CHAPTER XLIX
Vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his play for Eldon. For months he toiled and moiled upon it. Sometimes he would write all day and all night upon a scene, and work himself up into a state of what he called soul-sweat.
He would go to bed patting himself on the shoulder and talking to himself as if he were a draught-horse and a Pegasus combined: “Good boy, ’Gene! Good work, old Genius!”
In the morning he would wake feeling all the after-effects of a prolonged carouse. He would reach for a cigarette and review with contempt all he had previously done. No critic could have reviled his work with less sympathy.
“By night I write plays and by day I write criticisms,” he would say.
Lazily he would cough himself out of bed, cough through his tub and into his clothes, and go to his table like a surly butcher to carve his play with long slashes of the blue pencil.
At length he had it as nearly finished as any play is likely to be before it has been read. He went to New York, where Eldon was playing, and easily persuaded him to listen to the drama. Vickery would not explain the story of the play beforehand.
“I want you to get it the way the audience does.”
He marched his buskined blank verse with the elocution of a poet and all the sonority his raucous voice could lend him. He was shocked to note that Eldon was not helping him along with enthusiasm. His voice wavered, faltered, sank. He was hardly audible at the climax of his big third act.
Here the Puritan hero, who had left the Old World for the New World and liberty, discovered that the other Puritans wanted liberty only for themselves, and so abhorred his principles of toleration that they exiled him into the wilderness, mercilessly expecting him to perish in the blizzards or at the hands of the Indians. The hero, like another Roger Williams, turned and denounced them, then vowed to found a state where a man could call his soul his own, and plunged into the storm.
Vickery closed the manuscript and gulped down a glass of water. He had not looked at Eldon for two acts; he did not look at him now. He simply growled, “Sorry it bored you so.”
“It doesn’t bore me!” Eldon protested. “It’s magnificent—”
“But—” Vickery prompted.
“But nothing. Only—well—you see you said it was a play for me, and I—I’ve been trying to like it for myself. But—well, it’s too good for me. I feel like a man who ordered a suit of overalls and finds that the tailor has brought him an ermine robe and velvet breeches. It’s too gorgeous for me.”
“Nonsense!” said Vickery. “You don’t have to softsoap me. Why don’t you like it?”
“I do! As a work of art it is a masterpiece. The fault is mine. You see, I admire the classic blank-verse plays so much that I wish people wouldn’t try to write any more of them. They’re not in the spirit of our age. In Shakespeare’s time men wore long curls and combed them in public, and tied love-knots in them and wrote madigrals and picked their teeth artistically with a golden picktooth. The best of them cried like babies when their feelings were hurt.
“Nowadays we’d lynch a man that behaved as they did. Then they tried to use the most eloquent words. Now we try to use the simplest or, better yet, none at all. I think that our way is bigger than theirs, but, anyway, it’s our way.
“And then the Puritans. I admire them in spots. My people came over in one of the early boats. But plays about Puritans never succeed. Do you know why? It’s because the Puritans preached the gospel of Don’t! Everything was Don’t—don’t dance, don’t sing, don’t kiss, don’t have fun, don’t wear bright colors, don’t go to plays, don’t have a good time. But the theater is the place where people go to have a good time, a good laugh, a good cry, or a good scare. The whole soul of the theater is to reconcile people with life and with one another.
“The Puritans call the theater immoral. It is so blamed moral that it is untrue to life half the time, for wickedness always has to be punished in the theater, and we know it isn’t in real life.
“And another thing, Vick, why should the theater do anything for the Puritans? They never did anything for us except to tear down the playhouses and call the actors hard names. And what good came of it all?
“Here’s a book I picked up about the Puritans, because it has a lot about my ancestors. They had a daughter named Remember and a son named Wrastle. But look at this.” Eldon got up, found the volume, and hunted for the page, as he raged: “Now the Puritans in our country had none of the alleged causes of immorality—they had no novels, no plays, no grand or comic operas, no nude art, no vaudeville, no tango, and no moving pictures. They ought to have been pretty good, eh? Well, take a peek at what their Governor William Bradford writes.”
