CHAPTER XL
The thud of the fist, the grunt of Bret’s effort, the shriek of Sheila, the clatter of Eldon’s fall, the hubbub of the startled spectators, were all jumbled.
When Eldon, dazed almost to unconsciousness, gathered himself together for self-defense and counter attack, the stage was revolving about him. Instinctively he put up his guard, clenched his right fist, and shifted clear of the table.
Then his anger flamed through his bewilderment. He realized who had struck him, and he dimly understood why. A blaze of rage against this foreigner, this vandal, shot up in his soul, and he advanced on Winfield with his arm drawn back. But he found Winfield struggling with Batterson and McNish, who had flung themselves on him, grappling his arms. Eldon stopped with his fists poised. He could not strike that unprotected face, though it was gray with hatred of him.
An instant he paused, then unclenched his hand and fell to straightening his collar and rubbing his stinging flesh. Sheila had run between the two men in a panic. All her thought was to protect her husband. Her eyes blazed against Eldon. He saw the look, and it hurt him worse than his other shame. He laughed bitterly into Bret’s face.
“We’re even now. I struck you when you didn’t expect it because you didn’t belong on the stage. You don’t belong here now. Get off! Get off or—God help you!”
This challenge infuriated Bret, and he made such violent effort to reach Eldon that Batterson, Prior, McNish, and an intensely interested and hopeful group of stage-hands could hardly smother his struggles. He bent and wrestled like the withed Samson, and his hatred for Eldon could find no word bitter enough but “You—you—you actor!”
Eldon laughed at this taunt and answered with equal contempt, “You thug—you business man!” Then, seeing how Sheila urged Bret away, how dismayed and frantic she was, he cried in Bret’s face: “You thought you struck me—but it was your wife you struck in the face!”
Sheila did not thank him for that pity. She silenced him with a glare, then turned again to her husband, put her arms about his arms, and clung to them with little fetters that he could not break for fear of hurting her. She laid her head on his breast and talked to his battling heart:
“Oh, Bret, Bret! honey, my love! Don’t, don’t! I can’t bear it! You’ll kill me if you fight any more!”
The fights of men and dogs are almost never carried to a finish. One surrenders or runs or a crowd interferes.
Winfield felt all his strength leave him. His wife’s voice softened him; the triumph of his registered blow satisfied him to a surprising degree; the conspicuousness of his position disgusted him. He nodded his head and his captors let him go.
The reaction and the exhaustion of wrath weakened him so that he could hardly stand, and Sheila supported him almost as much as he supported her.
And now Reben began on him. An outsider had invaded the sanctum of his stage, had attacked one of his people—an actor who had made good. Winfield had broken up the happy family of success with an omen of scandal.
Reben denounced him in a livid fury: “Why did you do it? Why? What right have you to come back here and slug one of my actors? Why? He is a gentleman! Your wife is a lady! Why should you be—what you are? You should apologize, you should!”
“Apologize!” Bret sneered, with all loathing in his grin.
Eldon flared at the look, but controlled himself. “He doesn’t owe me any apology. Let him apologize to his wife, if he has any decency in him.”
He sat down on the table, but stood up again lest he appear weak. Again Sheila threw him a look of hatred. Then she began to coax Winfield from the scene, whispering to him pleadingly and patting his arms soothingly:
“Come away, honey. Come away, please. They’re all staring. Don’t fight any more, please—oh, please, for my sake!”
He suffered her to lead him into the wings and through the labyrinth to her dressing-room.
And now the stage was like a church at a funeral after the dead has been taken away. Everybody felt that Sheila was dead to the theater. The look in her eyes, her failure to rebuke her husband for his outrage on the company, her failure to resent his attitude toward herself—all these pointed to a slavish submission. Everybody knew that if Sheila took it into her head to leave the stage there would be no stopping her.
The curtain went up, disclosing the empty house with all the soul gone out of it. In the cavernous balconies and the cave of the orchestra the ushers moved about banging the seats together. They went waist-deep in the rows, vanishing as they stooped to pick up programs and rubbish. They were exchanging light persiflage with the charwomen who were spreading shrouds over the long windrows. The ushers and the scrub-ladies knew nothing of what had taken place after the curtain fell. They knew strangely little about theatrical affairs.
