CHAPTER XII
Eldon was unaware that his light was out. He was unaware of almost everything important. He forgot his opening lines and marched across the stage with the granite tread of the statue that visited Don Juan.
Sheila improvised at once a line to supply what Eldon forgot. But she could not improvise a flame on a wick. Indeed, she had not noticed that the flame was missing. Even when Eldon, with the grace of a scarecrow, held out the cold black lantern, she went on studying the map and cheerily recited:
“Oh, that’s better! Now we can see just where we are.”
The earthquake of joy that smote the audience caught her unaware. The instant enormity of the bolt of laughter almost shook her from her feet. They do well to call it “bringing down the house.” There was a sound as of splitting timbers and din upon din as the gallery emptied its howls into the orchestra and the orchestra sent up shrieks of its own. The sound was like the sound that Samson must have heard when he pulled the temple in upon him.
Sheila and Mrs. Vining were struck with the panic that such unexpected laughter brings to the actor. They clutched at their garments to make sure that none of them had slipped their moorings. They looked at each other for news. Then they saw the dreadfully solemn Eldon holding aloft the fireless lantern.
The sense of incongruity that makes people laugh got them, too. They turned their backs to the audience and fought with their uncontrollable features. Few things delight an audience like the view of an actress broken up. It is so successful that in comic operas they counterfeit it.
The audience was now a whirlpool. Eldon might have been one of the cast-iron effigies that hold up lanterns on gate-posts; he could not have been more rigid or more unreal. His own brain was in a whirlpool, too, but not of mirth. Out of the eddies emerged a line. He seized it as a hope of safety and some desperate impulse led him to shout it above the clamor:
“It ain’t a very big lantern, ma’am, but it gives a heap o’ light.”
Sheila’s answer was lost in the renewed hubbub, but it received no further response from Eldon. His memory was quite paralyzed; he couldn’t have told his own name. He heard Sheila murmuring to comfort him:
“Can’t you light the lantern again? Don’t be afraid. Just light it. Haven’t you a match? Don’t be afraid!”
If Eldon had carried the stolen fire of Prometheus in his hand he could not have kindled tinder with it. He heard Mrs. Vining growling:
“Get off, you damned fool, get off!”
But the line between his brain and his legs had also blown out a fuse.
The audience was almost seasick with laughter. Ribs were aching and cheeks were dripping with tears. People were suffering with their mirth and the reinfection of laughter that a large audience sets up in itself. Eldon’s glazed eyes and stunned ears somehow realized the activity of Batterson, who was epileptic in the wings and howling in a strangled voice:
“Come off, you—! Come off, or—I’ll come and kick you off!”
And now Eldon was more afraid of leaving than of staying.
In desperation Sheila took him by the elbow and started him on his way. Just as the hydrophobic Batterson was about to shout, “Ring!” Eldon slipped slowly from the stage.
Little Batterson met the blinded Cyclops and was only restrained from knocking him down by a fear that he might knock him back into the scene. As he brandished his arms about the giant he resembled an infuriated spider attacking a helpless caterpillar.
Batterson’s oration was plentifully interlarded with simple old Anglo-Saxon terms that can only be answered with a blow. But Eldon was incapable of resentment. He understood little of what was said except the reiterated line, “If you ever ask me again to let you play a part I’ll—”
Whatever he threatened left Eldon languid; the furthest thing from his thoughts was a continuance upon the abominable career he had insanely attempted.
He stalked with iron feet up the iron stairs to his dressing-room, put on his street clothes, and went to his hotel. He had forgotten to remove his greast-paint, the black on his eyebrows and under his eyes, or the rouge upon his mouth. A number of passers-by gave him the entire sidewalk and stared after him, wondering whether he were on his way to the madhouse or the hospital.
The immensity of the disaster to the play was its salvation. The audience had laughed itself to a state of exhaustion. The yelps of hilarity ended in sobs of fatigue. The well-bred were ashamed of their misbehavior and the intelligent were disgusted to realize that they had abused the glorious privilege of laughter and debauched themselves with mirth over an unimportant mishap to an unfortunate actor who had done nothing intrinsically humorous.
Sheila and Mrs. Vining went on with the scene, making up what was necessary and receiving the abjectly submissive audience’s complete sympathy for their plight and extra approval for their ingenuity in extricating themselves from it. When the curtain fell upon the act there was unusual applause.
To an actor the agony of “going up” in the lines, or “fading,” is not much funnier after the first surprise than the death or wounding of a soldier is to his comrade. The warrior in the excitement of battle may laugh hysterically when a friend or enemy is ludicrously maimed, when he crumples up and grimaces sardonically, or is sent heels over head by the impact of a shell. But there is little comfort in the laughter since the same fate may come to himself.
The actor has this grinning form of death always at his elbow. He may forget his lines because they are unfamiliar or because they are old, because another actor gives a slightly different cue, some one person laughs too loudly in the audience, or coughs, or a baby cries, or for any one of a hundred reasons. That fear is never absent from the stage. It makes every performance a fresh ordeal. And the actor who has faltered meets more sympathy than blame.
If Eldon had not sneaked out of the theater and had remained until the end of the play he would have found that he had more friends than before in the company. Even Batterson, after his tirade was over, regretted its violence, and blamed himself. He had sent a green actor out on the stage without rehearsal. Batterson was almost tempted to apologize—almost.
But Eldon was not to be found. He was immured in the shabby room of his cheap hotel sick with nausea and feverish with shame.
Somehow he lived the long night out. He read the morning papers fiercely through. There were no head-lines on the front page describing his ruinous incapacity. There was not even a word of allusion to him or his tragedy in the theatrical notices. He was profoundly glad of his obscurity and profoundly convinced that obscurity was where he belonged. He wrote out a note of humble apology and resignation. He resolved to send it by messenger and never to go near that theater again, or any other after he had removed his trunk.
