CHAPTER VIII
The play that Sheila was surrendered to, “A Friend in Need,” proved a success and raised its young author to such heights of pride and elation that when his next work, an ambitious drama, was produced, he had a long distance to fall. And fell hard.
Young Trivett had tossed off “A Friend in Need” and had won from it the highest praise as a craftsman. He had worked five years on his drama, only to be accused of being “so spoiled by success as to think that the public would endure anything he tossed off.”
But the miserable collapse of hischef-d’œuvredid not even check the triumph of hishors-d’œuvre. “A Friend in Need” ran on “to capacity” until the summer weather turned the theater into a chafing-dish. Then the company was disbanded.
In the early autumn following it was reorganized for a road tour. Of the original company only four or five members were re-engaged—Sheila, Mrs. Vining, Miss Griffen, and Tuell.
During the rehearsals Sheila had paid little attention to the new people. She was doomed to be in their company for thirty or forty weeks and she was in no hurry to know them. She was gracious enough to those she met, but she made no advances to the others, nor they to her. She had noticed that a new man played the taxicab-driver, but she neither knew nor cared about his name, his aim, or his previous condition of servitude.
The Freshmen of Leroy University brought him to her attention with a spectacular suddenness in the guise of a hero. The blow he struck in her supposed defense served as an ideal letter of introduction.
As soon as the curtain had fallen on the riot, cutting off the view of the battle between the police and the students, Sheila looked about for the hero who had rescued her from Heaven alone knew what outrage.
The neglected member of the troupe had leaped into the star rôle, the superstar rôle of a man who wages a battle in a woman’s defense. She ran to him and, seizing his hands, cried:
“How can I ever, ever, ever thank you, Mr.—Mr.—I’m so excited I can’t remember your name.”
“Eldon—Floyd Eldon, Miss Kemble.”
“You were wonderful, wonderful!”
“Why, thank you, Miss Kemble. I’m glad if you—if—To have been of service to you is—is—”
The stage-manager broke up the exchange of compliments with a “Clear! clear! Damn it, the curtain’s going up.” They ran for opposite wings.
When the play was over Eldon was not to be found, and Sheila went with her aunt to the train. At the hour when Winfield was being released from his cell the special sleeping-car that carried the “Friend in Need” company was three hundred miles or more away and fleeing farther.
When Sheila raised the curtain of her berth and looked out upon the reeling landscape the morning was nearly noon. Yet when she hobbled down the aisle in unbuttoned shoes and the costume of a woman making a hasty exit from a burning building, there were not many of the troupe awake to observe her. Her aunt, however, was among these, for old age was robbing Mrs. Vining of her lifelong habit of forenoon slumber. Like many another of her age, she berated as weak or shiftless what she could no longer enjoy.
But Sheila was used to her and her rubber-stamp approval of the past and rubber-stamp reproval of the present. They went into the dining-car together, Sheila making the usual theatrical combination of breakfast and lunch. As she took her place at a table she caught sight of her rescuer of the night before.
He was gouging an orange when Sheila surprised him with one of her best smiles. His startled spoon shot a geyser of juice into his eye, but he smiled back in spite of that, and made a desperate effort not to wink. Sheila noted the stoicism and thought to herself, “A hero, on and off.”
Later in the afternoon when she had read such morning papers as were brought aboard the train, and found them deadly dull since there was nothing about her in them, and when she had read into her novel till she discovered the familiar framework of it, and when from sheer boredom she was wishing that it were a matinée day so that she might be at her work, she saw Floyd Eldon coming down the aisle of the car.
He had sat in the smoking-room until he had wearied of the amusing reminiscences of old Jaffer, who was always reminiscent, and of the grim silence of Crumb, who was always taciturn, and of the half-smothered groans of Tuell, who was always aching somewhere. At length Eldon had resolved to be alone, that he might ride herd about the drove of his own thoughts. He made his face ready for a restrained smile that should not betray to Sheila in one passing glance all that she meant to him.
To his ecstatic horror she stopped him with a gesture and overwhelmed him by the delightful observation that it was a beautiful day. He freely admitted that it was and would have moved on, but she checked him again to present him to Mrs. Vining.
Mrs. Vining was pleased with the distinguished bow he gave her. It was a sort of old-comedy bow. She studied him freely as he turned in response to Sheila’s next confusing words:
“I want to thank you again for coming to my rescue from that horrible brute.”
Eldon looked as guilty as if she had accused him of being himself the brute he had saved her from. He threw off his disgusting embarrassment with an effort at a careless shrug:
“It was nothing—nothing at all, I am sure.”