They were hardly interested in the groups lingering on the stage in quiet, after-the-funeral conversation. But the situation was vitally interesting to the actors and the staff. Without Sheila the play would be starless. How could it go on? The company would be disbanded, the few weeks of salary would not have paid for the long rehearsals or the costumes. The people would be taken back to New York and dumped on the market again, and at a time when most of the opportunities were gone.
It meant a relapse to poverty for some of them, a postponement of ambitions and of loves, a further deferment of old bills; it meant children taken out of good schools, parents cut off from their allowances; it meant all that the sudden closing of any other factory means.
The disaster was so unexpected and so outrageous that some of them found it incredible. They could not believe that Sheila would not come back and patch up a peace with Reben and Eldon and let the success continue. Successes were so rare and so hard to make that it was unbelievable that this tremendous gold-mine should be closed down because of a little quarrel, a little jealousy, a little rough temper and hot language.
Eldon alone did not believe that Sheila would return. He had loved her and lost her. He had known her great ambitions, how lofty and beautiful they had been. He had dreamed of climbing the heights at her side; then he had learned of her marriage and had seen how completely her art had ceased to be the big dream of her soul, how completely it had been shifted to a place secondary to love.
No, Sheila would not make peace. Sheila was dead to this play, and this play dead without her, and without this play Sheila would die. Of this he felt solemnly assured.
Therefore when the others expressed their sympathy for the attack he had endured, or made jokes about it, he did not boast of what he might have done, or apologize for what he had left undone, or try to laugh it off or lie it off.
He could think only solemnly of the devastation in an artist’s career and the deep damnation of her taking off.
Batterson said, “Say, that was a nasty one he handed you.”
Eldon confessed: “Yes, it nearly knocked my head off; but it was coming to me.”
“Why didn’t you hand him one back?”
“How could I hit him when you held his hands? How could I hit him when his wife was clinging to him? And what’s a blow? I’ve had worse ones than that in knock-down and drag-out fights. I’ll get a lot more later, no doubt. But I couldn’t hit Winfield. He doesn’t understand. Sheila has trouble enough ahead of her with him. Poor Sheila! She’s the one that will pay. The rest of us will get other jobs. But Sheila is done for.”
By now the scenery was all folded and stacked against the walls. The drops were lost in the flies. The furniture and properties were withdrawn. The bare walls of the naked stage were visible.
The electrician was at the switchboard, throwing off the house lights in order. They went out like great eyes closing. The theater grew darker and more forlorn. The stage itself yielded to the night. The footlights and borders blinked and were gone. There was no light save a little glow upon a standard set in the center of the apron.
Eldon sighed and went to his dressing-room.
CHAPTER XLI
Meanwhile Sheila was immured with her husband. She sent Pennock away and locked the door, pressed Bret into a chair, and knelt against his knee and stretched her arms up.
“What is it, honey? What’s happened? I didn’t know you were within a thousand miles of here.”
He was still ugly enough to growl, “Evidently not!”
She seemed to understand and recoiled from him, sank back on her heels as if his fist had struck her down. “What do you mean?” she whispered. “That I—I—You can’t mean you distrust me?”
“That dog loves you and you—”
“Don’t say it!” She rose to her knees again and put up her hands. “I could never forgive you if you said that now—and our honeymoon just begun.”
“Honeymoon!” he laughed. “Look at this.” He held up his right hand. Grease-paint from Eldon’s jaw was on his knuckles. He put his finger on her cheek and it was covered with the same unction. Then he rubbed the odious ointment from his hands. She blushed under her rouge.
“I know it’s been a pitiful honeymoon. But I couldn’t help it, Bret. I did what I could. It has been harder for me than for you, and I’m just worn out. There’s no joy in the world for me. The success is nothing.”
“He loves you, I tell you, and you let him make love to you.”
“Of course, honey; it’s in the play; it’s in the play!”
“Not love like that. Why, everybody in the audience was saying it was real. All the people round me were saying you two were in love with each other.”
“That’s what we were working for, isn’t it?”
“Oh, not the characters, but you two; you and Eldon. Couldn’t I see how he looked at you, how you looked at him, how you—you crushed him in your arms?”
“How else could we show that the characters were madly in love with each other, dear?”