He handed the book to Vickery, whose eyes roved along the page:
Anno Dom: 1642. Marvilous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickednes did grow breake forth here, in a land wher the same was so much witnesed against, and so narrowly looked unto, & severly punished when it was knowne; as in no place more, and so much, that I have known or head of . . . . . espetially drunkennes and unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men & women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. . . things fearful to name have broak forth in this land, oftener then once . . . one reason may be, that ye Divell may carrie a greater spite against the churches of Christ and ye gospell hear, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holynes and puritie amongst them . . . that he might cast a blemishe & staine upon them in ye eyes of ye world, who use to be rashe in judgmente.
Anno Dom: 1642. Marvilous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickednes did grow breake forth here, in a land wher the same was so much witnesed against, and so narrowly looked unto, & severly punished when it was knowne; as in no place more, and so much, that I have known or head of . . . . . espetially drunkennes and unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men & women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. . . things fearful to name have broak forth in this land, oftener then once . . . one reason may be, that ye Divell may carrie a greater spite against the churches of Christ and ye gospell hear, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holynes and puritie amongst them . . . that he might cast a blemishe & staine upon them in ye eyes of ye world, who use to be rashe in judgmente.
Vickery smiled sheepishly, and Eldon relieved him of the book, exclaiming:
“Think of it, those terribly protected people were so bad they could only explain it by saying that Satan worked overtime! There is one of the most hideous stories in here ever published and you can find facts that makeThe Scarlet Letterlook innocent.”
Vickery protested, mildly: “Of course the Puritans were human and intolerant. That’s the whole point of my play, the struggle of a man against them.”
Eldon opposed him still. “But why should we worry over that? The Puritans have been pretty well whipped out. Liberty is pretty well secured for men in America. Why try to excite an audience about what they all are as used to as the air they breathe? Let Russia write about such things. Why not write a play about the exciting things of our own days? If you want liberty for a theme, why don’t you write about the fight the women are waging for freedom? Turn your hero into a heroine; turn your Puritans into conservative men and women of the day who stand just where they did. Show up the modern home as this book shows up the old Puritans.”
Vickery was dazed. Of all the critical suggestions he had ever heard, this was the most radical, to change the hero to a heroine, andvice versa.
He stared at Eldon. “Are you in favor of woman suffrage, you, of all men?”
Eldon laughed. “You might as well ask me if I am in favor of the coming winter or the hot spell or the next earthquake. All I know is that my opposition wouldn’t make the slightest difference to them and that I might as well reconcile myself to them.
“There’s nothing on this earth except death and the taxes that’s surer to come than the equality of women—in the sense of equality that men mean. The first place where women had a chance was the stage; it’s the only place now where they are put on the same footing with the men. They have every advantage that men have, and earn as much money, or more, and have just as many privileges, or more. The one question asked is, ‘Can you deliver the goods?’ That’s the question they ask of a business man, or painter, or sculptor, or architect, or soldier. Private morals are an important question, but a separate question, just as they are with men.
“So the stage is the right place for freedom to be preached by women, because that is the place where it is practised. The stage ought to lend its hand to free others because it is free itself.”
Vickery was beginning to kindle with the new idea, though his kindling meant the destruction of the building he had worked on so hard. He made one further objection: “You’re not seriously urging me to write a suffragette play, are you?”
“Lord help us, no!” Eldon snorted. “The suffragette is less entertaining on the stage than the Puritan, or the abolitionist, or any fighter for a doctrine. What the stage wants is the story of individuals, not of parties, or sects, or creeds. Leave sermons to the pulpits and lectures to the platform. The stage wants stories. If you can sneak in a bit of doctrine, all right, but it must be smuggled. Why don’t you write a play about the tragedy of a woman who has great gifts and can’t use them—a throttled genius like—well, like Sheila Kemble, for instance?”
“Oh, Sheila!” Vickery sighed. But the theme became personal, concrete, real at once. He made still a last weak objection: “But I wrote this play for you. I wanted to see you star in it.”
Eldon thought a moment, then he said: “You write the play for the woman, and let me play her husband. Give her all the fire you want, and make me just an every-day man with a wife he loves and admires and wants to keep, and doesn’t want to destroy. You do that and I’ll play the husband and I’ll give the woman star the fight of her life to keep me from running away with the piece. Don’t make the husband brilliant or heroic; just a stupid, stubborn, every-day man, and give him the worst of it everywhere. That all helps the actor. The woman will be divine, the man will be human. And he’ll get the audience—the women as well as the men.”
