CHAPTER XVI
The last days of Sheila’s presence with the company were full of annoyances. There was little opportunity for communion with Floyd. Mrs. Vining was invincibly tenacious. All day long, too, Floyd was rehearsing his new rôle. This proved intensely difficult to him. With a heart full of devotion to Sheila, it was worse than awkward to be making love to the parvenue who took her place, mimicked her intonations, made the same steps and gestures, said the same words, and yet was so radically different.
She was a forward thing—Miss Dulcie Ormerod. She patronized Eldon and tried to flirt with him at the same time. She forced conversation on him when he was morose. She happened to meet him with extraordinary coincidence when he was outside the theater. And almost every time the two of them happened to be together they happened to meet Sheila.
Dulcie was one of those women who seem unable to address one without pawing or clinging—as if the arms were telephone cables, and there were no communicating without contact.
Sheila was of the wireless type. A touch from her was as important as a caress. To put a hand familiarly or carelessly on her arm was not to be thought of, at least by Eldon. Others who attempted it found that she flinched aside or moved to a distance almost unconsciously. She kept herself precious in every way.
Eldon loathed the touch of Dulcie’s claws, especially as he could not seem to convince Sheila that he did not enjoy her incessant contiguity. And the prehensive Dulcie was calling him “Floyd” before the third rehearsal.
Batterson was calling him all sorts of names of the familiarity that implies contempt, for Eldon was not rehearsing well. He realized the confusing inconveniences that love can weave into the actor’s trade. If it had not been for Sheila he could have made a straight matter of art or business out of the love-scenes with Dulcie, or he could have thrown the hungry thing an occasional kind word to keep her quiet, or have fallen temporarily in love with her, for Dulcie was one of those actresses who insist that they “must feel a part to play it.” She was forever alluding to one of her rôles in which “she knew she was great because she wept real tears in it.”
Sheila belonged to the other school. Her father would say of a scene, “I knew I was great in that because I could guy it.” For then he was like the juggler who can chat with the audience without dropping a prop—a Cyrano who can fight for his life and compose a poem at the same time.
Sheila felt the emotions of her rôle when she first took it up, but she conquered them as soon as she could by studying and registering their manifestations, so that her resources were like an instrument to play on. Thereafter her emotions were those of the concert violinist who plays upon his audience as well as his instrument.
Sheila watched a few rehearsals. She hated the exaggerated sentimentalisms of Dulcie and her splay-footed comedy. Dulcie underscored every important word like a school-girl writing a letter. Sheila credited the audience with a sense of humor and kept its intelligence alert. Sheila made no bones of criticizing her successor. But when Eldon agreed with her, she was not convinced. She was far more jealous of him than she was of her rôle. But Eldon was not wise enough to take comfort from these proofs of her affection. They narrowly escaped quarreling during their last few meetings.
When Sheila went away Eldon could not even go to the train with her. Batterson held him to rehearsal.
Sheila said, “Don’t worry; Mr. Folwell will take care of me.” She could hardly have been ignorant of the torment this meant to Eldon, but her heart was aching, too, because he permitted a little thing like his business to keep him from paying the last tributes of tenderness.
Folwell was one of those affable leading men who always proffer their leading women as much gallantry as they care to accept. He had been a devoted suitor to Zelma Griffen and had graciously pretended to suffer agonies of jealousy over her humming-bird flirtations. He had done the same with the women stars of his last three engagements. He was Scotch, and had a gift of sad-eyed sincerity for the moment, and a vocabulary of irresistible little pet names, and a grim earnestness about whatever interested him at the time. His real name was, curiously, Robert Burns. He had changed it lest he be suspected of stealing it, or of advertising a much-advertised tobacco.
Eldon imagined that Folwell would begin to languish over Sheila the moment the train started, and was tempted to bash in his head so that he would be incapable of making love at all. He had won into Sheila’s good graces by knocking an anonymous student over the footlights. If he sent a pseudonymous actor the same way he might clinch his success with her. He little knew that the blow he had struck Bret Winfield had not yet ceased to sting that youth, and that Winfield was still repeating his vow to square himself with Eldon and with Sheila—in very different ways.
But Eldon let Folwell escape without planting his fists on him. And he let Sheila escape without imprinting the seal of his kiss upon her. He had never laid lip to her cheek. And now they were divorced, without being betrothed.