“But you didn’t have to play it so earnestly.”
“It wouldn’t be honest not to do our best, would it? Can’t you understand?”
“I can understand that my wife was in the arms of a man that loves her, and that even if you don’t love him, you pretended to, and he took advantage of it to—to—to kiss you!”
“Why, he didn’t kiss me, honey.”
“I saw him.”
“No, you didn’t. We just pretended to kiss each other. Not that a stage kiss makes any difference with rouge pressing on grease-paint—but, anyway, he didn’t.”
“You’ll be telling me he didn’t make love to you next.”
“Of course he didn’t, honey. We’d be fined for it if Reben or Batterson had noticed it; but the fact is we were trying to break each other up. Actors are always doing that when they’re sure of a success. We’ve been under a heavy strain, you know, and now we let down a little.”
Bret could hardly believe what he wanted so to believe—that while the audience was sobbing the actors were juggling with emotions, the mere properties of their trade. He asked, grimly, “If he wasn’t making love to you, what was he saying?”
“It was nothing very clever. He’s not witty, Eldon; he’s rather heavy when he tries to write his own stuff. He accused me of letting the scene lag, and he was whispering to me that I was ‘asleep at the switch, and the switch was falling off,’ and I answered him back that Dulcie Ormerod would please him better.”
“Dulcie Ormerod? Who’s Dulcie Ormerod?”
“Oh, she’s a little tike of an actress that took my place in the ‘Friend in Need’ company a long while ago. And she’s come on here to be my understudy. Eldon hates her because she makes love to him all the time.”
Bret’s gaze pierced her eyes, trying to find a lie behind their defense. “And you dare to tell me that you and Eldon were joking?”
“Of course we were, honey. If I’d been in love with him I wouldn’t choose the theater to display it in, with a packed house watching, would I? If we’d been carried away with our own emotion we’d have played the scene badly.
“Another thing happened. Batterson noticed that something was wrong with our work, and he stood in the wings close to me and began to whip us up. He was snarling at us: ‘Get to work, you two. Put some ginger in it.’ And he swore at us. That made us work harder.”
Bret was dumfounded. “You mean to tell me that you played a love-scene better because the stage-manager was swearing at you?”
Sheila frowned at his ignorance. “Of course, you dear old stupid. Acting is like horse-racing. Sometimes we need the spur and the whip; sometimes we need a kind word or a pat on the head. Acting is a business, honey. Can’t you understand? We played it well because it’s a business and we know our business. If you can’t understand the first thing about my profession I might as well give it up.”
“That’s one thing we agree on, thank God.”
“Oh, I’d be glad to quit any time. I’m worn out. I don’t like this play. It hasn’t a new idea in it. I’m tired of it already and I dread the thought of going on with it for a year—two years, maybe. I wish I could quit to-night.”
“You’re going to.”
She was startled by the quiet conviction of his tone. Again she sighed: “If I only could!”
“I mean it, Sheila,” he declared. “This is your last night on the stage or your last night as my wife.”
She studied him narrowly. He really meant it! He went on:
“Joking or no joking, you were in another man’s arms and you had no idea when you were coming home. We have no home. I have no wife. It can’t go on. You come back with me to-morrow or I go back alone for good and all.”
“But Reben—” she interposed, helpless between the millstones of her two destinies as woman and artist.
“I’ll settle with Reben.”
She hardly pondered the decision. Suddenly it was made for her. She looked at her husband and felt that she belonged to him first, last, and forever. She was at the period when all her inheritances and all nature commanded her to be woman, to be wife to her man. It was good to have him decide for her.
She dropped to the floor again and breathed a little final, comfortable, “All right.”
Bret bent over and caught her up into his arms with a strength that assured her protection against all other claimants of her, and he kissed her with a contented certainty that he had never known before. Then he set her on her feet and said with a noble authority:
“Hurry and get out of those things and into your own.”
She laughed at his magistral tone, and her last act of independence was to put him out of the actress’s room and call Pennock to her aid. Bret stood guard in the corridor. If he had had any qualms of conscience they would have been eased by the sound of Sheila’s cheerful voice as she made old Pennock bestir herself.
At length Sheila emerged with no trace of the actress about her, just a neat little, tight little armful of wife.