“It was wonderful,” Sheila insisted. “How powerful you must be to have lifted that monster clear over the apron of the stage into the lap of the orchestra!”
A man never likes to deny his infinite strength, but Eldon was honest enough to protest: “I caught him off his balance, I am afraid. And, besides, it comes rather natural to me to slug a man from Leroy.”
“Yes? Why?”
“I am a Grantham man myself. I was on our ’varsity eleven a couple of years.”
“Oh!” said Sheila. “Sit down, won’t you?”
She felt that she had managed this rather crassly. It would have been more delicate to express less surprise and to delay the invitation to a later point. But it was too late now. He had already dropped into the place beside her, not noticing until too late that he sat upon a novel and a magazine or two and an embroidery hoop on which she had intended to work. But he was on so many pins and needles that he hardly heeded one more.
College men are increasingly frequent on the stage, but not yet frequent enough to escape a little prestige or a little prejudice, according to the point of view. In Sheila’s case Eldon gained prestige and a touch of majesty that put her wits to some embarrassment for conversation. It was one thing to be gracious to a starveling actor with a two-line rôle; it was quite another to be gracious to a football hero full of fame and learning.
Mrs. Vining, however, had playedgrandes damestoo long to look up to anybody. She felt at ease even in the presence of this big third-baseman, or coxswain, or whatever he had been on his football nine. She said, “Been on the stage long, Mr. Eldon?”
Eldon grinned meekly, looked up and down the aisle with mock anxiety, and answered: “The stage-manager isn’t listening? This is my first engagement.”
“Really?” was the only comment Sheila could think of.
After his long silence in the company, and under the warming influence of Sheila’s presence, the snows of pent-up reminiscence came down in a flood of confession:
“I don’t really belong on the stage, you know. I haven’t a big enough part to show how bad an actor I really could be if I had the chance. But I set my mind on going on the stage, and go I went.”
“Did you find it hard to get a position?”
“Well, when I left college and the question of my profession came up, dad and I had several hot-and-heavies. Finally he swore that if I didn’t accept a job in his office I need never darken his door again. Business of turning out of house. Father shaking fist. Son exit center, swearing he will never come back again. Sound of door slamming heard off.”
Sheila still loved life in theatrical terms. “But what did your poor mother do?” she said.
A film seemed to veil Eldon’s eyes as he mumbled: “She wasn’t there. She was spared that.” Then he gulped down his private grief and went on with his more congenial self-derision: “I left home, feeling like Columbus going to discover America. I didn’t expect to star the first year, but I thought I could get some kind of a job. I went to New York and called on all the managers. I was such an ignoramus that I hadn’t heard of the agencies. I got to know several office-boys very well before one of them told me about the employment bureaus. Well, you know all about that agency game.”
Sheila had been spared the passage through this Inferno on her way to the Purgatory of apprenticeship. But she had heard enough about it to feel sad for him, and she spared him any allusions to her superior luck. Still, she encouraged him to describe his own adventures.
He told of the hardships he encountered and the siege he laid to the theater before he found a breach in its walls to crawl through. Constantly he paused to apologize for his garrulity, but Sheila urged him on. She had been born within the walls and she knew almost nothing of the struggles that others met except from hearsay. And she had never heard say from just such a man with just such a determination. So she coaxed him on and on with his history, as Desdemona persuaded Othello to talk. With a greedy ear she devoured up his discourse and made him dilate all his pilgrimage. Only, Eldon was not a Blackmoor, and it was of his defeats and not his victories that he told. Which made him perhaps all the more attractive, seeing that he was well born and well made.
He laughed at his own ignorance, and felt none of the pity for himself that Sheila felt for him. When she praised his determination, he sneered at himself:
“It was just bull-headed stubbornness. I was ashamed to go back to my dad and eat veal, and so I didn’t eat much of anything for a long while. The only jobs I could get were off the stage, and I held them just long enough to save up for another try. How these actors keep alive I can’t imagine. I nearly starved to death. It wouldn’t have been much of a loss to the stage if I had, but it wasn’t much fun for me. I wore out my clothes and wore out my shoes and my overcoat and my hat. I wore out everything but my common sense. If I’d had any of that I’d have given up.”
Mrs. Vining moved uneasily. “If you’d had common sense you wouldn’t have tried to get on the stage.”
“Auntie!” Sheila gasped. But she put up her old hand like a decayed czarina:
“And if you have common sense you’ll never succeed, now that you’re here.”
When this bewildered Eldon, she added, with the dignity of a priestess: “Acting is an art, not a business; and people come to see artists, not business men. Half of the actors are just drummers traveling about; but the real successes are made by geniuses who have charm and individuality and insight and uncommon sense. I think you’re probably just fool enough to succeed. But go on.”
