CHAPTER XLIV
The most thrilling first night of Sheila’s life was her debut as a mother. The doctor and the stork had a nip-and-tuck race. The young gentleman weighed more than ten pounds.
According to all the formulas of tradition, this epochal event should have made a different woman of Sheila. The child should have filled her life. According to actual history, Sheila was still Sheila, and her son, while he brought great joys and great anxieties, rather added new ambitions than satisfied the old.
Bret senior did not change his business interests or give up his office hours because of the child. Indeed, he was spurred on to greater effort that he might leave his heir a larger fortune.
The trained nurse, who received twenty-five dollars a week, and the regular nurse, who received twenty-five dollars a month, knew infinitely more about babies than Sheila.
The elder Mrs. Winfield, with the best intention and the worst tact, thought to make Sheila happy by telling her how happy she ought to be. This is an ancient practice that has never been discarded, though it has never yet succeeded.
The elder Mrs. Winfield said, “It’s a splendid thing for baby that you’ve given up the stage.”
Sheila felt an implied attack on her own family, and she bristled gently: “It’s fine for me, but I don’t think the baby would notice the difference if I acted every night. My mother didn’t leave the stage, and her mother and my father’s mother were hard-working actresses. And their children certainly prospered. Besides, if I were out of the way, the baby would have the advantage of its grandmother uninterrupted.”
The new grandmother accepted the last statement as an obvious truth and attacked the first. “You’re still thinking of going back, then?”
“Not at all,” said Sheila. “I’ll never act again. I was just saying that it wouldn’t harm the baby if I did. And,” she added, meekly, “it might be the making of him to have me out of the way.”
She said this with honest deprecation. She was troubled to find that she had not become one of those mere mothers that are so universal in books. She was horrified to discover that at times the baby lost its novelty, that its tantrums tried her nerves. She did not know enough to know that this was true of all mothers. She felt ashamed and afraid of herself. She did not return to her normal glow of health so soon as she should have done. She kept thin and wan. Cheerfulness was not in her, save when she played it like a rôle.
At length the doctor recommended a change of scene. Since it was not quiet that she needed, he suggested diversion, a trip to the city. The three Winfields made the journey—father, mother, and baby, not to mention the nurse.
The quick pulse and exultant life of New York reacted upon Sheila. She found the theaters a swift tonic, and, since “The Woman Pays” was now on the road after a long season on Broadway, there was no danger of choosing the wrong theater. She and Bret reveled in the plays with the ingenuous gaiety of farmers in town.
At this time, also, a monster “all-star” benefit was being extensively advertised. A great fire had destroyed a large part of one of our highly inflammable American cities, leaving thousands of people in such distress that public charity was invoked. The actors, as usual the most prompt of all classes to respond to any call upon their generosity, organized a huge performance to be given at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Players, managers, scene-painters, and scene-shifters were emulous in the service. Stars offered to scintillate in insignificant rôles. A program lasting from one o’clock to six was speedily concocted. The Opera House was not large enough for the demand. Boxes were sold by eminent auctioneers at astonishing premiums.
Bret took it into his head to assist. He paid two hundred dollars for a box.
Sheila left the baby with the nurse, put on a brand-new Paris frock, and gulped an early luncheon that she might not miss a line. Bret saw with mingled relief and dismay that she was as eager as a child going to her first party.
They read with awe the name-plate on the door of the box they had rented; it was that of one of the war lords of American finance.
The Opera House was seething with people. Bret and Sheila wedged their way through a dense skirmish-line of prominent actresses selling programs printed free with illustrations designed free. Bret had bought five for ten dollars before Sheila restrained him.
The bill was a reckless hash; everything was in it from a morsel of tragedy to a bit of juggling and repartee. The vast planes of the auditorium were crowded with people. The dean of the dramatists announced from the stage that the receipts were over fifteen thousand dollars and that a program autographed by every participant would be auctioned later.
Bret, in a mood of extravagance, determined to buy it for Sheila. It would show that he was not ashamed of her past or afraid of her future. During an intermission they promenaded the corridors thronged with notables. Sheila bowed her head almost off and was greeted with an effusiveness usually reserved for long-lost children.
At length Sheila heard her name called, felt a hand plucking at her elbow. She turned and faced Dulcie Ormerod, who gushed like a faucet:
“How are you, Sheila dear? I haven’t seen you for ages. How well you look! Isn’t this wonderful? Our play is in Trenton this week, so Mr. Eldon and I just ran over to take in this show. And is this your husband? Mayn’t I meet him?”
Sheila made the presentation helplessly, and Dulcie gushed on:
“I’ve been dying to see you. You remember Mr. Eldon, don’t you? Where is that man? Oh, Floydie dear, here’s an old friend of yours.”
To Sheila’s horror and Bret’s she turned and seized the elbow of a man whose back was turned and whose existence they had not noted in the thick crowd. Dulcie dragged Eldon about and swung him into his place at her side. He confronted Sheila and Bret as by miracle.
CHAPTER XLV
Dulcie had plotted it all for her own personal entertainment. Like a mad King of Bavaria she commanded the actors before her. She had caught sight of Sheila, and she knew who Bret was from the descriptions of him. She had a grudge against Sheila on general principles and another against Eldon for not going mad over her.
Eldon had received no answer to the note he sent Sheila denying his part in the newspaper notoriety. This had rankled in his heart. Bret still believed that the note was a lie and an effort to keep a hook on Sheila. He loved Eldon less than ever.
There was a longing for battle in both the big hearts, and each would have been glad to beat the other down before the whole crowd; yet, because of the crowd, neither could strike.