With the utmost reluctance he forced himself to go back to the scene of his shame. The stage-door keeper greeted him with a comforting indifference. He had evidently known nothing of what had happened. Stage-door keepers never do. None of the actors was about, and the theater was as lonely and musty as the tomb of the Capulets before Romeo broke in upon Juliet’s sleep.
Eldon mounted to his dressing-room and stared with a rueful eye at the make-up box which he had bought with all the pride a boy feels in his first chest of tools. He tried to tell himself that he was glad to be quit of the business of staining his face with these unmanly colors and of rubbing off the stains with effeminate cold-creams. He threw aside the soiled and multicolored towel with a gesture of disdain. But he was too honest to deceive himself. The more he denounced the actor’s calling the more he denounced himself for having been incompetent in it. He writhed at the memory of the hardships he had undergone in gaining a foothold on the stage and at the poltroonery of leaping overboard to avoid being thrown overboard.
As he left the theater to find an expressman to call for his trunk he looked into the letter-box where there was almost never a letter for him. To his surprise he found his name on a graceful envelope gracefully indited. He opened it and read the signature first. It was a note from Sheila.
Eldon’s eyes fairly bulged out of his head with amazed enchantment. His heart ached with joy. He went back to his dressing-room to read the letter over and over.
Dear Mr. Eldon,—Auntie John and I tried to see you last night, but you had gone. She was afraid that you would grieve too deeply over the mishap. It was only what might have happened to anybody. Auntie John says that she has known some of the most famous actors to do far worse. Sir Charles Wyndham went up in his lines and was fired athisfirst appearance. She wants to tell you some of the things that happened to her. They had to ring down on her once. She wants you to come over to our hotel and have tea with us this afternoon. Please do!Heartily,Sheila Kemble.
Dear Mr. Eldon,—Auntie John and I tried to see you last night, but you had gone. She was afraid that you would grieve too deeply over the mishap. It was only what might have happened to anybody. Auntie John says that she has known some of the most famous actors to do far worse. Sir Charles Wyndham went up in his lines and was fired athisfirst appearance. She wants to tell you some of the things that happened to her. They had to ring down on her once. She wants you to come over to our hotel and have tea with us this afternoon. Please do!
Heartily,
Sheila Kemble.
There was nothing much in the letter except an evident desire to make light of a tragedy and cheer a despondent soul across a swamp. Eldon did not even note that it was mainly about Aunt John. To him the letter was luminous with a glow of its own. He kissed the paper a dozen times. He resolved to conquer the stage or die. The stage should be the humble stepping-stone to the conquest of Sheila Kemble. Thereafter it should be the scene of their partnership in art. He would play Romeo to her Juliet, and they should play other rôles together till “Mr. and Mrs. Eldon” should be as famous for their art as for their domestic bliss.
Had she not already made a new soul of him, scattering his fright with a few words and recalling him to his duty and his opportunity? He would redeem himself to-night. To-night there should be no stumbling, no gloom in the lantern, no gaiety in the audience during his scene. To-night he would show Batterson how little old Crumb had really made of the part, drunk or sober.
He placed the letter as close to his heart as he could get it, and it warmed him like a poultice. He would go shave himself again and brush up a bit for Sheila’s tea-fête.
As he groped slowly down the dark stairway he heard voices on the stage. He recognized Crumb’s husky tones:
“If you’ll give me one more chance, Val, I swear I’ll never disappoint you again. I’m on the water-mobile for good this time.”
Eldon felt sorry for the poor old man. He paused to hear Batterson’s epitaph on him:
“Well, Jim, I’ll give you another try. But it’s against my will.”
“Oh, thank you, thank you, Val!”
“Don’t thank me. Thank that dub, Eldon. If he hadn’t thrown the scene last night you’d never get another look-in. No more would you if I could pick up anybody here. So you can go on to-night, but if your foot slips again, Jim, so help me, you’ll never put your head in another of our theaters.”
As Crumb’s heart went up, Eldon’s followed the see-saw law. All his hopes and plans were collapsed. He would not go to Sheila’s tea with this disgrace upon him and sit like a death’s-head in her presence.
And how could he present himself at her hotel in the shabby clothes he wore? She and her aunt were living expensively in Chicago. It was good advertisement to live well there; at least it was a bad advertisement not to. It was a bad advertisement for Eldon to appear anywhere. He was under the buffets of fortune. But he tore up his resignation.
Now of all times he needed the comfort of her cheer. Now of all times he could not ask it or accept it. He wrote her a note of devout gratitude, and said that a previous engagement with an old college friend prevented his accepting her gracious hospitality. His old college friend was himself, and they sat in his boarding-house cell and called each other names.
CHAPTER XIII
Eldon resumed the livery of the taxicab-driver and spoke his two lines each night with his accustomed grace, and received his accustomed tribute of silence. He arrived on the stage just before his cue, and he went to his room just after his exit.
He avoided Sheila, and she, feeling repulsed, turned her attention from him. Friends of her father and mother and friends of her school days besieged her with entertainment. People who took pride in saying they knew somebody on the stage sought introductions. Rich or handsome young men were presented to her at every turn. They poured their praises and their prayers into her pretty ears, but got no receipt for them nor any merchandise of favor. She was not quite out of the hilarious stage of girlhood. She said with more philosophy than she realized that she “had no use for men.” But they were all the more excited by her evasive charms. Her prettiness was ripening into beauty and the glow of youth from within gave her a more shining aureole than even the ingenuities of stage make-up and lighting. Homes of wealth were open to her and her growing clientèle frequented the theater. Miss Griffen was voted common, and left to the adulation of the fast young men.
The traveling-manager of the company was not slow to notice this. He saw that Sheila had not only the rare gifts of dramatic instinct and appeal, but that she had the power of attracting the approval of distinguished people as well as of the general. Men of all ages delighted in her; and this was still more important—women of all ages liked her, paid to see her. Women who gave great receptions in brand-new palaces bought up all the boxes or several rows in the orchestra in honor of Sheila Kemble. School-girls clambered to the balcony and shop-girls to the gallery to see Sheila Kemble.