Eldon felt both flattered and dismayed by this pronouncement. He began to talk to hide his confusion.
“I’m a fool, all right. Whether I’m just the right sort of a fool—Well, anyway—my money didn’t last long, and I owed everybody that would trust me for a meal or a room. The office-boys gave me impudence until I wore that out too, and then they treated me like any old bench-warmer in the park. The agents grew sick of the sight of me. They sent me to the managers until they had instructions not to send me again. But still I stuck at it, the Lord knows why.
“One day I went the rounds of the agencies as usual. When I came to the last one I was so nauseated with the idiocy of asking the same old grocery-boy’s question, ‘Anything to-day?’ I just put my head in at the door, gave one hungry look around, and started away again. The agent—Mrs. Sanchez, it was—beckoned to me, but I didn’t see; she called after me, but I didn’t hear; she sent an office-boy to bring me back.
“When I squeezed through the crowd in the office it was like being called out of my place in the bread-line to get the last loaf of the day. I felt ashamed of my success and I was afraid that I was going to be asked to take the place of some Broadway star who had suddenly fallen ill.
“Mrs. Sanchez swung open the gate in the rail and said: ‘Young man, can you sing?’
“My heart fell to the floor and I stepped on it. I heard myself saying, ‘Is Caruso sick?’
“Mrs. Sanchez explained: ‘It’s not so bad as all that. But can you carry a tune?’
“I told her that I used to growl as loud a bass as the rest of them when we sang on the college fence.
“ ‘That’s enough,’ said Mrs. Sanchez. ‘They’re putting on a Civil War play and they want a man to be one of a crowd of soldiers who sing at the camp-fire in one of the acts. The part isn’t big enough to pay a singer and there is nothing else to do but get shot and play dead in the battle scene.’
“I told her I thought I could play dead to the satisfaction of any reasonable manager and she gave me a card to the producer.
“Then she said, ‘You’ve never been on the stage, have you?’
“I shook my head. She told me to tell the producer that I had just come in from the road with a play that had closed after a six months’ run. I took the card and dashed out of the office so fast I nearly knocked over a poor old thing with a head of hair like a bushel of excelsior. It took me two days to get to the producer, and then he told me that it had been decided not to send the play out, since the theatrical conditions were so bad.”
Mrs. Vining interpolated, “Theatrical conditions are like the weather—always dangerous for people with poor circulation.”
“I went back to the office,” said Eldon, “and told Mrs. Sanchez the situation. The other members of the company had beaten me there. The poor old soul was broken-hearted, and I don’t believe she regretted her lost commissions as much as the disappointment of the actors.
“A lot of people have told me she was heartless. She was always good to me, and if she was a little hard in her manner it was because she would have died if she hadn’t been. Agents are like doctors, they’ve got to grow callous or quit. Her office was a shop where she bought and sold hopes and heartbreaks, and if she had squandered her sympathy on everybody she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But for some reason or other she made a kind of pet of me.”
Mrs. Vining murmured, “I rather fancy that she was not the first, and won’t be the last, woman to do that.”
Eldon flushed like a young boy who has been told that he is pretty. He realized also that he had been talking about himself to a most unusual extent with most unusual frankness, and he relapsed into silence until Sheila urged him on.
It was a stupid Sunday afternoon in the train and he was like a traveler telling of strange lands, under the insatiable expectancy of a fair listener. There are few industries easier to persuade a human being toward than the industry of autobiography. Eldon described the dreary Sahara of idleness that he crossed before his next opportunity appeared.
As a castaway sits in the cabin of a ship that has rescued him and smiles while he recounts the straits he has escaped from, and never dreams of the storms that are gathering in his future skies, so Eldon in the Pullman car chuckled over the history of his past and fretted not a whit over the miseries he was hurrying to.
The only thing that could have completed his luxury was added to him when he saw that Sheila, instead of laughing with him, was staring at him through half-closed eyelids on whose lashes there was more than a suspicion of dew. There was pity in her eyes, but in her words only admiration:
“And you didn’t give up even then!”
“No,” said Eldon; “it is mighty hard knocking intelligence into as thick a skull as mine. I went back to the garage where I had worked as a helper. I had learned something about automobiles when I ran the one my father bought me. But I kept nagging the agencies. Awful idiot, eh?”
To his great surprise the cynical Mrs. Vining put in a word of implied approval:
“We are always reading about the splendid perseverance of men who become leading dry-goods merchants of their towns or prominent politicians or great painters, but the actors know as well as anybody what real perseverance is. And nobody gives them credit for being anything but a lot of dissipated loafers.”