Sheila guessed at once that Dulcie had planned it; the cat was overacting her rôle of surprise and regret, as her little heart thrilled to see the two men braced in scarlet confusion and Sheila fluttering between them.
Bret endured a year of compressed agony. The foolishness of resuming the fight, the foolishness of not resuming it, the inextricable tangle of contradictory duties and impulses, shattered him. Eldon was undergoing the same return to chaos.
Yet the crowd shoving past observed nothing and did not pause. Bret felt Sheila’s hand clasp his arm both to protect and to be protected, and she urged him on. Then he managed to bow with formality to Eldon and to Dulcie. And so the great rencounter ended. Dulcie alone was made happy.
Sheila could not let her get away with that baby stare. She smiled with pretended amusement and said, “Thank you ever so much, Miss Ormerod.”
“Thank me for what?” gasped Dulcie. But Sheila just twinkled her eyes and smiled as she walked on.
Her muscles were tired for half an hour with the effort that smile cost them.
She led Bret to the box, and he was shivering with the unsatisfied emotions of a fighter for the battle missed. Sheila sank into a chair exhausted. She looked about anxiously. The one thing needed to complete the situation was for Eldon to walk into the next box and spend the rest of the afternoon. They were spared this coincidence.
Bret was in no mood to remain, but she kept him there. There would be some distraction at least in the spectacle. If they went back to their hotel they would have only their bitterness to chew upon.
The auction of the autographed program began. There was excited bidding from all parts of the house. But Bret kept silent. The program brought five hundred dollars. Bret sneered at the price of the trash.
A musical number came next. The orchestra struck up a tune that would have set gravestones to jigging. A platoon of young men and women in fantastic bravery was flung across the stage, singing and caracoling. A famous buffoon waddled to the footlights and beamed like a new red moon with its chin on the horizon. He was a master of the noble art of tomfoolery and the high-school of horse-play. He probed into the childhood core of every heart, and no grief could resist him.
Sheila forgot to be dismal and tried to look solemn for Bret’s sake till she saw that he was overpowered, too. He began to grin, to sniff, to snort, to shake, to roll, to guffaw. He laughed till tears poured down his cheeks. Sheila laughed in a dual joy. Everything solemn, ugly, hateful, dignified, had become foolish and childish; and foolishness had become the one great wisdom of the world.
The jester always wins in a contest with the doldrums because philosophy and honor present riddles that cannot be solved. The mystery of fun is just as insoluble, but you laugh while you wait.
Sheila watched the thousands of people rocking and roaring in a surf of delight, and she watched her husband’s soul washed clean as a child’s heart. It was a noble profession, this clownery; comedy was a priesthood.
Suddenly she saw Bret’s eyes, roving the hilarious multitude, pause and harden. She followed the line of his gaze across the space and saw Eldon in a box. He was laughing like a huge boy, putting back his head and baying the moon with yelps of delight.
She watched Bret anxiously and saw a kind of forgiveness softening his glare. The contagion of laughter reinfected him and he laughed harder than ever. If Eldon and he had met now they would have leaned on each other to laugh. Music and buffoonery and grief are the universal languages that everybody understands.
The excerpt from the comic opera was succeeded by a little play, and now the audience, shaken from its trenches by the artillery of laughter, was helpless before the pathos. The handkerchiefs fluttered like little white flags everywhere. Sheila saw through her tears that Bret was swallowing hard; a tear rolled out on his cheek, and he was ashamed to brush it off. It splashed on his finger and startled him. He looked at Sheila, and she smiled at him with ineffable tenderness. He reached out and took her hand.
In that mood a swift understanding could have been reached with Eldon. Sheila might almost have forgiven Dulcie. But they did not meet. As they left the Opera House, pleasantly fatigued with the exercise of every emotion, she felt immensely contented.
But the inevitable reaction followed. In this wonderful work of the stage, why was she idle? Why was she skulking at a distance when her training, her gifts, her ambitions, called her to do her share—to make people glad and sad and wise in sympathy? Why? Why? Why?
Two years later there was another baby—a daughter, its mother’s exquisite miniature. There was some bad luck for Sheila on this occasion, and the physician warned her against further child-bearing for several years. She was not up and about so soon as before, and a vague haze of melancholy settled about her. She took less interest in life.
Her laughter was not half so frequent or so clear; her mischief of satire was gone. She smiled on Bret more tenderly than ever, but it was tenderness rather than amusement. She had nerve-storms and idled about incessantly, and sometimes, with no apparent reason or warning, she would sigh frantically, leap to her feet, and pace the floor or the porch or the lawn aimlessly. When Bret anxiously asked her what was the matter she would gaze at him with sorrowful eyes and that doleful effort at a smile and say:
“Nothing, honey; nothing at all.”
“But you’re not happy?”
“Yes, I am, dear. Why shouldn’t I be? I have everything: my lover for my husband, my children, the home—everything.”
“Everything,” he would groan, “except—”
Then she would put her hands over his lips.
CHAPTER XLVI
Eugene Vickery’s sister Dorothy lived in Blithevale. Having lost her first choice, Bret Winfield, to the scintillating Sheila, she had sensibly accepted the devotion of his rival, Jim Greeley, who was now a junior partner in the big chemical works where his father manufactured drug staples.
Dorothy had never forgotten the child Sheila, and the two women resumed their acquaintance, their souls little changed, for all their bodily evolution. They were still two little girls playing with dolls. They were still utterly incomprehensible to each other, and the friendlier for that fact. Dorothy found Sheila a trifle insane, but immensely interesting, and Sheila found Dorothy stodgily Philistine, but thoroughly reliable, as normal as a yardstick.
