila.”
“Then for God’s sake let her play it!” Bret groaned. Vickery, astonished beyond surprise, mumbled, “What did you say?”
Bret repeated his prayer, explained the situation to the incredulous Vickery, apologized for himself and his plight. Vickery’s joy came slowly with belief. The red glow that spotted his cheeks spread all over his face like a creeping fire.
When he understood, he murmured: “Bret, you’re a better man than I thought you were. Whether or not you’ve saved Sheila’s life, you’ve certainly saved mine.” A torment of coughing broke down his boast, and he amended, “Artistically, I mean. You’ve saved my play, and that’s all that counts. The one sorrow of mine was that when I had finished it there was no one to give it life. But what if Sheila doesn’t like it? What if she refuses!”
His woe was so profound that Bret reached across the table and squeezed his arm—it was hardly more than a bone. Bret said, “I’ll make her like it!”
“She’s sure to,” Eldon said.
Vickery broke in: “You ought to hear him read it. Sometimes he reads a doubtful scene to me. Then it sounds greater to me than I ever dreamed. A manuscript is like an electric-light bulb, all glass and brass and little loops of thread that don’t mean anything. When the right actor reads it it fills with light like a bowl of fire and shines into dark places.” His mood was so grave that it influenced his language.
Bret said, “Let me take the manuscript to Sheila.”
Vickery frowned. “It’s not in shape for her eyes. It ought to be read to her.”
“Come read it to her, then.”
“My voice is gone and I cough all the time, but if—”
He paused. He did not dare suggest that Eldon read it for him. Eldon did not dare to volunteer. Bret did not dare to ask him. But at length, after a silence of crucial distress, he overcame himself and said, with difficulty:
“Perhaps Mr. Eldon would be—would be willing to read it.”
“I should be very glad to,” said Eldon in a low tone.
It was strange how solemn and tremulous they were all three over so small a matter. A razor edge is a small thing, but a most uncomfortable place to balance.
Vickery broke out with a revulsion to hope. “Great!” he exclaimed. “When?”
“This afternoon would please me best,” said Bret, rather sickly, now that the business had gone so far. “If Mr. Eldon—”
“I am free till seven,” said Eldon.
“I’ll go back and ask Mrs. Winfield, if she hasn’t gone out,” said Bret, rising.
“I’ll go fasten the manuscript together,” said Vickery, rising.
“I’ll go along and glance over the new scenes,” said Eldon, rising.
“Telephone me at my place,” said Vickery, “and let me know one way or the other as soon as you can. The suspense is killing.”
They walked out on the steps of the club, and Bret hailed a passing taxicab. As he turned round he saw Eldon lifting Vickery into a car that was evidently his own, for he took the wheel.
The nearer he got to the hotel the more Bret repented of his rash venture, the uglier it looked from various angles. He hoped that Sheila would be at the dressmaker’s, contenting herself with rhapsodies in silk.
But she was sitting at the window. She was dressed, but her eyes were dull as she turned to greet him.
“How are you, honey?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” she sighed. The old phrase!
Then he knew he had crossed the Rubicon and must go forward. “Why didn’t you go to your fitting?”
“I tried to, but I was too weak. I don’t need any new clothes. How was your business talk?”
“I can’t tell yet,” he said, and, after a battle with his stage-fright, broached the most serious business of his life. He had a right to be a bad actor and he read wretchedly the lines he improvised on his own scenario. “By the way, I stumbled across Eugene Vickery this afternoon.”
“Oh, did you? How is he?”
“Pretty sick. He’s just finished a new play.”
“Oh, has he?”
“He says it’s the work of his life.”
“Poor boy!”
“I don’t think he’ll write another.”
“Great heavens! Is he so bad?”
“Terribly weak. I told him you were in town and he was anxious to see you.”
“Why didn’t you invite him up?”
“I did. He said he’d like to come this afternoon if you were willing.”
“By all means. Better call him up at once.”
Bret went to the telephone, but turned to say, trying to be casual, “He asked if you’d be interested in hearing his play.”
“Indeed I would!” There was distinct animation in this. “Ask him to bring it along.”
Bret cleared his throat guiltily. “I told him I was sure you’d be dying to hear it, and he said he wondered if you would mind if he—er—brought along a friend to read it. Vick’s voice is so weak, you know.”
“I’m not in the mood for strangers, but if Vickery wants it, why—of course. Did he say who it was?”
“Floyd Eldon.”
That name had a way of dropping into the air like a meteor. When two lovers have fought over an outsider’s name that name always recurs with all its battle clamor. It is as hard to mention idly as “Gettysburg” or “Waterloo.”
Sheila knew what Bret had said of Eldon, what he had thought of him and done to him. She was amazed, and it is hard not to look guilty when old accusations of guilt are remembered. Bret saw the sudden tensity in her hands where they held the arms of her chair. He felt a miserable return of the old nausea, the incurable regret of love that it can never count on complete possession of its love, past, present, and future. But he was committed now to the conviction that he could not keep Sheila behind bars, and had no right to try. He had given her back to herself and the world, as one uncages a bird, hoping that it will hover about the house and return, but never sure what will draw it, or whither, once it has climbed into the sky.