The listening manager heard the outgoing voices again and again saying such things as, “It’s the third time I’ve seen this. It’s not much of a play, but Sheila Kemble—isn’t she sweet?”
The company-manager and the house-manager and the press agent all wrote to Reben, the manager-in-chief:
“Keep your eye on Kemble. She’s got draught. She makes ’em come again.”
And Reben, who had made himself a plutocrat with twenty companies on the road, and a dozen theaters, owned or leased—Reben who had grown rich by studying his public, planned to make another fortune by exploiting Sheila Kemble. He kept the secret to himself, but he set on foot a still hunt for the play that should make her while she seemed to be making it. He schemed how to get her signature to a five-year contract without exciting her cupidity to a duel with his own. He gave orders to play her up gradually in the publicity. The thoughts of managers are long, long thoughts.
He gave out an interview to the effect that what the public wanted was “Youth—youth, that beautiful flower which is the dearest memory of the old, and the golden delight of the young.”
His chief publicity man, Starr Coleman, a reformed dramatic critic, wrote the interview for Reben, explained it to him, and was proud of it with the vicarious pride of those strange scribes whose lives are devoted to getting for others what they deny to themselves.
Reben had told Coleman to play up strong his belief in the American dramatist, particularly the young dramatist. Reben always did this just before he set out on his annual European shopping-tour among the foreign play-bazars. Over there he could inspect the finished products of expert craftsmen; he could see their machines in operation, in lieu of buying pigs in pokes from ambitious Yankees who learned their trade at the managers’ expense.
This widely copied “Youth” interview brought down on Reben’s play-bureau a deluge of American manuscripts, almost all of them devoid of theme or novelty, redolent of no passion except the passion for writing a play, and all of them crude in workmanship. Reben kept a play-reader—or at least a play-rejector, and paid him a moderate salary to glance over submitted manuscripts so that Reben could make a bluff at having read them before he returned them. This timid person surprised Reben one day by saying:
“There’s a play here with a kind of an idea in it. It’s hopeless as it stands, of course, but it might be worked over a little. It’s written by a man named Vicksburg, or Vickery, or something like that. Funny thing—he suggests that Sheila Kemble would be the ideal woman for the principal part. And, do you know, I’ve been thinking she has the makings of a star some day. Had you ever thought of that?”
“No,” said Reben, craftily.
“Well, I believe she’ll bear watching.”
In after-years this play-returner used to say, “I put Reben on to the idea that there was star material in Kemble, before he ever thought of it himself.”
But long before either of them thought of Sheila Kemble as a star, that destiny had been dreamed and planned for her by Sheila Kemble.
Frivolous as she appeared on the stage and off, her pretty head was full of sonorous ambitions. That head was not turned by the whirlwinds of adulation, or drugged by the bouquets of flattery, because it was full of self-criticism. She was struggling for expressions that she could not get; she was groping, listening, studying, trying, discarding, replacing.
She thought she was free from any nonsense of love. Nonsense should not thwart her progress and make a fool of her, as it had of so many others. It should not interrupt her career or ruin it as it had so many others. She would make friends with men, oh yes. They were so much more sensible, as a rule, than women, except when they grew sentimental. And that was a mere form of preliminary sparring with most of them. Once a girl made a fellow understand that she was not interested in spoony nonsense, he became himself and gave his mind a chance. And all the while nature was rendering her more ready to command love from without, less ready to withstand love from within. She was becoming more and more of an actress. But still faster and still more was she becoming a woman.
While Sheila was drafting herself a future, Eldon was gnashing his teeth in a pillory of inaction. He could make no step forward and he could not back out. He had taken cheap and nasty lodgings in the same boarding-house with Vincent Tuell, who added to his depression by his constant distress. Tuell could not sleep nights or days; he filled Eldon’s ears with endless denunciations of the stage and with cynical advice to chuck it while he could. Eldon would probably have taken Tuell’s advice if Tuell had not urged it so tyrannically. In self-defense Eldon would protest:
“Why don’t you leave it yourself, man? You ought to be in the hospital or at home being nursed.”
And Tuell would snarl: “Oh, I’d chuck it quick enough if I could. But I’ve got no other trade, and there’s the pair of kiddies in school—and the wife. She’s sick, too, and I’m here. God! what a business! It wouldn’t be so bad if I were getting anywhere except older. But I’ve got a rotten part and I’m rotten in it. Every night I have to breeze in and breeze out and fight like the devil to keep from dying on the job. And never a laugh do I get. It’s one of those parts that reads funny and rehearses the company into convulsions and then plays like a column from the telephone-book. I’ve done everything I could. I put in all the old sure-fire business. I never lie down. I trip over rugs, I make funny faces, I wear funny clothes, but does anybody smile?—nagh! I can’t even fool the critics. I haven’t had a clipping I could send home to the wife since I left the big town.”
Eldon had been as puzzled as Tuell was. He had watched the expert actor using an encyclopedia of tricks, and never achieving success. Tuell usually came off dripping with sweat. The moment he reached the wings his grin fell from him like a cheap comic mask over a tragic grimace of real pain and despair. In addition to his mental distress, his physical torment was incessant. In his boarding-house Tuell gave himself up to lamentations without end. Eldon begged him to see a doctor, but Tuell did not believe in doctors.
“They always want to get their knives into you,” he would growl. “They’re worse than the critics.”
One day Eldon made the acquaintance of a young physician named Edie, who had recently hung a sign in the front window and used the parlor as an office during certain morning hours. Patients came rarely, and the physician berated his profession as violently as Tuell his. Eldon persuaded the doctor to employ some of his leisure in examining Tuell. He persuaded Tuell to submit, and the doctor’s verdict came without hesitation or delicacy:
“Appendicitis, old man. The quicker you’re operated on the better for you.”
“What did I tell you?” Tuell snarled. “Didn’t I say they were like critics? Their only interest in you is to knife you.”
The young doctor laughed. “Perhaps the critics turn up the truth now and then, too.”