Sheila gave to her two children all the adoration of a Madonna. They were fascinating toys to her; though at times she tired of them. She entertained them with all her talents, wasting on the infantile private audience graces and gifts that the public would have paid thousands of dollars to see.
But the children tired of their expensive toy, too, and preferred a rag doll or a little tin automobile that banged into chair legs and turned over at the edge of a rug.
Sheila had nursed her babies with an ecstatic pride. That was more than many of the village women did. She had been amazed to learn how many bottle-fed infants there were in town. Dorothy herself strongly recommended one or two foods prepared in other factories than the mother’s veins.
Dorothy was not the mother one meets in romance, but very much like the mothers next door and across the street—the ones the doctors know. Her children drove her into storms of impatience and outbursts of temper. Now and then she had to get away from them for half a day or for many days. If she could not escape on a shopping prowl to some other city she would send them off with the nurse under instructions to stay as long as the light held out. She welcomed their visits to relatives, she encouraged them to play in other people’s yards. Other mothers with headaches urged their children to play in one another’s yards. Nobody knew very well where they played or at what.
Dorothy was a violent anti-suffragist and the head of the local league, whose motto was that woman’s place is in the home. She was kept away from home a good deal in the furtherance of this creed.
Jim Greeley, the normal business man, spent his days at his desk, his evenings at his club, and his free afternoons at baseball games. Sometimes he added a little variety to the peace of his household by rolling in late, lyrical and incoherent.
There was a general impression about town that he found his home so well ordered that he sought a recreative disorder elsewhere. From the first meeting with him Sheila disliked the way he looked at her. His eyes, as it were, crossed swords with hers playfully and said, “Do you fence?” She found the compliments he murmured to her whenever opportunities arrived uncomfortably unctuous. But there was nothing that she could openly resent.
In the summer all the wives of Blithevale whose husbands had the money or could borrow it followed the national custom and went to the seashore, the mountains, anywhere to get away from home and husband; they took the children with them. The husbands stuck to their jobs and made occasional dashes to their families. All signs fail in hot weather. Even the churches close up. It is curious. It is even agreed that the rule about woman’s place being the home does not hold in hot weather.
Dorothy and Sheila and their youngsters went together one summer to a beach with nearly as much boardwalk as sand.
Sheila fretted about leaving Bret at his lonely grindstone. Dorothy ridiculed her and told her she must get over her honeymoon. Dorothy emphasized the importance of the sea air “for the children.” She insisted that a mother’s first duty was to them. Dorothy paid little enough heed to her own. She slept late, played cards, watched the dancing, and changed her clothes with a chameleonic frequence.
Sheila found that her children, like the rest, preferred the company of fellow-children and the sea to any other attractions. Their mothers bored them, hampered them, disgraced them. The children were self-sufficient, and better so. By the early evening they had played themselves into a comatose condition and never knew who took off their shoes or put them to bed. The long evenings remained to the mothers and they formed porch-colonies, and rocked and gabbled and stared through the windows at the dancers.
All over the country wives were enjoying their summer divorce. Thousands, millions of wives deserted their husbands and loafed at great cost, and it was all right. But for an actress to desert her husband and work—that was all wrong!
Sheila felt that her husband needed her more than her children did. She pictured him distraught with longing for her. And he was—so far as his business worries gave him time for sentimental worries. Sheila left the children in charge of the governess and fled back to Bret, who was enraptured at the sight of her and had an enormous amount of factory news to tell her.
The men-folk were working in spite of the summer, and glad to be working. Bret was absorbed in his business and left Sheila all day to sit in the darkened oven of the closed-up house, alone.
She contrasted her life this summer with the summer she had played in the stock company and toiled so hard to furnish amusement to the people who could not get away to seashores or mountains. She wondered wherein her present indolence was an improvement over her period of toil.
Still she was glad to be where her husband could find her in the briefentr’actesof his commercial drama. She had learned enough of the village to know that some of the men whose wives left them for the summer found substitutes among the village belles who could not or would not leave the old town.
Sheila had heard a vast amount of gossip concerning Jim Greeley. She had not repeated any of it to Dorothy, of course. It is not according to the rules of the game and only very unpleasant persons do it.
Bret knew of Jim’s repute, but did not forbid Jim his house. The village was full of such scandals and it was dangerous to begin cutting and snubbing. When the gossips whispered they made a terrifying picture of village life, yet whenever the theater was mentioned they assumed an air of Pharisaic superiority.
As soon as Sheila hurried back to Blithevale Jim Greeley began to spoil her evening communions with her husband by “just dropping round.” He talked till Bret yawned him home.
Still, Sheila was glad to keep Jim interested in respectable conversation, for Dorothy’s sake. Sometimes when Bret had to go back to his office, after dinner, and Jim was free, he just dropped round just the same.
On these occasions he seemed to be laboring under some excitement, full of audacious impulses restrained by timidity. Sheila felt a nausea at her suspicions; she was ashamed of them.
One cruelly hot evening when Bret was at the factory and the only stir of air eddied in a vine-covered corner of the big piazza she heard Jim come up the walk. She did not speak, hoping that he would go away. But he called her twice, and she had to answer.
He invited himself to sit down, and after violently casual chatter began to talk of his loneliness and her kindliness. She was his one salvation, he said.