As they were about to turn out at the stage door they saw Reben lingering in the wings. He beckoned to Sheila and called her by name. She moved toward him, not because he was her boss, but because he did not know that he was not. She rejoiced to feel that she had changed masters. Her husband, already the protector and champion, motioned her back and went to Reben in her stead.
“I wanted Miss Kemble,” Reben said, very coldly.
To which Bret retorted, calmly, “Mrs. Winfield has decided to resign from your company.”
Reben had fought himself to a state of self-control. He had resolved to leave Sheila and Bret to settle their own feud. He would observe a strict neutrality. His business was to keep the company together and at work. The word “resign” alarmed him anew.
“Resign!” he gasped. “When?”
“To-night.”
“Nonsense! She plays to-morrow.”
“She cannot play to-morrow.”
“She is ill? I don’t wonder, after such scenes. Her understudy might get through to-morrow night, but after that she must appear.”
“She cannot appear again.”
“My dear fellow, I have a contract.”
“I am breaking the contract.”
“Your name is not on the contract.”
“It is on a contract of marriage.”
“So you told me. She plays, just the same.”
“She does not play.”
“I will make her play.”
“How?”
“I—She—You—Sheila, you can’t put such a trick on me.”
Sheila crept forward to interpose again: “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Reben. But my husband—”
“Have I treated you badly? Have I neglected anything? Have I done you any injury?”
“No, no. I have no fault to find with you, Mr. Reben. But my husband—”
“Before you married him—before you met him, you promised me—”
“I know. I’m terribly sorry, but my duty to my husband is my highest duty. Please forgive me, but I can’t play any more.”
“You shall play. I have invested a fortune in your future. I have made you a success. You can’t desert me and the company now. You can’t! You sha’n’t, by—”
Sheila shook her head. She was done with the stage. Reben was throttled with his own anger. He turned again on Winfield and shook a jeweled fist under his nose:
“This is your infernal meddling. You get out of here and never come near again.”
Winfield pressed Reben’s fist down with a quiet strength. “We’re not going to.”
“You, I mean; not Sheila. Sheila belongs to me. She is my star. I made her. I need her. She means a fortune to me.”
“How much of a fortune does she mean to you?”
“I will clear a hundred thousand dollars from this piece at least; a hundred thousand dollars! You think I will let you rob me of that?”
“I’m not going to. I will pay you that much to cancel her contract.”
Reben gasped in his face. “You—you will pay me a—hun—dred—thou—sand—dol—lars?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“I haven’t that much cash in the bank.”
“Ha, ha! I guess not!”
“But I will pay it to you long before Sheila could earn it for you.”
“I will believe that when I see it.”
“I haven’t my check-book with me. I will send you a check for ten thousand on account to-morrow morning.”
Reben laughed wildly at him. Bret took out his card-case. There was a small gold pencil on his key-chain. He wrote a few words and handed the card to Reben:
Reben tossed his mane in scorn.
Bret answered: “It is a debt of honor. I’m able to pay it and I will.”
Reben stared up into the man’s cold eyes, looked down at the card, tightened his mouth, put the card into his pocketbook, and snarled:
“Honor! We’ll see. Now get out—both of you!”
Winfield accepted the dismissal with a smile of pride, and, turning, took Sheila’s arm and led her away.
“Oh, Bret! Bret!” she moaned.
“Don’t you worry, honey. You’re worth it,” he laughed.
“I wonder!” she sighed.
The next morning after breakfast Bret sat down to write the ten-thousand-dollar check. “It makes an awful hole in my back account,” he said, “but it heals a bigger one in my heart.”
Just then a note was brought to the door. When he opened it the “I O U” torn into small bits fell into his hands from a sheet of letter-paper containing these words:
My dear Mr. Winfield,—Please find inclosed a little wedding-present for your charming bride. One of the unavoidable hazards of the manager’s life is the fatal curiosity of actresses concerning the experiment of marriage. Please tell Miss Kemble—I should say Mrs. Winfield—that no fear of inconveniencing me must disturb her honeymoon. Miss Dulcie Ormerod will step into her vacant shoes and fill them nicely. I cannot return her contract, as it is in my safe in New York. I will leave it there until she feels that her vacation is over, when I shall be glad to renew it. The clever little lady insisted on cutting out the two weeks’ clause in her contract with me—I wonder if she left it in yours.With all felicitation, I am, dear Mr. and Mrs. Winfield,Faithfully yours,Henry Reben.Bret Winfield, Esq.