Sheila was not interested in generalizations. She wanted to know about the immediate young man before her. She was still child enough to feel tremendous suspense over a situation, however well she knew that it must have a happy ending. When she had been littler the story of Jack the Giant-killer had enjoyed an unbroken run of forty nights in the bedtime repertoire of her mother. And never once had she failed to shiver with delicious fright and suffer anguishes of anxiety for poor Jack whenever she heard the ogre’s voice. At the first sound of hisleit motiv, “Fee, fi, fo, fum—” her little hands would clutch her mother’s arm and her eyes would pop with terror. Yet, without losing at all the thrill of the drama, she would correct the least deviation from the sacred text and rebuke the least effort at interpolation.
It was this weird combination of childish credulity, fierce imagination, and exact intelligence that made up her gift of pretending. So long as she could keep that without outgrowing it, as the vast majority do, she would be set apart from the herd as one who could dream with the eyes wide open.
When she looked at Eldon she saw him as the ragged, hungry beggar at the stage door. She saw him turned away and she feared that he might die, though she knew that he still lived. There was genuine anxiety in her voice when she demanded, “How on earth did you ever manage to succeed?”
“I haven’t succeeded yet,” said Eldon, “or even begun to, but I am still alive. It’s hard to get food and employment in New York, but somehow it’s harder still to starve there. One way or another I kept at work and hounded the managers. And one day I happened in at a manager’s office just as he was firing an actor who thought he had some rights in the world. He snapped me up with an offer of twenty-five dollars a week. If he had offered me a million it wouldn’t have seemed any bigger.”
Mrs. Vining had listened with unwonted interest and with some difficulty, for sleep had been tugging at her heavy old eyelids. As soon as she heard that Eldon had arrived in haven at last she felt no further necessity of attention and fell asleep on the instant.
Sheila sighed with relief, too. And the train had purred along contentedly for half a mile before she realized that after all Eldon was not with that company, but with this. Seeing that her aunt was no longer with them in spirit, she lowered her voice to comment:
“But if you went with the other troupe, what are you doing here?”
“Well, you see, I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Sanchez the good news. I thought she would be glad to hear it, and I was going to offer her the commission for all the work she had done and all the time she had spent on me. She looked disappointed when I told her, and she warned me that the manager was unreliable and the play a gamble. She had just found me a position with a company taking an assured success to the road. It was this play of yours. The part was small and the pay was smaller still, but it was good for forty weeks.
“But I was ambitious, and I told her I would take the other. I wanted to create—that was the big word I used—I wanted to ‘create’ a new part. She told me that the first thing for an actor to do was to connect with a steady job, but I wouldn’t listen to her till finally she happened to mention something that changed my mind.”
He flushed with an excitement that roused Sheila’s curiosity. When he did not go on, she said:
“But what was it that changed your mind?”
Eldon smiled comfortably, and, emboldened by the long attention of his audience, ventured to murmur the truth: “I had seen you act—in New York—in this play, and I—I thought that you were a wonderful actress, and more than that—the most—the most—Well, anyway, Mrs. Sanchez happened to mention that you would be with this company, so I took the part of the taxicab-driver. But I found I was farther away from you than ever—till—till last night.”
And then Eldon was as startled at the sound of his words and their immense import as Sheila was. The little word “you” resounded softly like warning torpedoes on a railroad track signaling: “Down brakes! Danger ahead!”
CHAPTER IX
As Eldon’s words echoed back through his ears he knew that he had said too much and too soon. Sheila was afraid to speak at all; she could not improvise the exquisitely nice phrase that should say neither more nor less than enough. Indeed, she could not imagine just what she wanted to say, what she really felt or ought to feel.
The woman was never born, probably, who could find a declaration of devotion entirely unwelcome, no matter from whom. And yet Sheila felt any number of inconveniences in being loved by this man who was a total stranger yesterday and an old acquaintance to-day. It would be endlessly embarrassing to have a member of the company, especially so humble a member, infatuated with her. It would be infinitely difficult to be ordinarily polite to him without either wounding him or seeming to encourage him. She had the theatric gift for carrying on a situation into its future developments. She was silent, but busily silent, dramatizing to-morrows, and the to-morrows of to-morrows.
Eldon’s thoughts also were speeding noisily through his brain while his lips were uncomfortably idle. He felt that he had been guilty of a gross indiscretion and he wanted to remove himself from the discomfort he had created, but he could not find the courage to get himself to his feet, or the wit to continue or even to take up some other subject.
It was probably their silence that finally wakened Mrs. Vining. She opened her drowsy eyes, wondering how long she had slept and hoping that they had not missed her. She realized at once that they were both laboring under some confusion. She was going to ask what it was.