In the dusk he was only a voice, a voice of longing and appeal, like a disembodied Satan in a mood of desire. In the gloom she felt his hand brush hers, then cling. She drew hers away. His followed. It was very strange that two beings should conflict so tangibly, audibly, without any other evidence of existence.
Suddenly she knew that he was standing close to her, bending over her. She pushed her chair back and rose. Unseen arms caught her to a ghost as invisible and ineluctable as the wrestler with Jacob.
Sheila was horrified. She blamed herself more than Jim. She hated herself and humanity. “Don’t! please!” she pleaded in a whisper. She dreaded to have the servants overhear such an encounter. Jim misinterpreted her motive, clenched her tighter, and tried to find her lips with his.
“I thought you were Bret’s friend,” she protested as she hid her face from him.
“I like Bret,” Jim whispered in a frenzy, “but I love you. And I want you to love me. You do! You must! Kiss me!”
She tried to release the proved weapon of her elbow, but he held her by the wrists till she wrenched her hand loose with great pain and gave him her knuckles for a kiss.
The shock to his self-esteem was more than to his mouth, and he let her go. She rebuked him in guttural disgust:
“I suppose you think that because I’m an actress you’ve got to be a cad.”
“No, no,” he mumbled. “It’s just because you are you, and because you are so wonderful. Forgive me, won’t you?”
Even as he asked for forgiveness his hand sought her arm again. She slipped away and went into the starlight and sat on the steps.
“You’d better go now,” she said, “and you’d better not come back.”
“All right,” he sighed.
In the silence she heard Bret’s car far away. “Sit down,” she said, “and stay awhile. And smoke!”
She had foreseen Bret arriving as Jim hurried away. She did not like the way it would appear. If Bret’s suspicions were aroused he could not but look uneasily on her, and once he suspected her she felt that she would never forgive him. And it was altogether odious, too, to be included in the list of women whose names were remembered when Jim Greeley’s was mentioned.
And so she conspired with a knave by lies and concealments to keep peace in her husband’s home. Jim lighted a cigar and dropped down on the steps, puffing with ostentation.
Sheila looked out on the innocent seeming of the village and the gentle benignity of the stars, and hated to think how much evil could cloak itself and prosper in these deep shadows and soft lights and peaceful hours.
The car bustled to the curb, stopped while Bret got out. Then the chauffeur shot away with it to the garage. Bret came drowsily up the walk, kissed his wife, gripped the hand of his friend, and sat down.
Jim asked how business was, and they talked shop with zest while Sheila sat in utter solitude, watching the village Lothario play the rôle of honest Horatio.
Her husband had spent the day and half the evening at his business, and yet it interested him more than Sheila did. He showed no impatience to be rid of this man, no eagerness to be alone with his wife who had given up all her own industry to be his companion.
No instinct warned him that his absorption in his business was imperiling his home, nor that his crony was a sneaking conspirator against his happiness.
Sheila was wildly excited, but she pretended to be sleepy and yawningly begged to be excused. It was an hour later before Bret finished talking and she heard him exchange cheery good nights with Jim Greeley. When Bret arrived up-stairs she pretended to be asleep. Before long he was asleep, worn out with honest toil, while she lay battling for the slumber she had not earned. She was sleeping little and ill nowadays, and she rose unrefreshed from unhappy nights to uninteresting days. The effect on her health was growing manifest.
CHAPTER XLVII
The morning after the Jim Greeley adventure Sheila went back to her children and the seaside. She had no energy and everything bored her. The shock of the surf did not thrill her with new energy; it chilled and weakened her. She found Dorothy all aflutter over the attentions of a rich old widower who complimented her brutally.
Dorothy called him her “conquest” and spoke of her “flirtation.” Sheila knew that she used the words rather childishly than with any significance, but her face betrayed a certain dismay.
Dorothy bristled at the shadow of reproof. “Don’t look at me like that! I guess if Jim can butterfly around the way he does I’m not going to insult everybody that’s nice to me.”
Sheila disclaimed any criticism, but the incident alarmed her. And she thought of what Satan provided for idle hands.
Civilization keeps robbing women of their ancient housework. Spinning, weaving, grinding corn, making clothes, and twisting lamp-lighters are gone. Their husbands do not want them to cook or sweep or wait upon their own children. With the loss of their back-breaking, heart-withering old tasks has come a longer life of beauty and desire and a greater leisure for curiosity. They were unhappy and discontented in their former servitude. They are unhappy and discontented in their useless freedom.
Sheila saw everywhere evidences that grown-ups, like children, must either become sloths of indolence, or find occupation, or take up mischief for a business. She wondered and dreaded what the future might hold for herself.
The summers were not quite so hard to get through, for they had usually been periods of vacation for her. Sometimes she spent a month or two with her father and mother, or they with her. Sometimes old Mrs. Vining visited her and shamed her with the activity that kept the veteran actress alert at seventy years.
Sheila found a cynical amusement in pitting Mrs. Vining and Bret’s mother against each other. They began always with great mutual deference, but soon the vinegar of age began to render their comments acidulous. Mrs. Winfield had grown old in the domestic world and the church. Mrs. Vining had grown old in the wicked theater. Of course Sheila was prejudiced, but to save her she could not discover wherein Mrs. Winfield was the better of the two. She was certainly narrower, crueler, more somber. Moreover, she was also less industrious, for to Sheila the hallowed duties of the household were not industry at all, or at best were the proper toil for servants. Mrs. Winfield seemed to her to be a Penelope eternally reweaving each day the same dull pattern she had woven the day before.
When the autumn came her father and mother and Mrs. Vining and the other theater folk emerged from their estivation and made ready for the year’s work, while Sheila must return to the idleness of the village, or its more insipid dissipations.
Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law began to get on each other’s nerves. Sheila could not forget the glory of the theater. Mrs. Winfield could not outgrow her horror of it, and she could not refrain from nagging allusions to its baleful influences. To Sheila it was a case of the sooty pot eternally railing at the simmering kettle.
One day Sheila was wrought to such a pitch of resentment that she blurted out the whole story of her encounter with Jim Greeley.
“He was no actor,” said Sheila, triumphantly, “but he tried to win his friend’s wife away.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Winfield, “but his friend’s wife was an actress.”
Against such logic Sheila saw that she would beat her head in vain. She suppressed an inclination to tear her hair out and dance on it. And she gave Mrs. Winfield up as hopeless. Mrs. Winfield had long before given Sheila up as beyond redemption, and eventually she moved away from Blithevale to live with a widowed sister in the Middle West.
Sheila asked herself, bitterly, “What am I getting out of life? When one trouble goes another bobs into its place.” By the time the mother-in-law retired the children had grown up to a noisy, uncontrollable restlessness that drove the office-weary Bret frantic.
It was he, and not Sheila, that insisted on their occasional flights to New York, where they made the rounds of the theaters. Sometimes Sheila ran back on the stage to embrace her old friends and tell them how happy she was. And they said they envied her, knowing they lied.
They always asked her, “When are you coming back?” and when she always answered, “Never,” they did not believe her. Yet they saw that discontent was aging her. Discontent was never yet a fountain of youth.
Sheila returned to Blithevale like a caught convict. Plays came there occasionally, and Bret liked to see them as an escape from the worries he found at home or the worries that followed him from the office. He enjoyed particularly the entertainments concocted with the much-abused mission of furnishing relaxation for the tired business man. As if the tired business man were not an important and pathetic figure, and his refreshment one of the noblest and most needful acts of charity.
At these times when Sheila sat and watched other people playing, and often playing atrociously, the rôles that she should have played or would have enjoyed, her homesickness for the boards swept over her in waves of anguish. Sometimes the yearning to act goaded her so cruelly that she almost swooned. She felt like a canary full of song with her tongue cut out.
Now and then Eugene Vickery came to visit his sister Dorothy. He usually spent a deal of time with Bret and Sheila.
He was a different Eugene so far as success and failure can alter a man. That play of his which Sheila had tried in stock and Reben had allowed to lapse Eugene had patched up and sold to another manager who had a star in tow.
Play and star had been flayed with jubilant enthusiasm by the New York critics, but had drawn enough of the public to keep them on Broadway awhile, and then had succeeded substantially on the road in the cheaper theaters known as the “dollar houses.”
Vickery the scholar was both irritated and amused by the irony of his success. Almost illiterate journalists called his wisdom trash and only the less sophisticated people would accept it. His feelings were only partly soothed by the dollar anodyne and the solace of regular royalties.
His manager ordered another play, and Vickery tried to write down to his public. The result was a dismal fiasco, critically and box-officially. The lesson was worth the price. He went back to writing for himself in the belief that if he could succeed in the private theater of his own heart he would be sure at least of one sympathetic auditor. That was one more than the insincere writer could count on.
His bookish tastes and training led him to a bookish ideal. He felt that the highest dramatic art was in the blank-verse form, and he felt that there was something nobler in the good old times of costumes and rhetoric. In fact, blank verse demanded heroic garb, for when the words strut the speakers must. His Americanism was revealed only in the fact that he chose for his chief character a man struggling for liberty, for the right of being himself.
He selected the epic argosy of the Puritans and their battle for freedom of worship. His central figure was a granite and velvet soul of the type of Roger Williams.
He told Sheila and Bret a little about his scheme and they thought it wonderful. Bret found any literary creation incredibly ingenious, though more brilliant mental processes applied to mechanical problems seemed simple enough.
Sheila thought Vickery’s plan wonderful because her heart swelled at the lofty program of the plot. Blank verse had been her first religion and Shakespeare her first Scripture. It was one of her bitterest regrets that she had never paid the master the tribute of a performance of any of his works since she adapted his “Hamlet” to the needs of her own children’s theater.
“Who’s going to play your hero?” Bret asked, idly.
Vickery answered, “Well, I haven’t read it to him yet, but there’s only one man in the country with the brains and the skill and the good looks.”
“And who might all that be?” Sheila asked, with a laugh.
“Floyd Eldon.”
The name seemed to drop into a well of silence.
Vickery had forgotten for the moment the feud of the two men. The silence recalled it to him. He spoke with vexation:
“Good Lord, people! haven’t you got over that ancient trouble yet? When a grudge gets more than so old the board of health ought to cart it away. Eldon’s got over it, I know. A year or two ago he was telling me how kindly he felt toward Sheila and how he didn’t really blame Bret.”
Bret was not at all obliged for Eldon’s magnanimity, but Vickery went on singing Eldon’s praises till he noticed the profound silence of his auditors. He suddenly felt as if he had been speaking in an empty room. He saw that Bret was sullen and Sheila uneasy. Vickery spread the praise a little thicker in sheer vexation.
“Reben is going to star Eldon the minute he finds his play. I’m hoping I can fit him with this. He’s on the way up and I want to ride up on his coat-tails. He’s a gentleman, a scholar, an athlete—”
“But, after all, he’s an actor,” sniffed Bret.
“So was Shakespeare, the noblest mind in English literature.”
“I don’t care for the type,” said Bret. “Always posing, always talking about themselves.”
“Thanks, dear,” said Sheila, flushing.