But Tuell answered, bitterly: “Well, I’ve got to stand them. I haven’t got to stand for you other butchers.”
Eldon apologized for his friend’s rudeness, but the doctor took no offense: “It’s his pain that’s talking,” he said. “He’s a sick man. He doesn’t know how sick he is.”
One matinée day Tuell was like a hyena in the wings. He swore even at Batterson. On the stage he was more violently merry than ever. After the performance Eldon looked into his dressing-room and asked him to go to dinner with him. Tuell refused gruffly. He would not eat to-day. He would not take off his make-up. The sweat was everywhere about his greasy face. His jaw hung down and he panted like a sick dog. Eldon offered to bring him in some food—sandwiches or something. Tuell winced with nausea at the mention. Then an anguish twisted through him like a great steel gimlet. He groaned, unashamed. Eldon could only watch in ignorant helplessness. When the spasm was over he said:
“You’ve got to have a doctor, old man.”
“I guess so,” Tuell sighed. “Get that young fellow, Edie. He won’t rob me much. And he’ll wait for his fee.”
Eldon made all haste to fetch Edie from the boarding-house. They returned to find Tuell on the floor of his room, writhing and moaning, unheeded in the deserted theater. The doctor gave Eldon a telephone number and told him to demand an ambulance at once.
Tuell heard the word, and broke out in such fierce protest that the doctor countermanded the order.
“I can’t go to any hospital now,” Tuell raged. “Haven’t you any sense? You know there’s an evening performance. Get me through to-night, and I can rest all day to-morrow. I’ve got to play to-night. I’ve got to! There’s no understudy ready.”
He played. They set a chair for him in the wings and the physician waited there for him, piercing his skin with pain-deadening drugs every time he left the stage. There was sympathy enough from the company. Even Batterson was gentle, his fierce eyes fiercer with the cruelty of the situation. The house was packed, and “ringing down on capacity” is not done.
Tuell sat in a stupor, breathing hard like a groggy prize-fighter. But whenever his cue came it woke him as if a ringside gong had shrilled. He flung off his suffering and marched out to his punishment. Only, to-night, somehow, he lacked his usual speed. The suffering and the bromides dulled him so that in place of dashing on the stage he sauntered on; in place of slamming his lines back he just uttered them.
And somehow the laughter came that had never come before—the laughter the author had imagined and had won from the company at the first reading from the script.
From the wings they could see Tuell’s knuckles whiten where he clung to a chair to keep from falling.
The audience loved Tuell to-night, never suspected his anguishes, and waited for him, laughed when he appeared. For his final exit he had always stumbled off, whooping with stage laughter. It had always resounded unaccompanied. To-night he was so spent that he was capable only of a dry little chuckle. To his ears it was the old uproar. To the audience it was the delicious giggle of this spring’s wind in last year’s leaves. It tickled the multitude and all those united titters made a thunder.
Tuell staggered past the dead-line of the wings and fell forward into Eldon’s arms, whispering:
“I got ’em that time. Damn ’em, I got ’em at last.”
Eldon helped him to his chair, helped lift him in his chair and carry him to the ambulance. Tuell didn’t know whither they were taking him. He clawed at Eldon’s arm and muttered:
“I must write to the wife and tell her how I killed ’em to-night. And I’ve got the trick now. I’ve just found the secret—just to-night. Of course there wouldn’t be a critic there. Oh no, of course not.”
But there was a Critic there.
CHAPTER XIV
The next morning, as Eldon was leaving his boarding-house to call on Tuell at the hospital, he was astounded to see Batterson at the foot of the steps.
“I’m looking for you,” said the stage-manager.
Batterson’s eyes were so bloodshot and so wet that Eldon stared his surprise. Batterson grumbled:
“No, I’m not drunk. Tried to get drunk, but couldn’t.”
Eldon was at a loss for what to say to this. Suddenly Batterson was clinging to his arm, and sobbing with head bent down to hide his weakness from the passers-by.
“Why, Mr. Batterson,” Eldon stammered, “what’s wrong?”
“Tuell’s dead.”
“No! My God!”
“He never came out of the ether. They were too late to save him. The appendix had burst while he was working last night.”
Eldon, remembering that uncanny battle, felt the gush of brine to his eyes. He hung his head for concealment, too.
Batterson raged on: “Remember what Hamlet said: ‘They say he made a good end.’ Tuell was only a mummer, but he died on the firing-line, makin’ ’em laugh. If he’d been a soldier trying to save somebody from paying taxes without representation or trying to protect some millionaire’s oil-wells, or a fireman trying to rescue somebody’s furniture—they’d have called him a damned hero. But he was only an actor—he only tried to make people happy. He was a comedian, and not a good comedian—just a hard worker; one of these stage soldiers trying to keep the theater open.
“He did the best he knew how. The critics ripped him open and made him funnier than he could make himself. But he kept right on. I used to roast him worse than they did, God help me! But he never laid down on us. He died in his make-up. They didn’t take his grease-paint off till afterward. They didn’t know how. I had to do it for him when I got there. Poor old painted face, with the comedian’s smile branded on it! That was his trade-mark. He was only an actor.”
Eldon noted that Batterson had led him, not to the hospital, but to the theater, with its electric signs, its circus lithographs, its gaudy ballyhoo of advertisement.
Batterson groaned: “Well, here’s the shop. We’ve got to do what Tuell did. The theater’s got to keep open. It’s another sell-out to-night. Somebody has to play Tuell’s part to-night. I want you to.”
In spite of the horror that filled his heart Eldon felt a shaft of hope like a thrust of lightning in the night. Then the dark closed in again, for Batterson went on:
“It’s only for to-night, old boy. I’ve wired to New York and a good man’ll be here to-morrow. But there’s to-night. You’ve got to go on. You fell down the other time, and I guess I told you so, but you didn’t have a rehearsal. I can coach you up to-day. I’ve called the other people. They ought to be here now.”
And so they were.