Sheila resented the situation. Already she was a fellow-culprit with this troublesome young man. An unwitting rescuer appeared in the person of the stage-manager who dawdled along the aisle in the boredom of a stage-manager, who can never quite forget his position of authority and is never allowed to forget that his flock are proud individuals who feel that they know more than he does.
Sheila was impelled to appeal to Batterson on Eldon’s behalf, but she and the stage-manager had been in a state of armed truce since a clash that occurred at rehearsals. Batterson was not the original producer of the play, but he put out the road company and kept with it.
A reading of Sheila’s had always jarred him. He tried to change it. She tried to oblige him, but simply could not grasp what he was driving at. One of those peculiar struggles ensued in which two people are mutually astounded and outraged at their inability to explain or understand.
But if Mr. Batterson was hostile to Sheila, he was afraid of Mrs. Vining, both because he revered her and because she had known him when he was one of the most unpromising beginners that ever attempted the stage. He had never succeeded as an actor, which was no proof of his inability to tell others how to act, but always seemed so to them.
As he would have passed, Mrs. Vining, quite as if Sheila had prompted her, made a gesture of detention:
“Oh, Mr. Batterson, will you do me a great favor?” He bowed meekly, and she said, “Be a good boy and give Mr. Eldon here a chance to do some real work the first opportunity you get.”
Batterson sighed. “Good Lord! has he been pestering you, too?”
“He has been telling me of his struggles and his ambitions,” Mrs. Vining answered, with reproving dignity, “and I can see that he has ability. He is a gentleman, at least, and that is more than can be said of some of the people who are given some of the rôles.”
Batterson did not relish this. He had had one or two battles with Mrs. Vining over some of her stage business and had been withered by her comments on his knowledge of what really went on in real drawing-rooms. She had told him that they were as different as possible from stage drawing-rooms, and he had lacked information to answer. All he said now was:
“I’ve promised Eldon a dozen times that he should have a try at the first vacancy. But you know this old guard; they never surrender and they never die.”
“Except when they get a cue,” was Mrs. Vining’s drop of acid.
Batterson renewed his pledge and moved on, with a glance in which Eldon felt more threat than promise. But he thanked Mrs. Vining profusely and apologized to Sheila for taking so much of her time talking about himself. This made a good exit speech and he retired to his cell, carrying with him a load of new anxieties and ambitions.
Triply happy was Eldon now. He had been commended to the stage-manager and promised the first opportunity. He was getting somewhere. He had established himself in the good graces of the old duchess of the troupe. He had put his idol, Sheila, under obligations to him. He had ventured to let her know that he had joined the company on her account, and she had not rebuked him. This in itself was a thousand miles on his journey.
The meter of the train had hitherto been but a dry, monotonous clickety-click like the rattle bones of a dolorous negro minstrel. Now it was a jig, a wedding jig. The wheels and the rails fairly sang to him time after tune. The amiable hippety-hop fitted itself to any joyful thought that cantered through his heart.
By and by a town came sliding to the windows—Milton, a typical smallish city with a shabby station, a stupid hotel, no history, and no sights; it had reached the gawky age and stopped growing. But Eldon bade it welcome. He liked anybody and any place. He set out for the hotel, swinging his suit-case as if it were the harp of a troubadour. He walked with two or three other men of the company.
Old Jaffer had said: “The Mansion House is the only hotel. It’s three blocks to the right from the station and then two blocks to the left.” Jaffer knew the least bad hotel and just how to find it in hundreds of towns. He was a living gazetteer. “I’ve been to every burg in the country, I think,” he would say, “and I’ve never seen one yet that had anything to see.” The highest praise he could give a place was, “It’s a good hotel town.”
But they were all paradises to Eldon. He had fed so dismally and so sparsely, as a man out of a job, that even the mid-Westem coffee tasted good to him. Besides, to-day he had fed on honey dew and drunk the milk of paradise.
He was so jubilant that he offered to carry the hand-bag of Vincent Tuell, who labored along at his side, groaning. Eldon’s offer offended Tuell, who was just old enough to resent his age. It had already begun to lop dollars off his salary and to cut him out of the line of parts he had once commanded.
Tuell had never reached high—but he had always hoped high. Now he had closed the books of hope. He was on the down grade. His career had not been a peak, but a foot-hill, and he was on the wrong side of that. He received Eldon’s proffer as an accusation of years. He answered with a bitter negative, “No, thank you, damn you!”