Vickery began to see the play forming on the interior sky of his skull, vaguely yet vividly as clouds take shape and gleam. “If only Sheila could play it,” he said.
Eldon tossed his hands in despair.
Vickery began to babble as the plot spilled down into his brain in a cloudburst of ideas: “I might take Sheila for my theme. To disguise her decently she could be—say—Let me see—I’ve got it!—a singer! Her voice has thrilled Covent Garden and the Metropolitan and she marries a nice man and has some children and sings ’em little cradle-songs. She loves them and she loves her husband, but she is bursting with bigger song—wild, glorious song. Shall she stick to the nursery or shall she leave her babies every now and then and give the world a chance to hear her? Her mother-in-law and the neighbors say, ‘The opera is immoral, the singers are immoral, the librettos are immoral, the managers are immoral; you stay in the nursery, except on Sundays, and then you may sing in the choir.’
“But she remembers when she sang the death-love of Isolde in the Metropolitan with an orchestra of a hundred trying in vain to drown her; she remembers how she climbed and climbed till she was in heaven, and how she took five thousand people there with her, and—Oh, you can see it! It’s Trilby without Svengali; it’s Trilby as a mother and a wife. It’s all womankind.”
His thoughts were stampeded with the new excitement. He picked up the play he had loved so well and worked for so hard, and would have tossed it into the fire if Eldon’s room had not been heated by a steam-radiator. He flung it on the floor with contempt:
“That!” and he trampled it as the critics would have trampled it had it been laid at their feet.
“What to call my play?” he pondered, aloud. “It’s always easier for me to write the play than select the name.” As he screwed up his face in thought a memory came to him. “My mother told me once that when she was a little girl in the West her father wounded a wild swan and brought it home. She cared for it till it got well, then he clipped one of its wings so that it could not balance itself to fly. It grew tame and stayed about the garden, but it was always trying to fly.
“One day my grandfather noticed that the clipped wing was growing out and he sent a farm-hand to trim it down again. The fellow didn’t understand how birds fly, and he clipped the long wing down to the length of the short one. The bird walked about, trying its pinions. It found that, short as they were, they balanced each other.
“She walked to a high place and suddenly leaped off into the air; my mother saw her and thought she would fall. But her wings held her up. They beat the air and she sailed away.”
“Did she ever come back?” Eldon asked.
“She never came back. But she was a bird and didn’t belong in a garden. A woman would come back. We used to have pigeons at home. We clipped their wings at first, too, till they learned the cote. Then we let them free. You could see them circling about in the sky. Pigeons come back. I’m going to call my play ‘Clipped Wings.’ How’s that for a title?—‘Clipped Wings’!”
Eldon was growing incandescent, too, but he advised caution:
“Be easy on the allegory, boy, or you’ll have only allegorical audiences. Stick to the real and the real people will come to see it. Go on and write it, and don’t forget I play the husband; I saw him first. Don’t write a lecture, now; promise me you won’t preach or generalize. You stick to your story of those two people, and let the audience generalize on the way home. And don’t let your dialogue sparkle too much. Every-day people don’t talk epigrams. Give them every-day talk. That’s as great and twice as difficult as blank verse.
“Don’t try to sweeten the husband. Let him roar like a bull, and everybody will understand and forgive him. I tell you the new wife has it all her own way. She’s venturing out into new fields. The new husband is the one I’m sorry for.
“I hate Winfield for taking Sheila off the stage, and I hate him for keeping her away. But if I were in his place I’d do the same. I’d hate myself, but I’d keep her. The more you think of it, the harder the husband job is.
“The new husband of the new woman is up against the biggest problem of the present time and of the future: what are husbands going to do about their wives’ ambitions? What are wives going to do about their husbands’ rights to a home? Where do the children come in? It doesn’t do the kids much good to have ’em brought up in a home of discontent by a broken-hearted mother raising her daughter to go through the same tragedy. But they ought to have a chance.
“There’s a new triangle in the drama. It’s not a question of a lover outside; the third member is the wife’s ambition. Go to it, my boy—and give us the story.”
Vickery stumbled from the room like a sleep-walker. The whole play was present in his brain, as a cathedral in the imagination of an architect.