My dear Mr. Winfield,—Please find inclosed a little wedding-present for your charming bride. One of the unavoidable hazards of the manager’s life is the fatal curiosity of actresses concerning the experiment of marriage. Please tell Miss Kemble—I should say Mrs. Winfield—that no fear of inconveniencing me must disturb her honeymoon. Miss Dulcie Ormerod will step into her vacant shoes and fill them nicely. I cannot return her contract, as it is in my safe in New York. I will leave it there until she feels that her vacation is over, when I shall be glad to renew it. The clever little lady insisted on cutting out the two weeks’ clause in her contract with me—I wonder if she left it in yours.
With all felicitation, I am, dear Mr. and Mrs. Winfield,
Faithfully yours,
Henry Reben.
Bret Winfield, Esq.
Sheila read the ironic words across Bret’s arm. She clung to it as to a spar of rescue and laughed. “I’ll never go back.”
And this time it was Bret who sighed, “I wonder.”
CHAPTER XLII
The impromptu epilogue to the play and the abandonment of the theater by the young star had occurred too late to reach the next morning’s papers.
The evening sheets were sure to make a spread. The actors were bound to gossip, and the stage-hands. Somebody would tell some reporter and gain a little credit or a little excitement. Therefore almost everybody would join in the race for publication.
Reben understood this, and he held a council of war with Starr Coleman as to the best form of presentation. He had a natural and not unjustified desire to have the story do the least possible harm to his play. He collaborated with his press agent for hours over the campaign, and they decided upon a formal telegram to be given to the Associated Press and the other bureaus. They would flash it to all the crannies of the continent. It was too bad that such easy publicity should be wasted on an expiring instead of a rising star.
For the Chicago papers Reben decided upon an interview which he would give with seeming reluctance at the solicitation of Coleman on behalf of the reporters.
The loss of Sheila was a serious blow. The problem was whether or not “Hamlet” could succeed with Hamlet omitted; or, rather, if “As You Like It” would prosper without Rosalind.
Reben had been tempted to close the theater at once; then get Winfield’s money out of him if he had to levy on his father’s business, which, the manager had learned, was big and solvent.
But his egotism revolted at such a procedure, and in a fine burst of pride he had written the letter to Bret and, tearing the “I O U” to shreds, sealed it in. At the same time he resolved not to give up the ship. It was never easy to tell who made the success of a play. He had known road companies to take in more money without a famous star than with one.
He rounded up Batterson, got him out of bed, and sent for Dulcie Ormerod to meet him in the deserted hotel parlor and begin rehearsals at once. She could make up her sleep later in the day or next week. Then he went to his own bed.
Sometimes luck conspires with the brave. The first stage-hand who met the first early morning reporter and sold him the story for a drink had the usual hazy idea one brings away from a fist-battle. According to him Winfield had come back on the stage drunk and started a row by striking at Mr. Eldon.
Eldon knocked Winfield backward into the arms of Batterson and McNish, and would have finished him off if Sheila had not sheltered him. Thereupon Eldon ordered Winfield out of the theater, and he retreated under the protection of his wife, for it seemed that the poor girl had been deluded into marrying the hound.
The reporter was overjoyed at this glorious find. He hunted up Sheila and Winfield first. Sheila answered the telephone, and at Bret’s advice refused to see or be seen. She gave the reporter the message that her husband had absolutely nothing to say.
It is a safe statement at times, but just now it confirmed the reporter in a beautiful theory that Eldon had beaten Winfield up so badly that he was in no condition to be seen.
The reporter found Batterson next and told him his suspicions. Batterson, surly with wrecked slumber, was pleased to confirm the theory and make a few additions. He owed Winfield no courtesies.
When Starr Coleman and Reben were found they needed no prompting to set that snowball rolling and to play up Eldon’s heroism. Coleman added the excellent thought that Winfield’s motive was one of professional jealousy because Eldon had run away with the play and the star’s laurels were threatened. For that reason she had basely deserted the ship; but the ship would go on. Mr. Reben, in fact, had felt that Miss Kemble was an unfortunate selection for the play and had already decided to substitute his wonderful discovery, the brilliant, beautiful Dulcie Ormerod—photographs herewith.