Eldon apologized with a laugh. He felt as hilariously contented and sportive as a young pup whom no rebuff can offend. As he strode along he glanced back and saw that Sheila and Mrs. Vining were footing it, too, and carrying such luggage as Pennock could not accommodate. Eldon was amazed. He had supposed that they would ride. He dropped back to Sheila’s elbow and pleaded:
“Won’t you let me take a cab and ride you to the hotel?”
Sheila thanked him No, and Mrs. Vining finished him off:
“Young man, if you’re going to be an actor you must learn to practise small economies—especially in small towns where you gain nothing by extravagance. You never know how short your season may be. The actor who wastes money on cabs in the winter will be borrowing car fare in the summer.”
Eldon accepted the repulse as if it were a bouquet. “I see; but at least you must let me carry your suit-cases.”
Mrs. Vining threw him much the same answer as Tuell: “I’m not so old as I look, and I travel light.”
He turned to Sheila, whose big carry-all was so heavy that it dragged one shoulder down. She looked like the picture of somebody or other carrying a bucket from the well—or was it from a cow? He put out his hand. She turned aside to dodge him. He followed her closely and finally wrested the suit-case from her. Seeing his success, Mrs. Vining yielded him hers also. He let Pennock trudge with hers. And so they walked to the hotel and marched up to the desk.
Jaffer and Tuell had already registered. Eldon thought they might at least have waited till the ladies had had first choice. He was surprised to hear Sheila and Mrs. Vining haggling over the prices of lodging and choosing rooms of moderate cost.
He had no chance to speak to them at the performance or after it, but the next morning he hung about the lobby till train-time. He pretended much surprise at seeing Sheila,—as if he had not been waiting for her! He was a bad actor. Again he secured the carry-all in spite of her protests. If he had known more he would have seen that she gave up to avoid a battle. But she dropped back with Pennock and left him to walk with Mrs. Vining, who did not hesitate to assail him with her usual directness:
“Young man, you’re very nice and you mean very well, but you’ve got a lot to learn. Have you noticed that when the company gets into a train or a public dining-room, everybody settles as far away as possible from everybody else?”
Eldon had noticed it. It had shocked him. Mrs. Vining went on:
“And no doubt you’ve seen a big, husky actor let a poor, tired actress drag her own baggage to a far-off hotel.”
Eldon had noted that, too, with deep regret. He was astounded when Mrs. Vining said:
“Well, that actor is showing that actress the finest courtesy he can. When men and women are traveling this way on business, the man who is attentive to a woman is doing her a very dubious kindness, unless they’re married or expect to be.”
“Why?” said Eldon. “Can’t he pay her ordinary human courtesy?”
“He’d better not,” said Mrs. Vining, “or he’ll start the other members of the company and the gaping crowd of outsiders to whispering: ‘Oh, he’s carrying her valise now! It’s a sketch!’ ”
“A ‘sketch’?” Eldon murmured.
“Yes, a—an alliance, an affair. A theatrical troupe is like a little village on wheels. Everybody gossips. Everybody imagines—builds a big play out of a little scenario. And so the actor who is a true gentleman has to keep forgetting that he is one. It’s a penalty we women must pay for earning our livings. You see now, don’t you, Mr. Eldon?”
He bowed and blushed to realize that it was all meant as a rebuke to his forwardness. He had been treated with consideration, and had immediately proceeded to make a nuisance of himself. He had no right to carry Sheila’s burdens, and his insistence had been only an embarrassment to her. He had behaved like a greedy porter at a railroad station to whom one surrenders with wrath in order to silence his demands.
He had not progressed so far as he thought. His train had been ordered to back up. When he had placed Sheila’s baggage and Mrs. Vining’s in the seats they chose in the day coach, he declined Sheila’s invitation to sit down, and sulked in the smoking-car.
The towns that followed Milton were as stupid as Jaffer had said they were. The people who lived there seemed to love them, or at least they did not leave them, but they were dry oases for the lonely traveler. Few of the towns had even a statue, and most of those that had statues would have been the richer for their absence.
Of one thing Eldon made sure—that he would never inflict another of his compromising politenesses on Miss Sheila Kemble. He avoided her so ostentatiously that the other members of the company noticed it. Those who had instantly said when he carried her valise, “Aha! he is carrying her valise now!” were presently saying, “Oh, he’s not carrying her valise now!”
CHAPTER X
Gradually the company worked a zigzag passage to Chicago, where it was booked for an indefinite stay. If the “business” were good, it would be announced that, “owing to the unprecedented success, it has been found necessary to extend the run originally contemplated.” If the business were not so good, it would be announced that, “owing to previous bookings, it would unfortunately be impossible to extend the run beyond the next two weeks.”