When he came to drawing the details of the cathedral, and figuring out the ground-plan, stresses, and strains, the roof supports, the flying buttresses, the cost of material, and all the infernally irreconcilable details—that was quite another thing yet.
But he plunged into it as into a brier-patch and floundered about with a desperate enthusiasm. His health ebbed from him like ink from his pen. His doctor ordered him to rest and to travel, and he sought the mountains of New York for a while. But he would not stop work. His theme dragged him along and he hoped only that his zest for writing would not give out before the play was finished. If afterward his life also gave out, he would not much care.
He had lost Sheila, and Sheila had lost herself. If he could find his work, that would be something at least.
CHAPTER L
There was a certain birch-tree on the hill behind the old Winfield homestead.
The house itself sat well back in its ample green lawn, left fenceless after the manner of American village lawns. In the rear of the house there were many acres of gardens and pasture where cattle stood about, looking in the distance like toy cows out of a Noah’s Ark.
Beyond the pasture was the steep hill they flattered with the name of “the mountain.” To the children it furnished an unfailing supply of Indians, replenished as fast as they were slaughtered.
Every now and then Sheila had to be captured and tied to a tree and danced around by little Polly and young Bret and their friends, bedecked with feathers from dismantled dusters, brandishing “tommyhawks” and shooting with “bonarrers.”
Just as the terrified pale-face squaw was about to be given over to the torture the Indians would disappear, take off their feathers, rub the war mud off their noses, and lay aside their barbarous weapons; then arming themselves with wooden guns, they would charge to Sheila’s rescue, fearlessly annihilating the wraiths of their late selves.
One day when Sheila was bound to the tree she saw Bret stealing up to watch the game. He waved gaily to her and she nodded to him. Then the whim came to her to cease burlesquing the familiar rôle and play it for all it was worth. She imagined herself really one of those countless women whom the Indians captured and subjected to torment. Perhaps some woman, the wife of a pioneer, had once met her hideous doom in this same forest. She fancied she saw her house in flames and Bret shot dead as he fought toward her. She writhed and tugged at the imaginary and unyielding thongs. She pleaded for mercy in babbling hysteria, and for a climax sent forth one sincere scream of awful terror. If Dorothy’s mother had heard it she would have remembered the shriek of the little Ophelia.
Sheila noted that the redskins were silent. She looked about her through eyes streaming with fictional tears. She saw that Bret was plunging toward her, ashen with alarm. The neighbors’ children were aghast and her own boy and girl petrified. Then Polly and young Bret flung themselves on her in a frenzy of weeping sympathy.
Sheila began to laugh and Bret looked foolish. He explained:
“I thought a snake was coiled round you. Don’t do that again, in Heaven’s name.” That night he dreamed of her cry.
It was a long while before Sheila could comfort her children and convince them that it was all “pretend.”
After that, when they were incorrigible, she could always cow them by threatening, “If you don’t I’ll scream.”
The children would have been glad to make little canoes from the bark of the birch, but Sheila would not let them peel off the delicate human-like skin. The tree meant much to her, for she and Bret had been wont to climb up to it before there were any amateur Indians. Bret had carved their names on it in two linked hearts.
On the lawn in front of the house there was another birch-tree. It amused Bret to name the tree on the hill “Sheila” and the tree on the lawn “Bret.” And the nearest approach he ever made to poetry was to pretend that they were longing for each other. He probably absorbed that idea from the dimly remembered lyric of the pine-tree and the palm.
Sheila suggested that the birch from the lawn should climb up and dwell with the lonely tree on the heights. Bret objected that he and Sheila would never see them then, for they made few such excursions nowadays.
It struck him as a better idea to bring “Sheila” down to “Bret.” He decided to surprise his wife with the view of them together. He chose a day when Sheila was to take the children to a Sunday-school picnic. On his way to the office he spoke to the old German gardener he had inherited from his father. When Bret told him of his inspiration the old man (Gottlieb Hauf, his name was) shook his head and crinkled his thin lips with the superiority of learning for ignorance. He drawled:
“You shouldn’t do so,” and, as if the matter were ended, bent to snip a shrub he was manicuring.
“But I want it,” Bret insisted.
“You shouldn’t vant it,” and snipped again.