That was the story that Bret and Sheila read when it occurred to them to send down for an evening paper. Bret was desperate with rage—rage at Eldon, at Reben, at the entire press, and the whole world. But he remembered that his father, who had been a politician, had used as his motto: “Don’t fight to-day’s paper till next week. You can’t whip a cyclone. Take to the cellar and it will soon blow over.”
Sheila was frantic with remorses of every variety. She blamed Eldon for it all. She did not absolve him even when a little note arrived from him:
Dear Mrs. Winfield,—After the exciting events of last night I overslept this morning. I have but this minute seen the outrageous stories in the newspapers. I beg you to believe that I had no part in them and that I shall do what I can to deny the ridiculous rôle they put upon me.Yours faithfully,Floyd Eldon.
Dear Mrs. Winfield,—After the exciting events of last night I overslept this morning. I have but this minute seen the outrageous stories in the newspapers. I beg you to believe that I had no part in them and that I shall do what I can to deny the ridiculous rôle they put upon me.
Yours faithfully,
Floyd Eldon.
Eldon’s denials were as welcome as denials of picturesque newspaper stories always are. They were suppressed or set in small type, with statements that Mr. Eldon very charmingly and chivalrously and with his characteristic modesty attempted to minimize his share in a most unpleasant matter.
Bret was so annoyed by a chance encounter with a group of cross-examining reporters, and found himself so hampered by his inability to explain his own anger at Eldon and the theater without implying gross suspicion of his wife’s behavior, that he broke away, returned to the policy of silence that he ought not to have left, and, gathering Sheila up, fled with her to his own home.
The play profited by the advertisement, and Dulcie Ormerod slid into the established rôle like a hand going into a glove several sizes too large. Eldon was doubly a hero now, and Reben went back to New York with triumph perched on his cigar.
CHAPTER XLIII
A honeymoon is like a blue lagoon divinely beautiful, with a mimicry of all heaven in its deeps; blinding sweet in the sun, and almost intolerably comfortable in the moon.
But by and by the atoll that circles it like a wedding-ring proves to be a bit narrow and interferes with the view of the big sea pounding at its outer edges. The calm becomes monotonous, and at the least puff of wind the boat is on the reefs. They are coral reefs, but they cut like knives and hurt the worse for being jewelry.
To Bret and Sheila the newspaper storm over her departure from the theater, her elopement from success, was like the surf on the shut-out sea.
The Winfield influence had suppressed most of the newspaper comment in the home papers, but the people of Blithevale read the metropolitan journals, and Sheila’s name flared through those for many days.
When the news element had been exhausted there were crumbs enough left for several symposiums on the subject of “Stage Marriages,” “Actresses as Wives,” “Actresses as Mothers,” “The Homevs.the Theater,” and all the twists an ingenious press can give to a whimsy of public interest.
Bret and Sheila suffered woefully from the appalling pandemonium their secret wedding had raised, and Winfield began to be convinced that the policy of the mailed fist, the blow and the word, had not brought him dignity. But it had brought him his wife, and she was at home; and when they could not escape the articles on “Why Actresses Go Back to the Stage,” she laughed at the prophecies that she would return, as so many others had done.
“They haven’t all gone back,” she smiled. “And I am one of those who never will, for I’ve found peace and bliss and contentment. I’ve found my home.”
They were relieved of all that had been unusual in their marriage, and they shared and inspired the usual raptures, which were no less poignant for being immemorially usual. This year’s June was the most beautiful June that ever was, while it was the newest June.
Their honeymoon was usual in being sublime. It was also usual in running into frequent shoals and reefs.
The first reef was Bret’s mother. Bret had always been amazed at the professional jealousy of actors and their contests for the largest type and the center of the stage. Suddenly he was himself the center of the stage and his attention was the large type. He was dismayed to behold with what immediate instinct his mother and his wife proceeded to take mutual umbrage at each other’s interest in him, and to take astonishing pain from his efforts to divide his heart into equal portions.
Sheila recognized that poor Mrs. Winfield had a right to her son’s support in a time of such grief, but she felt that she herself had a right to some sort of honeymoon. And being a stranger in the town and all, she had especial claim to consideration.