On the gloomy stage before the empty house the company stood about in somber garb, under the oppression of Tuell’s death. Batterson walked down to the footlights, clapped his hands, and said:
“Places, please, ladies and gentlemen, for poor old Tuell’s first scene. Mr. Eldon will play the part to-night.”
Those who were not on at the entrance drew to the sides. The others moved here and there and stood at their posts. Batterson directed with an unwonted calm, with a dismal patience.
The part Eldon held in his hand had been taken from Tuell’s trunk. The dead hands seemed to cling to it with grisly jealousy. The laughter of Tuell seemed to haunt the place like the echo of a maniac’s voice. Eldon could not give any color to the lines. He could barely utter them. The company gave him his cues with equal lifelessness.
Sheila was present and read her flippancies in a voice of terror—the terror of youth before the swoop of death. Mrs. Vining muttered her cynicisms with the drear bitterness of one to whom this familiar sort of thing had happened once more.
When the detached scenes had been run over several times Batterson dismissed Eldon first that he might go and study. As he went he heard Batterson saying:
“Help him out to-night, ladies and gentlemen. Do the best you can. To-morrow we’ll have a regular man here. And now about poor Tuell. Some of the comic-opera people in town will sing at his funeral. His wife is coming out to get him. Mr. Reben telegraphed to pay the expenses of taking him back. I guess he didn’t leave the wife anything much—except some children. We’d better get up a little benefit, I guess—a matinée, probably. The other troupes in town will help, of course. If any of you know any good little one-act plays, let’s have ’em. I’ve got a screaming little farce we might throw on. I think I can get some of the vaudeville people to do a few comic turns.”
That night Eldon slipped into the dead man’s shoes—at least he wore the riding-boots and the hunting-coat and carried the crop that Tuell had worn. Tuell had had them made too large—for the comic effect that did not come. They fitted Eldon fairly well. But it was like acting in another man’s shroud.
He was without ambition, without hope of personal profit. He was merely a stop-gap. He was too completely gloomy even to feel afraid of the audience. He was only a journeyman finishing another man’s job.
His memory worked like a machine, so independently of his mind that he seemed to have a phonograph in his throat. He kept wondering at the little explosions of laughter at his words.
He saw the surprise in Sheila’s eyes as he brought down the house—with so different a laughter now. He murmured to her in sudden dread, “Are they guying me again?”
“No, no,” she answered. “Go on; you’re splendid!”
The news of Tuell’s death had taken little space in the evening papers. The audience, as a whole, was oblivious of it, or of what he had played. There was none of the regret on the other side of the footlights that solemnized the stage. The play had been established as a successful comedy. People came to laugh, and laughed with confidence.
But the pity of Tuell’s fate ruined any joy Eldon might have taken in the success he was winning. He played the part through in the same dull, indifferent tone. When he made his final exit he laughed as he had heard Tuell laugh, with uncanny mimicry as if a ghost inhabited him. He was hardly conscious of the salvo of applause that followed him. He supposed that some one still on the stage had earned it. He sighed with relief as he reached the shelter of the dark wings. Batterson, who had hovered near him, ready with the unnecessary prompt-book, glared at him in amazement and growled:
“Good Lord! Eldon, who’d have ever picked you for a comedian?”
Eldon smiled at what he imagined to be sarcasm, and took from his pocket the little pamphlet he had carried with him for quick reference. He offered it to Batterson. Batterson waved it back.
“Keep it, my boy. When the other fellow gets here from New York he can play your old part.”
CHAPTER XV
The next night Eldon reached the theater in a new mood. He had been promoted. He still felt sorry for poor Tuell. The grief of the wife whom he had met at the train and taken to the undertaker’s shop where Tuell rested had torn his heart as with claws. He had told her all things beautiful of Tuell. He had wept to see her weep. He wept his heart clean as a sheep’s heart.
As Villon said, “The dead go quick.” Eldon was ashamed to be so merciless, but in spite of himself ambition blazed up in him. He was a comedian. Batterson had told him so. The house had told him so. Sheila had murmured, “You’re splendid.”
And now he was a comedian with a screamingly funny rôle. Now he could build it up. He had been working on it half unconsciously all night and all day.
The second night he marched into the scene with the authority of one who is about to be very funny. In his first scenes he delivered his lines with enthusiasm, with appreciation of their humor. He took pains not to “walk into his laughs” as he had done the night before, when he had not expected any laughs. He waited for his laughs. He was amazed to note that they did not come. His pause left a hole in the action. He worked harder, underlined his important words, cocked his head as one who says, “The story I am about to tell you is the funniest thing you ever heard. You’ll die when you hear it.”
It was the scene that died. A new form of stage-fright sickened him. Hope perished. He was not a comedian, after all. His one success had been an accident.
When the first curtain fell he slunk away by himself to avoid Batterson’s searching eyes. To complete his shame he saw that Batterson was talking earnestly with the new-comer from New York.
Old Mrs. Vining sauntered his way. He tried to escape, but the heavy standard of a bunch-light cut him off. She approached him and began in that acid tone of hers:
“Young man, there are two things that are important to a comedian. One is to get a laugh, and the other is to nail it. You got your laughs last night and you’ve lost ’em to-night. Do you know why?”
“If I only did! I’m playing twice as hard to-night.”
“You bet you are, and you’re hard as zinc. You keep telling the audience how funny you’re going to be, and that finishes you. Now you’ve lived long enough to know that there are few jokes in the world so funny that they can stand being boosted before they’re told. Play your part straight, man. You can fake pathos and rub it in, but of all things always play comedy straight.
“And another thing, don’t fidget! One of the best comedians that ever walked the stage told me once, ‘I know only one secret for getting laughs, and that is, Nobody must move when the laugh comes.’ But to-night you never waited for anybody else to kill your laughs. You butchered ’em yourself by lolling your head and making fool gestures. Quit it! Now you go on in the next act and play the part as you did last night. Be gloomy and quiet and depressed. That’s what makes ’em laugh out there—the sight of your misery. There’s nothing funny to them in your being so damned cheerful as you were to-night.”