Opposition always hardened Bret. He took the shears from the old man and stood him up. “You do as I tell you—for once.”
Gottlieb could be stubborn, too. “Und I tell you die Birke don’t vant it. She don’t like it down here.”
“The other birch-tree is flourishing down here.”
“Dot makes nuttink out. Die Birke up dere she like vere she is. She like plenty sun.”
“This one grows in the shade.”
“Diese Birke don’t know nuttink about sun. She alvays grows im Schatten.”
“Well, the other one would like the shade if it had a chance. You bring it down here.”
The old man shook his head stubbornly and reached for the shears.
Bret was determined to have his own way. “Is it my tree or yours?”
“She is your tree—but she don’t like. You move her, she dies.”
“Bosh! You do as you’re told.”
“All right. I move her.”
“To-day?”
“Next vinter.”
“Now!”
“Um Gotteswillen!She dies sure. Next vinter or early sprink, maybe she has a chence, but to move her in summer—no!”
“Yes!”
“Nein doch!”
Bret choked with rage. “You move that tree to-day or you move yourself out of here.”
Gottlieb hesitated for a long while, but he felt that he was too old to be transplanted. Besides, that tree up there was none of his own children. He consented with as bad grace as possible. He moved the tree, grumbling, and doing his best for the poor thing. He took as large a ball of earth with the roots as he could manage, but he had to sever unnumbered tiny shoots, and the voyage down the mountain filled him with misgivings.
When Bret came home that night the two trees stood close together like Adam and Eve whitely saluting the sunset. Over them a great tulip-tree towered a hundred feet in air, and all aglow with its flowers like a titanic bridal bouquet. When the bedraggled Sheila came back with the played-out children she was immeasurably pleased with the thoughtfulness of the surprise.
The next morning Bret called her to the window to see how her namesake laughed with all her leaves in the early light. The two trees seemed to laugh together. “It’s their honeymoon,” he said. When he left the house old Gottlieb was shaking his head over the spectacle. Bret triumphantly cuffed him on the shoulder. “You see! I told you it would be all right.”
“Vait once,” said Gottlieb.
A few days before this Dorothy had called on Sheila to say that the church was getting up an open-air festival, a farewell to the congregation about to disperse for the summer. They wanted to borrow the Winfield lawn.
Sheila consented freely. Also, they wanted to give a kind of masque. Masques were coming back into fashion and Vickery had consented to toss off a little fantasy, mainly about children and fairies, with one or two grown-ups to hold them together.
Sheila thought it an excellent idea.
Also, they wanted Sheila to play the principal part, the mother of the children.
Sheila declined with the greatest cordiality.
Dorothy pleaded. Sheila was adamant. She would work her head off and direct the rehearsals, she said, but she was a reformed actress who would not backslide even for the church.
Other members of the committee and even the old parson begged Sheila to recant, but she beamed and refused. Rehearsals began with Dorothy as the mother and Jim’s sister Mayme as the fairy queen. Sheila’s children and Dorothy’s and a mob of others made up the rest of the cast, human and elfin.
Sheila worked hard, but her material was unpromising—all except her own daughter, whom she had named after Bret’s mother and whom she called “Polly” after her own. Little Polly displayed a strange sincerity, a trace of the Kemble genius for pretending.
When Vickery, who came down to see his work produced and saw little Polly, it was like seeing again the little Sheila whom he still remembered.
He told big Sheila of it, and her eyes grew humid with tenderness.
He said, “I wrote my first play for you—and I’d be willing to write my last for you now if you’d act in it.”
Sheila blessed him for it as if it were a beautiful obituary for her dead self. He did not tell her that he was writing her into his masterpiece, that she was posing for him even now.
On the morning of the performance Miss Mayme Greeley woke up with an attack of hay-fever in full bloom. The June flowers had filled her with a kind of powder that went off like intermittent skyrockets. She began to pack her trunk for immediate flight to a pollenless clime. It looked as if she were trying to sneeze her head into her trunk. There was no possibility of her playing the fairy queen when her every other word was ker-choo!
Sheila saw it coming. Before the committee approached her like a press-gang she knew that she was drafted. She knew the rôle from having rehearsed it. Mayme’s costume would fit her, and if she did not jump into the gap the whole affair would have to be put off.