Sheila told Bret one day: “Of course, honey, your mother is a perfect dear and I don’t wonder you love her, but she’d like to poison me— Now wait, dearie. Of course I don’t mean just that, but—well, she’s like an understudy. An understudy doesn’t exactly want the star to break her neck or anything, but if a train ran over her she’d bear up bravely.”
Another reef was the factory. Of course Sheila expected her husband to pay the proper attention to his business and she wanted him to be ambitious, but she had not anticipated how little time was left in a day after the necessary office hours, meal hours, and sleep hours were deducted.
She wrote her mother:
Bret is an ideal husband and I’m ideally happy, of course, but women off the stage are terrible loafers. They just sit in the window and watch the procession go by.When I chucked Reben I said, “Thank Heaven, I don’t have to go on playing that same old part for two or three years night after night, matinée after matinée.” But that’s nothing to the record of the household drama. This is the scene plot of my daily performance:Scene: Home of the Winfields.Time: Yesterday, to-day, and forever.ACT I.Scene: Dining-room. Time: 8a.m.Husband and wife at breakfast. Soliloquy by wife while hubby reads paper and eats eggs and says, “Yes, honey,” at intervals.Exit husband.Curtain.Five hours elapse.ACT II.Scene: Same as ACT I. Luncheon on table. Husband enters hurriedly, apologizes for coming home late and dashing away early. Tells of trouble at factory.Exit hastily.Curtain.Five hours elapse.ACT III.Scene: Same as ACT II. Dinner on table. Husband discusses trouble at factory. Wife tells of troubles with servants. Neither understands the other.Curtain.Two hours elapse.ACT IV.Scene: Living-room. Husband reads evening papers; wife reads stupid magazines. Business of making love. Return to reading-matter. Husband falls asleep in chair.Curtain.That’s the scenario, and the play has settled down for an indefinite run at this house.
Bret is an ideal husband and I’m ideally happy, of course, but women off the stage are terrible loafers. They just sit in the window and watch the procession go by.
When I chucked Reben I said, “Thank Heaven, I don’t have to go on playing that same old part for two or three years night after night, matinée after matinée.” But that’s nothing to the record of the household drama. This is the scene plot of my daily performance:
Scene: Home of the Winfields.Time: Yesterday, to-day, and forever.
ACT I.Scene: Dining-room. Time: 8a.m.Husband and wife at breakfast. Soliloquy by wife while hubby reads paper and eats eggs and says, “Yes, honey,” at intervals.
Exit husband.Curtain.
Five hours elapse.
ACT II.Scene: Same as ACT I. Luncheon on table. Husband enters hurriedly, apologizes for coming home late and dashing away early. Tells of trouble at factory.
Exit hastily.Curtain.
Five hours elapse.
ACT III.Scene: Same as ACT II. Dinner on table. Husband discusses trouble at factory. Wife tells of troubles with servants. Neither understands the other.Curtain.Two hours elapse.
ACT IV.Scene: Living-room. Husband reads evening papers; wife reads stupid magazines. Business of making love. Return to reading-matter. Husband falls asleep in chair.Curtain.
That’s the scenario, and the play has settled down for an indefinite run at this house.
Roger and Polly read the letter and shook their heads over it. Roger sighed.
“How long do you think it’s really booked for, Polly?”
“Knowing Sheila—” Polly began, then shook her head. “Well, really I don’t know. There are so many Sheilas, and I haven’t met the last three or four of them.”
For many months Sheila was royally entertained by what she called “the merry villagers.” She was the audience and they the spectacle. She took a childish delight in mimicking odd types, to Bret’s amusement and his mother’s distress. She took a daughter-in-law’s delight in shocking her mother-in-law by pretending to be shocked at the Blithevale vices.
Hitherto Sheila had gone to church regularly next Sunday, but seldom this. In Blithevale Mrs. Winfield compelled her to attend constantly. Sheila took revenge by quoting all the preacher said about the wickedness of his parishioners.
When she heard of a divorce or a family wreck she would exclaim, “Why, I thought that only actors and actresses were tied loose!”