Jaffer was saying as they rolled in: “There’s no telling in advance what Chicago’s going to do to us. New York stood for this rotten show for a whole season; Chicago may be too wise for us. I hope so. It’s a ghastly town. The Lake winds are death to a delicate throat. I always lose my voice control in Chicago.”
With Jaffer the success he was in was always a proof of the stupidity of the public. In his unending reminiscences, which he ran serially in the smoking-room like anotherArabian Nights, the various failures he had met were variously described. Those in which he had had a good part were “over the heads of the swine”; those in which he had shone dimly were “absolutely the worst plays ever concocted, my boy—hopeless from the start. How even a manager could fail to see it in the script I can’t for the life of me imagine.”
Old Jim Crumb said: “Chicago is a far better judge of a play than New York is. Chicago’s got a mind of her own. She’s the real metropolis. The critics have got a heart; they appreciate honest effort. If they don’t like you they say so fairly, without any of the brutality of New York.” Crumb’s last appearance in Chicago had been in a highly successful play.
Tuell stopped groaning long enough to growl: “Don’t you believe it! Chicago’s jealous of New York, and the critics have got their axes out for anything that bears the New York stamp. If they don’t like you, they lynch you—that’s all, they just lynch you.” Tuell’s last appearance there had been with a failure.
Eldon felt little interest in the matter one way or another. He had been snubbed in his romance. The other rôle he played would never be dignified even by a tap of the critical bludgeon. He was tired of the stage.
And then the opportunity he had prayed for fell at his feet, after he had ceased to pray for it.
The play opened on a Sunday night. It was Eldon’s first performance of a play on the Sabbath. He rather expected something to come through the roof. But the play went without a mishap. The applause was liberal, and the next morning’s notices were enthusiastic.
Sheila was picked out for especial praise. The leading woman, Miss Zelma Griffen, was slighted. She was very snappy to Sheila, which added the final touch to Sheila’s rapture.
Old Jaffer was complimented and remembered, and now he was loud in the praises of the town, the inspiring, bracing ozone from the Lake, and his splendid hotel. Jim Crumb’s bit as a farmer was mentioned, and his previous appearance recalled with “regret that he had not more opportunity to reveal his remarkable gifts of characterization.”
This was too much for poor Crumb. He went about town renewing former acquaintances with the fervor of a far voyager who has come home to stay. When he appeared at the second performance his speech was glucose and his gait rippling. In his one scene it was his duty to bring in a lantern and hold it over an automobile map on which Sheila and Mrs. Vining were trying to trace a lost road. It was a passage of some dramatic moment, but Crumb in his cups made unexpected farce of it by swinging the lantern like a switchman.
No comic genius from AristophanesviaMolière to Hoyt has ever yet devised a scene that will convulse an audience like the mistake or mishap of an actor. Poor, befuddled Crumb’s wabbly lantern was the laughing hit of the piece. He was too thick to be rebuked that night. Friends took him to his hotel and left him to sleep it off.
When the next morning he realized what he had done, what sacrilege he had committed, he sought relief from insanity in a hair of the dog that bit him. He was soon mellow enough to fall a victim to an hallucination that Tuesday was a matinée day. He appeared at the theater at half-past one, and made up to go on. He fell asleep waiting for his cue, and was discovered when his dressing-room mate arrived at seven o’clock. Then he insisted on descending to report for duty. He was still so befogged that Batterson did not dare let him ruin another performance. He addressed to Crumb that simple phrase which is the theatrical death-warrant:
“Hand me back your part.”
With the automatic heroism of a soldier sentenced to execution, Crumb staggered to his room and, fetching the brochure from his trunk, surrendered it to the higher power, revealing a somewhat shaky majesty of despair.
Eldon was standing in the wings, and Batterson thrust the document at him and growled: “You say you’re a great actor. I’m from Missouri. Get up in that and show me, to-night.”
If he had placed a spluttering bomb in Eldon’s hands, and told him to blow up a Czar with it, Eldon could hardly have felt more terrified.
CHAPTER XI
Eldon climbed the three flights of iron stairway to his cubby-hole more drunkenly than Crumb. The opportunity he had counted on was his and he was afraid of it. This was the sort of chance that had given great geniuses their start, according to countless legends. And he had been waiting for it, making ready for it.
Weeks before during the rehearsals and during the first performances he had hung about in the offing, memorizing every part, till he had found himself able to reel off whole scenes with a perfection and a vigor that thrilled him—when he was alone. Crumb’s rôle had been one of the first that he had memorized. But now, when he propped the little blue book against his make-up box and tried to read the dancing lines, they seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the play. He would have sworn he had never heard them. He had been told that the best method for quickly memorizing a part was to photograph each page or “side.” But the lines danced before him at an intoxicated speed that would have defied a moving-picture camera.