These were not the least of the sarcasms fate was lavishing on her that her wicked past as an actress, which had kept her under suspicion so long, should be the means of bringing the village to her feet; that the church should drive her back on the stage; that the stage should be a plot of grass, that her own children should play the leading parts, and she be cast for a “bit” in their support.
Thus it was that Sheila returned to the drama, shanghaied as a reluctant understudy. The news of the positive appearance of the great Mrs. Winfield—“Sheila Kemble as was, the famous star, you know”—drew the whole town to the Winfield lawn.
The stage was a level of sward in front of the two birches, with rhododendron-bushes for wings. The audience filled the terraces, the porches, and even the surrounding trees.
The masque was an unimportant improvisation that Vickery had jingled off in hours of rest from the labor of his big play, “Clipped Wings.”
But it gained a mysterious charm from the setting. People were so used to seeing plays in artificial light among flat, hand-painted trees with leaves pasted on visible fishnets, that actual sunlight, genuine grass, and trees in three dimensions seemed poetically unreal and unknown.
The plot of the masque was not revolutionary.
Dorothy played a mother who quieted her four clamoring children with fairy-stories at bedtime; then they dreamed that a fairy queen visited them and transported them magically in their beds to fairyland.
At the height of the revel a rooster cock-a-doodle-did, the fairies scampered home, the children woke up to find themselves out in the woods in their nighties, and they skedaddled. Curtain.
The magic transformation scene did not work, of course. The ropes caught in the trees and Bret’s chauffeur and Gottlieb Hauf had to get a stepladder and fuss about, while the sleeping children sat up and the premature fairies peeked and snickered. Then the play went on.
Bret watched the performance with the indulgent contempt one feels for his unprofessional friends when they try to act. It puzzled him to see how bad Dorothy was.
All she had to do was to gather her family about her and talk them to sleep. Sheila had reminded her of this and pleaded:
“Just play yourself, my dear.”
But Dorothy had been as awkward and incorrigible as an overgrown girl.
To the layman it would seem the simplest task on earth—to play oneself. The acting trade knows it to be the most complex, the last height the actor attains, if he ever attains it at all.
Bret watched Dorothy in amazement. He was too polite to say what he thought, since Jim Greeley was at his elbow. Jim was not so polite. He spoke for Bret when he groaned:
“Gee whiz! What’s the matter with that wife of mine? She’s put her kids to bed a thousand times and yet you’d swear she never saw a child in her life before. You’d swear nobody else ever did. O Lord! Whew! I’ll get a divorce in the morning.”
The neighbors hushed him and protested with compliments as badly read and unconvincing as Dorothy’s own lines. At last Sheila came on, in the fairy-queen robes. Everybody knew that she was Mrs. Winfield, and that there were no fairies, at least in Blithevale, nowadays.
Yet somehow for the nonce one fairy at least was altogether undeniable and natural and real. The human mother putting her chicks to bed was the unheard-of, the unbelievable fantasm. Sheila was convincing beyond skepticism.
At the first slow circle of her wand, and the first sound of her easy, colloquial, yet poetic speech, there was a hush and, in one heart-throb, a sudden belief that such things must be true, because they were too beautiful not to be; they were infinitely lovely beyond the cruelty of denial or the folly of resistance.
Bret’s heart began to race with pride, then to thud heavily. First was the response to her beauty, her charm, her triumph with the neighbors who had whispered him down because he had married an actress. Then came the strangling clutch of remorse: What right had he to cabin and confine that bright spirit in the little cell of his life? Would she not vanish from his home as she vanished from the scene? Actually, she merely walked between the rhododendron-bushes, but it had the effect of a mystic escape.
There was great laughter when the children woke up and scooted across the lawn in their bed-gear, but the sensation was Sheila’s. Her ovation was overwhelming. The women of the audience fairly attacked Bret with congratulations. They groaned, shouted, and squealed at him:
“Oh, your wife was wonderful! wonderful!wonderful! You must be soproudof her!”
He accepted her tributes with a guilty feeling of embezzlement, a feeling that the prouder he was of her the more ashamed he should be of himself.
He studied her from a distance as she took her homage in shy simplicity. She was happy with a certain happiness he had not seen on her face since he last saw her taking her last curtain calls in a theater.