When she heard of one of those hideous scandals that all communities endure now and then as a sort of measles she would make a face of horror: “Why, I’ve always read that village life was ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths pure.”
When Bret would fume at the petty practices of business rivals, the necessity for crushing down competition and infringement, the importance of keeping the name at the top of the list, Sheila would smile, “And do manufacturers have professional jealousy, too?”
She soon realized, however, that her comedy was not getting across the footlights as she meant it.
Seen through the eyes of one who had been used to hard work, far travel, and high salary, the business of being a wife as the average woman conducted it was a farce to Sheila.
That the average wife was truly a helpmeet appeared to her merely a graceful gallantry of the husbands. As a matter of fact, as far as she could see, the only help most of the men got from their wives was the help of the spur and the lash. The women’s extravagances and discontent compelled the husbands to double energy and increased achievement.
Thus, while the village was watching with impatient suspicion the behavior of this curious actress-creature who had settled there, the actress-creature was learning the uglier truths about that most persistently flattered of institutions, the American village.
But after the failure of her first satires Sheila resolved to stop being “catty,” and to dwell upon the sweeter and more wholesome elements of life in Blithevale. She ceased to defend the theater by aspersing the town.
She said never a word, however, of any longing for a return to the stage. Now and then an exclamation of interest over a bit of theatrical news escaped her when she read the New York paper that had been coming to the Winfield home for years. It arrived after Bret left for the office, and he usually glanced at it during his luncheon. One noon Bret’s eye was caught by head-lines on an inner page devoted largely to dramatic news. The “triumph” of “The Woman Pays” was announced; it had been produced in New York the night before. In spite of the handicap of its Chicago success it had conquered Broadway. As sometimes happens, it found the Manhattanites even more enthusiastic than the Westerners.
Bret noted with a kind of resentment that Sheila was not mentioned as the creator of the leading rôle. He hated to see that Dulcie Ormerod was taken seriously by the big critics. He winced to read that Floyd Eldon was a great find, a future star of the first magnitude.
Winfield had once been wretched for fear that his kidnapping of Sheila had ruined the chances of the play. Yet it was not entirely comfortable to see that the play prospered so hugely without her. He had not been entirely glad that Reben had returned his “I O U”; and he was not entirely glad that Reben stood to make a greater profit than he had estimated at first in spite of Sheila. It was a peculiarly galling humiliation.
Bret would have concealed the paper from Sheila, but he knew that she had read it before he came home to luncheon. He had wondered what made her so distraught. Now that he knew, he said nothing, but he could see the torment in the back of her smiling eyes, the labored effort to be casual and inconsequential. That Mona Lisa enigma haunted him at his office, and he resolved to take her for a spin in the car. She would be having a hard day, for ambitious fevers have their crises and relapses, too. Bret wanted to help his wife over this bitter hour.
When he came in unexpectedly he found her lying asleep on the big divan in the living-room. The crumpled newspaper lay on the floor at her side. She had been reading it again. Her lashes were wet with recent tears, yet she was smiling in her sleep. As he bent to her lips moved. He paused, an eavesdropper on her very dreams. And he made out the muffled, disjointed words:
“What can I say but, thank you—on behalf of the company—your applause—I thank you.”
She was taking a curtain call!
Bret tiptoed away, wounded by her and for her. He struggled for self-control a moment, telling himself that he was a fool to blame her for her dreams. He knocked loudly on the door and called to her. She woke with a start, stared, realized where she was and who he was, and smiled upon him lovingly. She explained that she had been asleep and “dreaming foolish dreams.”
But when he asked what they were she shrugged her shoulders and laughed, “I forget.”
Afterward Bret read that “The Woman Pays” had settled down for a long run on Broadway. Sheila settled down also and attended to her knitting. And knitting became a more and more important office. She was more and more content to sit in an easy-chair and wait.
Bret paused one day to pick up some of the curious doll-clothes.
“I knat ’em myself,” said Sheila, with boundless pride.
Bret, the business man, pondered the manufacturing cost.
“You could buy the whole lot for ten dollars,” he said. “And they’ve taken you a month to finish them. You’re not charging as much for your time as you did.”
“No,” she said, “I could buy ’em for less, and it would be still less trouble to adopt a child to wear ’em; but it wouldn’t be quite the same, would it?”
He agreed that it would not.