Eldon said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Vining.” But he was not convinced of anything except his fatal and eternal unfitness to be an actor. He walked into the second act carrying his old burden of dejection; he rather moaned than delivered his lines. And the people laughed.
The cruelty of the public heart angered Eldon and he made further experiment in dolor. Laughs came now that he had not secured the night before. The others were bigger than then. He threw into some of his lines such subcellar misery that he broke up Sheila. When he made the laughing exit he did not even chuckle, he moaned. And the result was a tornado. People mopped their eyes.
Batterson met him with a quizzical smile: “You got ’em going to-night nearly as good as the time your lantern went out.”
That was higher praise than it sounded at first hearing.
When Mrs. Vining made her exit she said, “Aha! What did I tell you, young man?”
When Sheila came off she sought him out, and cried, “Oh, you were wonderful, simply wonderful!”
And when Batterson growled at her: “You spoiled several of his best laughs by talking through ’em. You ought to know better than that,” Sheila was so pleased for Eldon’s sake that she relished the rebuke.
Mrs. Vining had warned him to nail his laughs. At the next performance he tried to repeat his exact effects. Some of them he forgot, some of them he remembered. But they did not work this time. Others went better than ever. Each point was a new battle.
And so it was with every repetition. No two audiences were alike. Each had its own individuality. He began to study audiences as individuals. The first part of his first act was his period of getting acquainted. Some houses were quick and some slow, some noisily demonstrative, some quietly satisfied. It took all his powers to play his part. And he could not tire of it because every night was a first night in a new rôle.
Success made another man of him. He was interested in his task. He was winning praise for it. The management voluntarily raised his salary a little. He held his head a trifle higher.
Sheila noted the change at once. She liked him the better for it. She repeated her invitation to tea. He accepted now, and appeared in some new clothes. They were vastly becoming. On the stage he played a middle-aged henpecked plebeian. Off the stage he was young and handsome and thoroughbred.
He was a reader, too, and Sheila, like most actresses, was an omnivorous browser. They talked books. She lent him one of hers. He cherished it as if it were a breviary. They argued over literature and life. He ventured to contradict her. He was no longer a big mastiff at heel. He was forceful and stubborn. These qualities do not greatly displease a woman who likes a man.
Mrs. Vining was amused at first by the change in Sheila. Latterly the girl was constantly quoting “Mr. Eldon.” By and by it was “As Floyd Eldon says,” and one day Mrs. Vining heard, “Last night Floyd was telling me.” Then Aunt John grew alarmed, for she did not want Sheila to be in love—not for a long while yet, and never with an actor.
And Sheila had no intention of falling in love with an actor. But this did not prevent her from being the best of friends with one. All of Eldon’s qualities charmed Sheila as she discovered them. She had leisure for the discovery. There were no rehearsals; business was good at the theater; Eldon grew better and better in his performance. Sheila kept up her pace and enlarged her following. They dwelt in an atmosphere of contentment. But as her personal public increased and as the demands on her spirits and her time increased she began to take more pleasure in the company of Eldon and to like him best alone. She began to break old engagements, or fulfil them briefly, and to refuse new invitations.
Mrs. Vining was not able to be about for a while. Her neuralgia was revived by the knife-winds of Chicago. But Sheila and Eldon found them highly stimulating. He joined her in her constitutionals.
Chicago was large enough to give them a kind of seclusion by multitude, the solitude of a great forest. Among Chicago’s myriads the little “Friend in Need” company was lost to view. It was possible to go about with Eldon and never meet a fellow-trooper; to walk miles with him along the Lake front, or through Lincoln Park, to sidle past the pictures in the Art Institute or the Field Museum, and rest upon the benches in galleries where the dumb beauty on the walls warmed the soul to sensitiveness.
And when they were not alone their hearts seemed to commune without exchange of word or glance. He told her first how wonderful an artist she was, and by and by he was crediting her art to her wonderful “personality.” She told him that he had “personality,” too, lots of it, and charming. She told him that the stage needed men of birth and breeding and higher education, especially when these were combined with such—such—she could hardly say beauty—so she fell back again on that useful term—“personality.”
They never tired of discussing the technic of their trade and its emotional grandeurs. He told her that his main ambition was to see her achieve the heights God meant her for; he only wished that he might trudge on after her, in her wake. She told him that he had far greater gifts than she had, and that his future was boundless.
Finally she convinced him that she was convinced of this, and over a tea-table in the Auditorium Hotel he murmured—and trembled with the terrific audacity of it as he murmured:
“If only we could always play together—twin stars.”
She was shocked as if she had touched a live wire of frightful beatitude. And her lips shivered as she mumbled, “Would you like that?”
He could only sigh enormously. And his eyes were full of devout longing as he whispered, “Let’s!”
They burst into laughter like children planning some tremendous game. And then Mrs. Vining had to walk into their cloud-Eden and dissolve it into a plain table at which she seated herself.
Mrs. Vining was thinking “Aha!” as she crossed the room to their table. “It’s high time I was getting well. Affairs have been progressing since I began to nurse my neuralgia.”
She resolved to stick around, like the “demon chaperon” of Fontaine Fox’s comic pictures. At all costs she must rescue Sheila from the wiles of this good-looking young man. For her ward to lose her head and find her heart in an affair with an actor would be a disaster indeed; the very disaster that Sheila’s mother had warned her against.
Of course Sheila’s mother had married an actor and been as happy as a woman had a right to expect to be with any man. And of course Mrs. Vining’s own dear dead John Vining had been the most lovable of rascals. But such bits of luck could not keep on recurring in the same family.
And Mr. Reben did not believe in marriage for actors, either. He had many reasons far from romantic. The public did not like its innocent heroines to be wives. The prima donna’s husband is a proverb of trouble-making. Separated, the couple pine; united, they quarrel with other members of the company or with each other. Children arrive contrary to bookings and play havoc with youth and vivacity, changing the frivolous Juliet into a Nurse or a Roman Matron.