He mumbled good counsels to himself, however, as if he were undertaking the rescue of a drowning heroine, and at length the letters came to a focus, the words resumed their familiarity.
He had received the part nearly an hour before the time for the overture, that faint rumor which is to the actor what the bugle-call is to the soldier. By half past seven he found that he could whisper the lines to himself without a slip.
The character he was to impersonate did not appear until the third act, but Eldon was in the wings made up and on tiptoe with readiness when the first curtain rose. His heart went up with it and lodged in his pharynx, where it throbbed chokingly.
The property-man had been recruited to replace Eldon as the taxicab-driver, but Eldon was on such tenterhooks that when his old cue came for entrance he started to walk on as usual. Only a hasty backward shove from the arm of the property-man saved him from a public blunder.
The rest of the play seemed to unfold itself with an unendurable slowness. The severer critics had remarked on this.
As Eldon watched, the lines he heard kept jostling the lines he was trying to remember and he fell into a panic of uncertainty. At times he forgot where he was and interfered with the entrances and exits of the other actors, yet hardly heard the rebukes they flung at him.
Sheila, following one of her cues to “exit laughing L 2 E,” ran plump into Eldon’s arms. He was as startled as a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and clung to her to keep from falling. His stupor was pleasingly troubled by a vivid sense of how soft and round her shoulders were when he caught them in his hands.
As he fell back out of her way he trod upon Mrs. Vining’s favorite toe and she swore at him with an old-comedy vigor. She would have none of his apology, and the stage-manager with another oath ordered him to his room.
Once there, he fell to studying his lines anew. The more he whispered them to himself the more they eluded him. The vital problem of positions began to harass him. He began to wonder just where Crumb had stood.
He had learned from watching the rehearsals that few things upset or confuse actors like a shift of position. They learned their lines with reference to the geography of the stage and seemed curiously bewildered if the actor whom they had addressed on the right side appeared on the left.
Eldon foresaw himself throwing Sheila and Mrs. Vining out of their stride by standing up-stage when he should stand down, or right when he should stand left. He knew there was an etiquette about “giving the stage” to the superior characters. He remembered one rather heated argument in which Batterson had insinuated that old Mrs. Vining had been craftily “stealing the stage” from one young woman who was selfish enough in all conscience, but who had foolishly imagined that the closer she was to the audience the more she commanded it.
Eldon was disgusted with his ability to forget what he had watched incessantly. He was to make his entrance from the left, yet, as he recollected it, Crumb had stood to the right of Sheila as he held the lantern over the map. Now he wondered how he was to get round her. This bit of stage mechanism had always impressed him. He had seen endless time spent by the stage-manager in trying to devise a natural and inconspicuous method for attaining the simple end of moving an actor from one side of a table to the other side. At first he would have said, bluntly, “The way to go round a table is to go round it.” But he had finally realized that the audience must always be taken into account while seeming always to be ignored.
The more he pondered his brief rôle the more intricate it grew. It began to take on the importance of Hamlet. He repeated it over and over until he fell into a panic of aphasia.
Suddenly he heard the third act called and ran down the steps to secure his lantern. It was not to be found. The property-man was not to be found. When both were discovered, the lighting of the lantern proved too intricate for Eldon’s bethumbed fingers. The disgusted property-man performed it for him. He took his place in the wings.
Agues and fevers made a hippodrome of his frame. He saw his time approaching. He saw Sheila unfolding the road-map, scanning it closely. She was going to see the farmer approaching with a lantern. She was going to call to him to lend her the light of it. Now she saw him. She called to him. But he must not start yet, for he was supposed to be at a distance. She called again. She spoke to her aunt.
Now is the time! No, not yet! Now! Not yet!
“Why, here you are!” said Sheila.
But he was not there. He was a cigar Indian riveted to the floor. She beckoned to him, and summoned him in a stage whisper, but he did not move. Batterson dashed from his position near the curtain and shoved him forward, with a husky comment, “Go on, you—”
Eldon never knew what Batterson called him, but he was sure that he deserved it. He started like a man who has fallen out of bed. He tripped, dropped to one knee, recovered himself with the lurch of a stumbling horse, and plunged into the scene.
The quick and easy way to extinguish a lantern is to lower it quickly and lift it with a snap. That is what Eldon did. He found himself in the presence of two actresses on a little strip of dark beach with the audience massed threateningly before it like a tremendous phosphorescent billow curved inward for the crash. The billow shook a little as Eldon stumbled; a few titters ran through it in a whispering froth.