Sheila was so happy that she was afraid that her joy would bubble out of her in disgraceful childishness. With her first entrance on the grassy “boards” she had felt again the sense of an audience in sympathy and in subjection, the strange clasp of hands across the footlights, even though there were no footlights. It was a double triumph because the audience was Philistine and little accustomed to the theater. But she could feel the pulse of all those neighbors as if they had but one wrist and she held that under her fingers, counting the leap and check of their one heart and making it beat as she willed.
The ecstasy of her power was closely akin, in so different a way, to what Samson felt when the Philistines that had rendered him helpless called him from the prison where he did grind, to make them sport:
“He said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth that I may lean upon them.” As he felt his strength rejoicing again in his sinews, he prayed, “Strengthen me only this once, O God, that I may be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”
Nobody could be less like Samson than Sheila, yet in her capacity she knew what it was to have her early powers once more restored to her. And she bowed herself with all her might—“And the house fell.”
An almost inconceivable joy rewarded Sheila till the final spectator had italicized the last compliment. Then, just as Samson was caught under his own triumph, so Sheila went down suddenly under the ruination of her brief victory.
She was never to act again! She was never to act again!
When Bret came slowly to her, the last of her audience, she read in his eyes just what he felt, and he read in her eyes just what she felt. They wrung hands in mutual adoration and mutual torment. But all they said was:
“You were never so beautiful! You never acted so well!” and “If you liked me, that’s all I want.”
The next morning Bret woke to a new and busy day after a night of perfect oblivion. Sheila did not get up, as her new habit was, but she reverted to type. She said that she had not slept and Bret urged her to stay where she was till she was rested.
Later, as he was knotting his tie, he glanced from the window as usual at the birches whose wedding he was so proud of. His hands paused at his throat and his fingers stiffened. He called, “Sheila! Sheila! Come look!”
He forgot that she had not risen with him. She lifted herself heavily from her pillow and came slowly to his side. She brushed back her heavy hair from her heavy eyes and said, “What is it?”
“Look at the difference in the birches. ‘Bret’ is bright and fine and every leaf is shining. But look at ‘Sheila’!”
The Sheila tree seemed to have died in the night. The leaves drooped, shriveled, turning their dull sides outward on the black branches. The wind, that made the other tree glisten like breeze-shaken water, sent only a mournful shudder through her listless foliage.
CHAPTER LI
Bret turned with anxious, almost with superstitious query to Sheila. He found her wan and tremulous and weirdly aged. He cried out: “Sheila! What’s the matter? You’re ill!”
She tried to smile away his fears: “I had a bad night. I’m all right.”
But she leaned on him, and when he led her back to bed she fell into her place like a broken tree. She was stricken with a chill and he bundled the covers about her, spread the extra blankets over her, and held her in his arms, but the lips he kissed shivered and were gray.
He was in a panic and begged her to let him send for the doctor, but she reiterated through her chattering teeth that she was “all right.” When he offered to stay home from the office she ridiculed his fears and insisted that all she needed was sleep.
He left her anxiously, and came home to luncheon earlier than usual. He did not find Sheila on the steps to greet him. She was not in the hall. He asked little Polly where her mother was, and she said:
“Mamma’s sick. She’s been crying all day.”
“No, I haven’t,” said Sheila; “I’m all right.”
She was coming down the stairs; she was bravely dressed and smiling bravely, but she depended on the banister, and she almost toppled into Bret’s arms.
He kissed her with terror, demanding: “What’s the matter, honey? Please, please tell me what’s the matter.”
But she repeated her old refrain: “Why, I’m all right, honey! I’m perfectly all right!”
But she was not. She was broken in spirit and her nerves were in shreds.
Though she sat in her place at table, Bret saw that she was only pretending to eat. Dinner was the same story. And there was another bad night and a haggard morning.
Bret sent for the doctor in spite of her. He found only a general constitutional depression, or, as Bret put it, “Nothing is wrong except everything.”
A week or two of the usual efforts with tonics brought no improvement. Meanwhile the doctor had asked a good many questions. It struck him at last that Sheila was suffering from the increasingly common malady of too much nervous energy with no work to expend it on. She must get herself interested in something. Perhaps a change would be good, a long voyage. Bret urged a trip abroad. He would leave the factory and go with her. Sheila did not want to travel, and she reminded him of the vital importance of his business duties. He admitted the truth of this and offered to let her go without him. She refused.