“Oh, I don’t mean you, honey,” Bret expostulated. “That’s why I loved you—you almost never talk about yourself. You’re everything that’s fine.”
Vickery tried to restore the conversation to safer generalities. “Actors talk about their personality sometimes because that is what they are putting on the market. But did you ever hear traveling-men talk about their line of goods? or clergymen about the church? or manufacturers about what they are making? Do you ever talk shop yourself?”
“Oh no!” Sheila laughed ironically, and now Bret flushed.
“Shop talk is merely a question of manners,” said Vickery. “Some people know enough not to talk about themselves, and some don’t. There are lots of old women that will talk you to death about their cooks and their aches. I’m one of those who jaw about themselves all the time. It’s not because I’m conceited, for the Lord knows I have too much reason for modesty. It’s just a habit. Eldon hasn’t got it. He’ll talk about a rôle, or about an audience, but you’ll never hear him praise himself. And there are plenty of actors like him.”
Bret grunted his disbelief.
“You don’t know enough of them to be a judge,” Vickery insisted.
“No, and I don’t want to,” Bret growled. “I prefer good, honest, wholesome, normal, real men—men like Jim Greeley and other friends of mine.”
A little shiver passed through Sheila. Bret felt it, and assumed that she was distressed at hearing Eldon’s name taken in vain. Vickery was not impressed with the choice of his brother-in-law as an ideal. Dorothy had told him too much about Jim. He did not suspect, however, that Sheila had cause to loathe him. He continued to talk his own shop, and to praise Eldon, to celebrate his progress, his increasing science in the dynamics of theatricism.
“He’s becoming a great comedian,” he said. “And comedy requires brains. Pathos and tragedy are more or less matters of emotion and temperament, but comedy is a science.”
As Vickery chanted Eldon up, Sheila’s eyes began to glow again. Bret fumed with jealousy, imputing that glow of hers to enthusiasm for Eldon.
The fact was that she was thinking of Eldon without a trace of affection. She was thinking of him as a successful competitor, as a beginner who was forging ahead and growing expert, growing famous while she had fallen out of the race.
She was more jealous of Eldon than Bret was.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Sheila suffered the very same feeling to a more sickening degree, a little later, when “The Woman Pays” company, now in its fourth year, reached Blithevale in cleaning up the lesser one-night stands. The play that Sheila had rejected had become the corner-stone of Reben’s fortunes. It was as inartistic and plebeian and reminiscent as apple pie. But the public loves apple pie and consumes tons of it, to the great neglect ofmarrons glacés.
That play was a commodity for which there is always a market. A great artist could adorn it, but it was almost actor-proof against destruction.
Even Dulcie Ormerod could not spoil it for its public. When she played it Batterson gnashed his teeth and Reben held his aching head, but there were enough injudicious persons left to make up eight good audiences a week.
Dulcie “killed her laughs” by fidgeting or by reading humorously or by laughing herself. She lost the audience’s tears by the copiousness of her own. But she loved the play and still “knew she was great because she wept herself.” When she laughed she showed teeth that speedily earned a place in the advertisement of dentifrice, and when she wept, a certain sort of audience was overawed by the sight of a genuine tear. Real water has always been impressive on the stage.
By sheer force of longevity the play slid her up among the prominent women of the day. She stuck to the rôle for four years, and was beginning to hope to rival the records of Joseph Jefferson, Denman Thompson, Maggie Mitchell, and Lotta.
The night the company played in Blithevale Bret and Eugene, Sheila, Dorothy and her Jim, made up a box-party.
Jim proclaimed that Dulcie was a “peach,” but he alluded less to the art she did not possess than to the charms she had. She was pretty, there was no question of that—as shapely and characterless as a Bouguereau painting, as coarsely sweet as granulated sugar. Dorothy credited her with all the winsome qualities of the character she assumed, and took a keen dislike to the actress who played the adventuress, an estimable woman and a genuine artist whose oxfords Dulcie was not fit to untie.
Eugene and Sheila suffered from Dulcie’s utter falsehood of impersonation. Even Bret felt some mysterious gulf between Dulcie’s interpretation and Sheila’s as he remembered it.
Sheila was afraid to speak her opinion of Dulcie lest it seem mere jealousy. Eugene voiced it for her.
“To think that such a heifer is a star! Getting rich and getting admiration,” he growled, “while a genius like Sheila rusts in idleness. It’s a crime.”
“It’s all my fault,” said Bret. “I cut her out of it.”
“Don’t you believe it, honey,” Sheila cooed. “I’d rather be starring in your home than earning a million dollars before the public.”
But somehow there was a clank of false rhetoric in the speech. It was lover’s extravagance, and even Bret felt that it could not quite be true, or that, if it were true, somehow it ought not to be.
He felt himself a dog in the manger, yet he was glad that Sheila was not up there with some actor’s arms about her.
After the third act Dulcie sent the company-manager—still Mr. McNish—to invite Mrs. Winfield to come back at the end of the play.
Sheila had hoped to escape this test of her nerves, but there was no escape. She felt that if Dulcie were haughty over her success she would hate her, and if she were not haughty and tried to be gracious she would hate her more.
Dulcie assumed the latter rôle and played it badly. She condescended as from a great height, patronized like a society patroness. Worse yet, she pawed Sheila and called her “Sheila” and “dearie” and congratulated her on having such a nice quiet life in such a dear little village, while “poor me” had to play forty weeks a year. Sheila wanted to scratch her big doll-eyes out.