To escape the ordeal of watching Sheila, and the ordeal of being questioned, he called up Vickery’s’ number and told him to come over at once, and added, “Both of you.”
Then he hung up the receiver and went forward to face Sheila’s eyes. He told her all that had happened except his appeal to Eldon and their conspiracy to get her back on the stage.
She was agitated immensely, and risked his further suspicion by setting to work to primp and to change her gown to one that her nature found more appropriate to such an audition.
Eldon and Vickery arrived while she was in the dressing-room, and Bret whispered to them:
“I haven’t told her that the play is for her. Don’t let her know.”
This threw Eldon and Vickery into confusion, and they greeted Sheila with helpless insincerity.
She saw how feeble Vickery was and how well Eldon was, and both saw that she was not the Sheila that had left the stage. Eldon felt a resentment against Winfield for what time and discontent had wrought to Sheila, but he knew what the theater can do for impaired beauty with make-up and artifice of lights.
After a certain amount of small talk and fuss about chairs the reading began. To Bret it was like a death-warrant; to Vickery and Eldon it was a writ of habeas corpus; to Sheila it was like the single copy of a great romance that she could never own.
Eldon read without action or gesticulation and with almost no attempt to indicate dialect or characterization. But he gave hint enough of each to set the hearers’ imagination astir and not enough to hamper it.
Outside in the far-below streets was a muffled hubbub of motors and street-cars. And within there was only the heavy elegance of hotel furniture. But the listeners felt themselves peering into the lives of living people in a conflict of interests.
The light in the room grew dimmer and dimmer as Eldon read, till the air was thick with the deep crimson of sunset straining across the roofs. It served as the very rose-light of daybreak in which the play ended, calling the husband and wife to their separate tasks in the new manhood and the new womanhood, outside the new home to which they should return in the evening, to the peace they had earned with toil.
Bret hated the play because he loved it, because he felt that it had a right to be and it needed his wife to give it being; because it seemed to command him to sacrifice his old-fashioned home for the sake of the ever-demanding world.
Sheila made no comment at all during the reading. She might have been an allegory of attention.
Even when Eldon closed the manuscript and the play with the quiet word “Curtain” Sheila did not speak. The three men watched her for a long hushed moment, and then they saw two great tears roll from the clenched eyes.
She murmured, feebly: “Who is the lucky woman that is to—to create it?”
“You!” said Bret.
Woman-like, Sheila’s first emotion at the vision of her husband urging her to go back on the stage was one of pain and terror. She stared at Bret through the tears evoked by Vickery’s art, and she gasped: “Don’t you love me any more? Are you tired of me?”
“Oh, my God!” said Bret.
But when he collapsed Vickery took the floor and harangued her till she yielded, to be rid of him and of Eldon, that she might question her husband.
CHAPTER LV
When they were alone Bret explained his decision and the heartbreaking time he had had arriving at it. He would not debate it again. He permitted Sheila the consolation of feeling herself an outcast, and she reveled in misery. But the first rehearsal was like a bugle-call to a cavalry horse hitched to a milk-wagon.
She entered the Odeon Theater again by the back door and bowed to the same old man, who smiled her in with bleary welcome. And Pennock was at her post looking as untheatrical as ever. She embraced Sheila and said, “It’s good to see you workin’ again.”
The next person she met was Mrs. Vining, looking as time-proof as ever.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Sheila cried.
And Mrs. Vining sighed. “Oh, there’s an old catty mother-in-law in the play, and Reben dragged me out of the Old Ladies’ Home to play it.”
Sheila’s presence at the Odeon was due to the fact that when Eldon asked Reben to release him so that he might play in “Clipped Wings,” with Sheila as star and Bret Winfield as the angel, Reben declined with violence.
When Eldon told him of the play he demanded the privilege of producing it. He ridiculed Bret as a theatrical manager and easily persuaded him to retire to his weighing-machines. Reben dug out the yellowed contract with Sheila, had it freshly typed, and sent it to her, and she signed it with all the woman’s terror at putting her signature to a mortgage.
One matinée day, as Sheila left the stage door, she met Dulcie coming in to make ready for the afternoon’s performance.
Dulcie clutched her with overacted enthusiasm and said: “Oh, my dear, it’s so nice that you’re coming back on the stage, after all these years. Too bad you can’t have your old theater, isn’t it? We’re doomed to stay here forever, it seems. But—oh, my dear!—you mustn’t work so hard. You look all worn out. Are you ill?”
Sheila retreated in as good order as possible, breathing resolutions to oust Dulcie from the star dressing-room and quench her name in the electric lights. That vow sustained her through many a weak hour.
But at times she was not sure of even that success. At times she was sure of failure and the odious humiliation of returning to Blithevale like a prodigal wife fed on husks of criticism.
Bret was called back to his factory by his business and by his request. He did not want to impede Sheila in any way. He had gone through rehearsals and try-outs with her once, and, as he said, once was plenty.
Sheila wept at his desertion and called herself names. She wept for her children and called herself worse names. She wept on Mrs. Vining at various opportunities when she was not rehearsing.