Reben would have been infuriated to learn that Sheila Kemble, his Sheila of the golden future, was dallying on the brink of an infatuation for an infatuated minor member of one of his companies. A flirtation, even, was too dangerous to permit. He would have dismissed Eldon without a moment’s pity if he had known what none of the company had yet suspected. Unwittingly he accomplished the effect he would have sought if he had been aware.
Reben ran out to Chicago ostensibly, according to his custom, to inspect the troupe in the last fortnight of its run there. He invited Sheila to supper with Mrs. Vining. He criticized Sheila severely and praised Miss Griffen. Later, as if quite casually, he spoke to Mrs. Vining of a new play he had found abroad. It was a man star’s play. “I bought it for Tom Brereton,” he said, “but the leadin’ woman’s rôle is rather interestin’.”
He described one of her scenes and noted that Sheila was instantly excited. It was one of those craftsmanly achievements the English dramatists arrive at oftener than ours, and it had made the instant fame of the actress who played it in London. Having dropped this golden apple before Atalanta, he changed the subject carelessly.
Sheila turned back to the apple:
“Tell me more about the play, please!”
Reben told her more, permitted her to coax him to tell it all. He yawned so crudely that she would have noticed his wiles if she had been able to think of anything but that rôle; for an actress thrills at the thought of putting on one of these costumes of the soul as quickly as an average woman grows incandescent before a new gown.
Sheila clasped her hands and shook her head like a beggar outside a restaurant window: “Oh, but I envy the woman who plays that part! Who is she?”
“Parton, I suppose,” Reben yawned. “But she’s fallen off lately. Gone and got herself in love—and with a fool actor, of all people! The idiot! I’ve a notion to chuck her. After all the money and publicity I’ve wasted on her, to fall for a dub like that!”
Sheila did not dare plead for the part. But her eyes prayed; her very attitude implored it.
Reben laughed: “In case anything awful happened to Parton—like sudden death or matrimony—I don’t suppose the rôle would interest you?”
“I’d give ten years off my life to play that part.”
“Would you, now?” Reben laughed. “You don’t mean it. Ten years off your life, eh? Would you give ten dollars off your salary?” He chuckled at his shrewdness.
But she answered, solemnly, “I’d play it for nothing.”
“Well, well!” said Reben. “That would be a savin’!” He always would have his little joke. Then he said: “But jokin’ aside, of course I couldn’t afford to let you work for nothin’. Fact is, if the play was a success I could afford to pay you a little better than you’re gettin’ now. What are you gettin’ now?”
“Seventy-five,” said Sheila.
“Is that all!” said Reben. “Well, well, I don’t have to be as stingy as that. But there’s one thing I can’t afford to do and that’s to work for an actor—or actress—who quits me as soon as I make him—or her.”
“I’d never quit you if you gave me chances like that,” Sheila sighed, hopelessly.
“So they all tell me,” said Reben. “Then they chuck me for the management of Cupid & Co. Would you be willin’ to sign a five years’ contract with me, young lady?”
“In a minute!”
“Well, well! I’ll see what can be done. Good night!”
He left her to fret herself to an edge with the insomnia of frantic ambition. The next day he sent her a contract to look over.
“Aha!” said Sheila to Mrs. Vining. “That’s his little game. He wanted me all the time. Why couldn’t he have said so? I’ll make him pay for being so clever.”
She sent the contract back with emendations.
He emended her emendations and returned it to her.
She emended further and wrote in the margin, “Oh, Mr. Reben!” and, “Greedy, greedy!”
He rather enjoyed the duel with the little haggler. He belonged to the race that best manages to combine really good art with really good business and really good generosity.
When at last he had bargained Sheila to the wall he made her a present of better terms than she had accepted—as if he were tossing her a handsome diamond.
Sheila embraced him and called him an angel. He belonged, indeed, to the same race as the only original angels.
She signed the contract with exclamations of gratitude. With his copy in his pocket he put out both hands and wished her all the glory he planned for her. Then he told her to get ready to leave within a week for New York and rehearsals.
He had brought to Chicago a young woman stage-named Dulcie Ormerod to replace her. He wanted Dulcie to play the part at least a week so that the company could be advertised as “exactly the same that appeared in Chicago.”
When he had gone Sheila fell from the clouds—at least she struck a hole in the air and sank suddenly nearer to the earth. She cried, “Oh, Aunt John, I forgot to ask if he wanted you in the new play!”
“No, he doesn’t, dearie. He told me how sorry he was that there was no part for me while you were signing the contract.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! I won’t leave you!”
“Of course you will, my child. You can’t go on forever chained to my old slow heels. Besides, I’m too tired to learn a new part this season. I’ll jog on out to the Coast with this company. I think California will be good for me.”
A little later Sheila remembered Floyd Eldon. She gasped as if she had been stabbed.
“Why, what’s wrong now, honey?” cried Mrs. Vining.
“I was just thinking—Oh, nothing!”
Sheila was dismayed at the idea of leaving Eldon, leaving him all by himself—no, not by himself, for that Dulcie creature would replace her in the company, and perhaps—no doubt—in his lonely heart. Sheila had grown ever so fond of Eldon, but she could not expect any man, least of all so handsome, so big-hearted a man, to resist the wiles of a cat, or, worse, a kitten, who would select such a name as “Dulcie.”
An inspiration gave Sheila sudden cheer. She would ask dear Mr. Reben to give Eldon a chance in the new company. It would be far better for Floyd to “create” something than to continue hammering at his present second-hand rôle. He might have to take a smallish part, but they would be in each other’s neighborhood, and perhaps the star might fall ill. Eldon would step in; he would make an enormous sensation; and then and thus in a few short months they would have accomplished their dream—they would be revolving as twin stars in the high sky together.