The doctor advised her to take up some active occupation. Bret suggested water-colors, authorship, pottery, piano-playing, the harp, vocal lessons—Sheila had an ear for music and sang very well, for one who did not sing. Sheila waved the suggestions aside one by one.
Bret and the doctor hinted at charity work. It is necessary to confess that the idea did not fascinate Sheila. She had the actor’s instinct and plenteous sympathy, and had always been ready to give herself gratis to those benefit performances with which theatrical people are so generous, and whose charity should cover a multitude of their sins. But charity as a job! Sheila did not feel that going about among the sick and poverty stricken people would cheer her up especially.
The doctor as his last resort suggested a hobby of his own—he suggested that Sheila take up the art of hammering brass. He had found that it worked wonders with some of his patients.
Sheila, not knowing that it was the doctor’s favorite vice and that his home was full of it, protested: “Hammered brass! But where would I hide it when I finished it? No, thank you!”
She said the same to every other proposal. You can lead a woman to an industry, but you cannot make her take it up. Still Bret agreed with the doctor that idleness was Sheila’s chief ailment. There was an abundance of things to do in the world, but Sheila did not want to do them. They were not to her nature. Forcing them on her was like offering a banquet to a fish. Sheila needed only to be put back in the water; then she would provide her own banquet.
Bret gave up trying to find occupations for her. The summer did not retrieve her strength as he hoped. She tired of beaches and mountains and family visitations.
In Bret’s baffled anxiety he thought perhaps it was himself she was so sick of; that love had decayed. But Sheila kept refuting this theory by her tempests of devotion.
He knew better than the doctor did, better than he would admit to himself, what was the matter with her. She wanted to go on the stage, and he could not bear the thought of it. Neither could he bear the thought of her melancholia.
If Sheila had stormed, complained, demanded her freedom he could have put up a first-class battle. But he could not fight the poor, meek sweetheart whose only defense was the terrible weapon of reticence, any more than he could fight the birch-tree that he had brought from its native soil.
The Sheila tree made a hard struggle for existence, but it grew shabbier and sicker, while the Bret tree, flourishing and growing, offered her every encouragement to prosper where she was. But she could not prosper.
One evening when Bret came home, nagged out with factory annoyances, he saw old Gottlieb patting the trunk of the Sheila tree and shaking his head over it. Bret went to him and asked if there were any hope.
There were tears in Gottlieb’s eyes. He scraped them off with his wrist-bone and sighed:
“Die arme schöne Birke.Ain’t I told you she don’t like? She goink die. She goink die.”
“Take her back to the sunlight, then,” said Bret.
But Gottlieb shook his head. “Jetzt ist’s all zu spät.She goink die.”
Bret hurried on to the house, carrying a load of guilt. Sheila was lying on a chair on the piazza. She did not rise and run to him. Just to lift her hand to his seemed to be all that she could achieve. When he dropped to his knee and embraced her she seemed uncannily frail.
The servant announcing dinner found him there.
Bret said to Sheila, “Shall I carry you in?”
She declined the ride and the dinner.
Bret urged, “But you didn’t eat anything for lunch.”
“Didn’t I? Well, no matter.”
He stared at her, and Gottlieb’s words came back to him. The two Sheilas would perish together. He had taken them both from the soil where they had first taken root. Neither of them could adapt herself to the new soil. It was too late to restore the birch to its old home. Was it too late to save Sheila?
He would not trust the Blithevale fogies longer. She should have the best physician on earth. If he were in New York, well and good; if he lived in Europe, they would hunt him down. Craftily he said to Sheila:
“How would you like to take a little jaunt to New York?”
“No, thanks.”
“With me. I’ve got to go.”
“I’m sorry I can’t; but it will be a change for you.”
“I’ll be lonely without you.”
“Not in New York,” she laughed.
“In heaven,” he said, and the extravagance pleased her. He took courage from her smile and pleaded: “Come along. You can buy a raft of new clothes.”
She shook her head even at that!
“You could see a lot of new plays.”
This seemed to waken the first hint of appetite. She whispered, “All right; I’ll go.”