On the way home Bret confessed that it rather hurt him to see a “dub like Dulcie rattling round in Sheila’s shoes.” The metaphor was meant better than it came out, but Sheila was not thinking of that when she groaned: “Don’t speak of it.”
Bret invited Vickery to stop in for a bit of supper and Vickery accepted, to Bret’s regret. Sheila excused herself from lingering and left Bret to smoke out Vickery, who was in a midnight mood of garrulity. The playwright watched Sheila trudge wearily up the staircase, worn out with lack of work. He turned on Bret and growled:
“Bret, there goes the pitifulest case of frustrated genius I ever saw. It’s a sin to chain a great artist like that to a baby-carriage.”
Bret turned scarlet at the insolence of this, but Vickery was too feeble to be knocked down. He was leaner than ever, and his eyes were like wet buckeyes. His speech was punctuated with coughs. As he put it, he “coughed commas.” Also he coughed cigarette-smoke usually. His friends blamed his cough to his cigarettes, but they knew better, and so did he.
He was in a hurry to do some big work before he was coughed out. It infuriated him to feel genius within himself and have so little strength or time for its expression. It enraged him to see another genius with health and every advantage kept from publication by a husband’s selfishness.
He was in one of his irascible spells to-night and he had no mercy on Bret. He spoke with the fretful tyranny of an invalid.
“It’s none of my business, I suppose, Bret, but I tell you it makes me sick—sick! to see Sheila cooped up in this little town. New York would go wild over her—yes, and London, too. There’s an awful dearth on the stage of young women with beauty and training. She could have everything her own way. She’s a peculiarly brilliant artist who never had her chance. If she had reached her height and quit—fine! But she was snuffed out just as she was beginning to glow. It was like lighting a lamp and blowing it out the minute the flame begins to climb on the wick.
“Dulcie Ormerod and hundreds of her sort are buzzing away like cheap gas-jets while a Sheila Kemble is here. She could be making thousands of people happy, softening their hearts, teaching them sympathy and charm and breadth of outlook; and she’s teaching children not to rub their porridge-plates in their hair!
“Thousands used to listen to every syllable of hers and forget their troubles. Now she listens to your factory troubles. She listens to the squabbles of a couple of nice little kids who would rather be outdoors playing with other kids all day, as they ought to be.
“It’s like taking a lighthouse and turning the lens away from the sea into the cabbage-patch of the keeper.”
“Go right on,” Bret said, with labored restraint. “Don’t mind me. I’m old-fashioned. I believe that a good home with a loving husband and some nice kids is good enough for a good woman. I believe that such a life is a success. Where should a wife be but at home?”
“That depends on the wife, Bret. Most wives belong at home, yes. Most men belong at home, too. They are born farmers and shoemakers and school-teachers and chemists and inventors, and all glory to them for staying there. But where did Christopher Columbus belong? Where would you be if he had stayed at home?”
“But Sheila isn’t a man!”
“Well, then, did Florence Nightingale belong at home? or Joan of Arc?”
“Oh, well, nurses and patriots and people like that!”
“What about Jenny Lind and Patti?”
“They were singers.”
“And Sheila is a singer, only in unaccompanied recitative. Actors are nurses and doctors, too; they take people who are sick of their hard day’s work and they cure ’em up, give ’em a change of climate.”
“Home was good enough for our mothers,” Bret grumbled, sinking back obstinately in his chair.
“Oh no, it wasn’t.”
“They were contented.”
“Contented! hah! that’s a word we use for other people’s patience. Old-fashioned women were not contented. We say they were because other people’s sorrows don’t bother us, especially when they are dead. But they mattered then to them. If you ever read the newspapers of those days, or the letters, or the novels, or the plays, you’ll find that people were not contented in the past at any time.
“People used to say that laborers were contented to be treated like cattle. But they weren’t, and since they learned how to lift their heads they’ve demanded more and more.”
Bret had been having a prolonged wrestle with a labor-union. He snarled: “Don’t you quote the laboring-men to me. There’s no satisfying them!”
“And it’s for the good of the world that they should demand more. It’s for the good of the world that everybody should be doing his best, and getting all there is in it and out of it and wanting more.”
“Is nobody to stay at home?”
“Of course! There’s my sister Dorothy—nicest girl in the world, but not temperamental enough to make a flea wink. She’s got sense enough to know it. You couldn’t drive her on the stage. Why the devil didn’t you marry her? Then you both could have stayed at home. You belong at home because you’re a manufacturer. I should stay at home because I’m a writer. But a postman oughtn’t to stay at home, or a ship-captain, or a fireman.”
Bret attempted a mild sarcasm: “So all the women ought to leave home and go on the stage, eh?”
Vickery threw up his hands. “God forbid! I think that nine-tenths of the actresses ought to leave the stage and go home. Too many of them are there because there was nowhere else to go or they drifted in by accident. Nice, stupid, fatheads who would be the makings of a farm or an orphan-asylum are trying to interpret complicated rôles. Dulcie Ormerod ought to be waiting on a lunch-counter, sassing brakemen and brightening the lot of the traveling-men. But women like Mrs. Siddons and Ellen Terry, Bernhardt and Duse and Charlotte Cushman and Marlowe and any number of others, including Mrs. Bret Winfield, ought to be traveling the country like missionaries of art and culture and morality.”
“Morality!” Bret roared. “The stage is no place for a good woman, and you know it.”
“Oh, bosh! In the first place, what is a good woman?”
“A woman who is virtuous and honorable and industrious and—Well, you know what ‘good’ means as well as I do.”