She called up Reben at the theater; he had gone to the hotel. At the hotel, he had left for the station. At the station, he had taken the train. Well, she would write to him or, better yet, see him in person and arrange it the minute she reached New York.
That night she took her contract to the theater in her hand-bag. She must tell Floyd about it.
He was loitering outside when she reached the stage door. Her face was agleam with joy as she beckoned him under a light in the corridor. His face was agleam, too, as he hurried forward. Before she could whisk out her contract he brandished before her one of his own. Before she could say, “See what I have!” he was murmuring: “Sheila! Sheila! What do you suppose? Reben—the great Reben likes my work. He said he thought I was worth keeping, but I ought to be playing the juvenile lead instead of a second old man. He’s going to shift Eric Folwell to a new production East, and he offered me his place! Think of it! Of course I grabbed it. I’m to replace Folwell as soon as I can get up in the part. Would you believe it—Reben gave me a contract for three years. He’s boosted me to fifty a week already. I’m to play this part all season through to the Coast. And next season he’ll give me a better part in something else—and at a better salary.
“I wanted to telephone you about it, but I was afraid to mention it to you for fear something might prevent him from signing. But he did!—just before he took the train. See, there’s his own great name! After next week I’m to be your lover in the play as well as in reality. Our dream is coming true already, isn’t it—” He hesitated before the absolute word, then, having made the plunge, went on and whispered, “Sheila mine!”
Sheila stared at him, at the love and triumph in his eyes; and suddenly her cake was dough. Her mouth twisted like a child’s when the rain begins on a holiday. She turned her head away and passed the side of her hand childishly across her clenched eyes, whence the tears came thronging. She half murmured, half wept:
“I’m not your Sheila. I’m that hateful old Reben’s slave. And I don’t go any further with you. Miss—Dulcie Somebody-or-other is to have my part. She’s prettier than I am. And I’ve got to go to New York next week to begin rehearsals of—a horrid old B-british success.”
The voice of the call-boy warning them of the half-hour sent them scurrying to their cells with their plight unsolved. They had a few chances to exchange regrets during the performance, but other members of the company who had heard of the good luck of both of them kept breaking in with felicitations that sounded like irony. They were so desperate for talk that Eldon waited for Sheila in the alley and walked to her hotel with her. Mrs. Vining went along, very much along. They had to accept her presence; she would not be ignored. She put in sarcastic allusions to the uselessness of good luck in this world. In her day actors and actresses would have been dancing along the streets over such double fortune. As to their separation, it would be a good test of their alleged affection. If it was serious it would outlast the test; if not, it was a good time to learn how unimportant the whole thing was.
She regarded the elegies of young love with all the skepticism of the old who have seen so much of it, heard so much repetition of such words as “undying” and “forever,” and have seen the “undying” dying all about like autumn leaves, and few of the “forevers” lasting a year.
Sheila accepted Eldon’s invitation to have a bite of supper in the grill-room. Mrs. Vining was in a grill-room mood and invited herself along. Other members of the troupe appeared and visited the funeral table with words of envy.
In the spaces between these interruptions Sheila explained her plan to ask Reben to give Eldon a chance with the new company.
Mrs. Vining sniffed: “Sheila, you ought to have sense enough to know that the minute you mentioned this young man’s name Reben would send him to Australia—or fire him.”
“Fire him?” said Sheila. “He has a three years’ contract.”
“Yes, with a two weeks’ clause in it, I’ll bet.”
They fetched the contract out and looked it over again. There was the iniquitous clause, seated like a toad overlooked among the flowers, and now it was impossible to see the flowers for the toad.
“Oh, you ought to have changed that,” said Sheila. “It’s different in mine.”
“I didn’t know,” said Eldon, “and I shouldn’t have dared to argue with Reben. I was afraid he might change his mind. But I could resign and come East and get a job with another manager.”
Mrs. Vining poured on more vinegar: “You can’t resign. That two weeks’ notice works only one way. And if you break with Reben you’ll have a fine chance getting in with any other manager! Besides, why let your—well, call it ‘love’ if you want to—why let it make fools of you both? Mr. Eldon has had a great compliment from the best manager in the country, and a raise of salary, and a promise of his interest. Are you thinking of slapping him in the face and kicking your own feet out from under yourself just because this foolish little girl is going along about her business?
“And another thing, Mr. Floyd Eldon, if you love this girl as much as you say you’re taking a pretty way to prove it. Do you want to ruin her career just as it’s beginning, drag this rising star back to the drudgery of being the wife of a fifty-dollar-a-week actor? Oh, you’ll do better. You’re the type that matinée girls make a pet of. You’ll have draught, too, as soon as you learn a little more about your business. But it wouldn’t help you any just now to be known as an old married man. You mind your business and let her mind hers.
“You think you’re Romeo and Juliet in modern costume, I suppose. Well, look what a mess they made of it. You are two fine young things and I love you both, but you mustn’t try to prove your devotion to each other by committing suicide together.”
Eldon’s thoughts were dark and bitter. His own career meant nothing to him at the moment. His love of Sheila was all-important to him, and her career was, above all, important. He said: “I certainly won’t do anything to hurt Sheila’s career. That’s my religion—her career.”
He poured into her eyes all the idolatry a man can feel for a woman. He had a curious feeling that he read in her eyes a faint fleck of disappointment. His sacrifice was perfect and complete, but he felt an odious little suspicion that it was not absolutely welcome.
Perhaps he guessed right. Sheila was hastening to that point in womanhood where the chief demand of her soul is not that her lover should exalt her on a pedestal and worship her, but should tear her thence and love her. She did not suspect this yet herself. All she knew was that she was dissatisfied with her triumph. She bade Eldon a ghostly farewell at the hotel elevator and went up to her room, while he turned away to his dingy boarding-house. He had not yet bettered his lodgings; he was trying to save his pennies against the future need of a married man.
When Sheila had made ready for bed she put out the lights and leaned across the sill and stared across the dark boundless prairie of the starlit Lake. It had an oceanic vastitude and loneliness. It was as blank as her own future.