At length the old lady’s patience gave out and she stormed, “I warned you not to marry.”
“You warned me not to marry in the profession, and I didn’t.”
“Well,” sniffed Mrs. Vining, “I supposed you had sense enough of your own not to marry outside of it.”
“But—”
“And now that you did, take your medicine. You’re crying because you want to be with your man and your children. But when you had them you cried just the same. All the women I know on the stage and off, married and single, childless or not, are always crying about something. Good Lord! it’s time women learned to get along without tears. Men used to cry and faint, and they outgrew it. Women don’t faint any more. Why can’t they quit crying? The whole kit and caboodle of you make me sick.”
“Thank you!” said Sheila, and walked away. But she was mad enough to rehearse her big scene more vigorously than ever. Without a slip of memory she delivered her long tirade so fiercely that the company and Vickery and Batterson broke into applause. From the auditorium Reben shouted, “Bully!”
As Sheila walked aside, Mrs. Vining threw her arms around her and called her an angel and proved that even she had not lost the gift of tears.
Bret was not without his own torments. The village people drove him frantic with their questions and their rapturous horror and the gossip they bandied about.
His mother, who hurried to the “rescue” of his home and his “abandoned children,” strengthened him more by her bitterness against Sheila than she could have done by any praise of her. A man always discounts a woman’s criticism of another woman. It always outrages his male sense of fairness and good sportsmanship.
Besides, Bret was driven by every reason of loyalty to defend his wife. He told his mother and his neighbors that he would see her oftener than a soldier or a sailor sees his wife. He would keep close to her. His business would permit him to make occasional journeys to her. Their summers would be honeymoons together.
He made good use of theargumentum ad feminamby telling his mother how well the children would profit by their grandmother’s wisdom, and he promised them the fascinating privilege of traveling with their mother at times.
But it was not easy for Bret. He knew that many people would laugh at him for a milksop; others would despise him for a complacent assistant in his wife’s dishonor. At times the dread of this gossip drove him almost mad.
He had his dark hours of jealous distrust, too, and the very thought of Eldon filled him with dread. Eldon was gifted and handsome, and congenial to Sheila, and a fellow-artist as well. And his other self, the Iago self that every Othello has, whispered that hateful word “propinquity” in his ear with vicious insinuation.
He gnashed his teeth against himself and groaned, “You fool, you’ve thrown her into Eldon’s arms.”
His better self answered: “No, you have given her to the arms of the world. Propinquity breeds hatred and jealousy and boredom and emulation as often as it breeds love.”
He would have felt reassured if he had seen Sheila fighting Eldon for points, for positions, and for lines.
There was one line in Eldon’s part that Sheila called the most beautiful line in the play, a line about the husband’s dead mother. Sheila first admired then coveted the line.
At last she openly asked for it. Eldon was furious and Vickery was aghast.
“But, my dear Sheila,” he explained, “you couldn’t use that line. Your mother is present in the cast.”
“Couldn’t we kill her off?” said Sheila.
“I like that!” cried Mrs. Vining, who was playing the part.
Sheila gave up the line, but with reluctance. But it was some time before Eldon and Vickery regained their illusions concerning her.
And yet it was something more than selfish greed that made her grasp at everything for the betterment of her rôle. It was like a portrait she was painting and she wished for it every enhancement. An architect who plans a cathedral is not blamed for wishing to raze whole acres so that his building may command the scene. The actor’s often berated avarice is no more ignoble, really. And the actor who is indifferent or over-generous is like the careless artist in other fields. He builds neither himself nor his work.
Mrs. Vining fought half a day against the loss of a line that emphasized the meanness of her character. She wanted to be hated. She played hateful rôles with such exquisite art that audiences loved her while they loathed her.
So Sheila spared nothing and nobody to make the part she played the greatest part was ever played. Least of all she spared herself, her strength, her mind, her time. But she battened on work, she was a glutton for punishment. She had her stage-manager begging for a rest, and that is rare achievement.
And all the while she grew stronger, haler, heartier; she grew so beautiful from needing to be beautiful that even Dulcie Ormerod, passing her once more at the mail-box, gasped:
“My Gawd! but that hat is becoming. Tell me quick what’s the address of your milliner.”
That was approbation indeed from Dulcie.
At length the dreadful dress-rehearsal was reached. The usual unheard-of mishaps happened. Everybody was hopeless. The actors parroted the old saying that “a bad dress-rehearsal means a good first performance,” knowing that it proves true about half the time.
The piece was tried first in Plainfield. The local audience was not demonstrative. Eldon tried to comfort himself by saying that the play was too big, too stunning, for them to understand.
The next night they played in Red Bank and were stunned with applause in the first scene and increasing enthusiasm throughout. But that proved nothing, and Jaffer, who was with the company, remembered a famous failure that had been a triumph in Red Bank and a disaster on Broadway.
The fear of that merciless Broadway gauntlet settled over the company. Success meant everything to every member. It meant the paying of bills, a warm home for the winter, a step upward for the future. Even one of the stage-hands had a romance that required a New York run.