“I know a lot better than you do, you old mud-turtle. There are plenty of good women on the stage. And there are plenty of bad ones off. There are more Commandments than one, and more than one way for a woman to be bad. There are plenty of wives here in Blithevale whose physical fidelity you could never question, though they’re simply wallowing in other sins. You know lots of wives that you can’t say a word against except that they are loafers, money-wasters, naggers of children, torturers of husbands, scourges of neighbors, enemies of everything worth while—otherwise they are all right.
“They neglect their little ones’ minds; never teach them a lofty ideal; just teach them hatred and lying and selfishness and snobbery and spite and conceit. They make religion a cloak for backbiting and false witness. And they’re called good women. I tell you it’s an outrage on the word ‘good.’ ‘Good’ is a great word. It ought to be used for something besides ‘the opposite of sensual’!”
“All right,” Bret agreed, “use it any way you want to. You’ll admit, I suppose, that a good woman ought to perpetuate her goodness. A good woman ought to have children.”
“Yes, if she can.”
“And take care of them and sacrifice herself for them.”
“Why sacrifice herself?”
“So that the race may progress.”
“How is it going to progress if you sacrifice the best fruits of it? Suppose the mother is a genius of the highest type, a beautiful-bodied, brilliant-minded, wholesome genius. Why should she be sacrificed to her children? They can’t be any greater than she is. Since genius isn’t inherited or taught, they’ll undoubtedly be inferior. And at that they may die before they grow up. Why kill a sure thing for a doubtful one?”
“You don’t believe in the old-fashioned woman.”
“She’s still as much in fashion as she ever was. The old-fashionedest woman on record was Eve. She meddled and got her husband fired out of Paradise. And she never had any stage ambitions or asked for a vote or wore Paris clothes, but she wasn’t much of a success as a wife; and as a mother all we know of her home influence was that one of her sons killed the other and got driven into the wilderness. You can’t do much worse than that. Even if Eve had been an actress and gone on the road, her record couldn’t have been much worse, could it?”
Bret was boxing heavily and sleepily with a contemptuous patience. “You think women ought to be allowed to go gadding about wherever they please?”
“Of course I do! What’s the good of virtue that is due to being in jail? We know that men are more honest, more decent, more idealistic, more romantic, than women. Why? Because we have liberty. Because we have ourselves to blame for our rottenness. Because we’ve got nobody to hide behind. The reason so many women are such liars and gossips and so merciless to one another is because they are so penned in, because all the different kinds of women are expected to live just the same way after they are married. But some of them are bad mothers because they have no outlet for their genius. Some of them would be better wives if they had more liberty.”
Bret was entirely unconvinced. “You’re not trying to tell me that the stage is better than the average village?”
“No, but I think it’s as good. There will never be any lack of sin. But the sin that goes on in harems and jails and hide-bound communities is worse than the sin of free people busily at work in the splendid fields of art and science and literature and drama and commerce.
“I think Sheila belongs to the public. I don’t see why she couldn’t be a better wife and a better mother for being an eminent artist. And I like you, Bret, so much. You’re as decent a fellow at heart as anybody I know. I hate to have it you, of all men, that’s crushing Sheila’s soul out of her. I hate to think that I introduced you to her. And I let you cut me out.
“She wouldn’t have loved me if she’d married me, but, by the Lord Harry! her name would be a household word in all the homes in the country instead of just one.”
Vickery dropped to a divan and lay outstretched, exhausted with his oration. Bret sat with his lips pursed and his fingers gabled in long meditation. At length he spoke:
“I’m not such a brute as you think, ’Gene. I don’t want to sacrifice anybody to myself, least of all the woman I idolize. If Sheila wants to leave me and go back, I’ll not hinder her. I couldn’t if I wanted to. There’s no law that enables a man to get out an injunction against his wife going on the stage. If she wants to go, why doesn’t she?”
Vickery sat up on the couch and snapped: “Because she loves you, damn it! I’m madder at her than I am at you.” Then he fell back again, puffing his cigarette spitefully.
Bret smoked slowly at a long cigar. He was thinking long thoughts.
A little later Vickery spoke again: “Besides, Sheila won’t say she wants to go back, for fear it would hurt your feelings.”
Bret took this very seriously. “You think so?”
“I know so.”
Bret smoked his cigar to ash, then he rose with effort and solemnity, went to the door, and called, “Oh, Sheila!”?
From somewhere in the clouds came her voice—the beautiful Sheila voice, “Yes, dear.”
“Come to the stairs a minute, will you?”
“Yes, dear.”
Vickery had risen wonderingly. He could not see Sheila’s nightcapped head as she looked over the balustrade. He did not know that Sheila had been listening to his eulogy of her and agreeing passionately with his regrets at her idleness.
“ ’Gene here,” said Bret, “has been roasting me for keeping you off the stage. I want him to hear me tell you that I’m not keeping you off the stage. Do you want to go on the stage, Sheila?”
Sheila’s voice was housewifely and matter-of-fact. “Of course not. I want to go to bed. And it’s time ’Gene was in his. Send him home.”
She heard Bret cry, “You see!” and heard his triumphant laughter as he clapped Vickery on the shoulder. Then she went to her room and locked herself in. The click of the bolt had the sound of a jailer’s key. She was a prisoner in a cell, in a solitary confinement, since her husband’s soul was leagues away from any sympathy with hers. She paced the floor like a caged panther, and when the sobs came she fell on her knees and silenced them in her pillow lest Bret hear her. She had made her renunciation and plighted her troth. She would keep faith with her lover though she felt that it was killing her. Her soul was dying of starvation.