If he had known how tenderly Sheila’s thoughts flew back to him, if he had known that she locked herself in her state-room and wept and never once saw Folwell on the train, he would have been happier and sadder both, with the incurable perversity of a forlorn lover. If he could have seen her very soul of souls he would have seen what she dared not admit to herself, that she was a little disappointed in him because he let her go. She doubted the greatness of his love of her because he loved the artist she was so well. Sheila was more jealous of her actress self than of Dulcie Ormerod.
It was not many days before Eldon, too, turned his back on Chicago, but facing westerly. The city was dear to him: he had passed through a whole lifetime of stages there, from crushing failure to success in a leading rôle, and from loneliness to reciprocated love and widowerhood.
Mrs. Vining tried to console him when he turned to her as at least a relative of Sheila’s. She made as much as she could of his performance as Folwell’s successor. It was a creditable and a promising beginning, though it offended her experienced standards in countless ways. But she flattered him with honeyed words, and she tried to wear away his love for Sheila.
She had seen so many nice young fellows and dear, sweet girls stretched on the rack of these situations—wrenched by the wheels of separation and all the suspicions that jealousy can imagine from opportunity. In all mercy she wished this couple well cured of the inflammation. She did her part to allay it with counter-irritants and caustics. She wrote Sheila that Eldon was getting along famously with his rôle—and with Dulcie, who was “a dear little thing and winning excellent press notices.” She told Eldon that Sheila was in love with her new play, and that Tom Brereton was turning her head with his compliments. Folwell, who had the second male rôle in the new play, was also very attentive, she said. And Sheila was going out a good deal in New York—dancing her feet off nearly every night. The author of the play was a third rival for her favor, in Mrs. Vining’s chronicles.
Everything collaborated to Eldon’s torture. The “Friend in Need” company was moving West in long jumps. Sheila’s letters had farther and farther to go. A sudden change of booking threw them off the track and two weeks passed without a line. He sent her day letters and night letters as affectionate in tone as he had the face to submit to the telegraph operators. Her answers did not satisfy him. They were never so prompt as his calculations and he did not credit her with restraint before the cold-eyed telegraphers.
She was far busier, too, than he imagined. Costumes were to be ordered and fitted; the new lines to be learned; photographs to be posed for; interviews to be given. Reben was grooming her for a star already, without giving her an inkling of his schemes. As for flirting with Brereton or Folwell, she was as far as possible from the thought of such a leisurely occupation. She was having battles with them, and still bitterer conflicts with the author.
CHAPTER XVII
In the eyes of the playwright Sir Ralph Incledon, as in the eyes of the early Spaniards, the Americans were savages with unlimited gold to exchange for glass beads. He had a noble contempt for all of us except our dollars, and he was almost ashamed to take those; their very nomenclature was vulgar and the decimal system was French.
The London success of his piece following upon his arrival at knighthood had completely spoiled him. Other great writers and actors who had received the accolade had been rendered a little meeker and more knightly as knights, but Incledon became almost unendurably offensive, even to his fellows in London. The decent English in New York who had to meet him abominated him as civilized Americans abroad abominate the noisy specimens of Yankee insolence who go twanging their illiterate contempt through the palaces and galleries and restaurants of Europe.
Sir Ralph was greatly distressed with the company Reben had proudly mustered for him. Tom Brereton was English born and bred, but Sir Ralph accused him of “an extraord’n’r’ly atrowcious Amayric’n acs’nt.” Americans who had seen the London performance had been amazed not only at the success of Miss Berkshire, but at her very tolerance on the stage; they said she looked like a giraffe and talked like a cow. But she pleased her own public somehow. When Sir Ralph saw Sheila he was not impressed; he said that she was “even wahss” than Brereton and under “absolutely neigh-o sec’mst’nces could he permit hah to deviate from the p’fawm’nce of d’yah aold Bahkshah.”
Sheila had flattered herself that she knew something of England and English; she had visited the island enough, and some of its stateliest homes; and she had had some of the worst young peers making love to her. But Sir Ralph, she wrote her aunt, evidently regarded her “as something between a squaw and a pork-packer’s daughter.”
Sir Ralph threw her into such a bog of humiliation that she floundered at every step. How could she give an intelligent reading to a line when he wanted every word sung according to the idiom of another woman of another race? How could she embody a rôle in its entirety when every utterance and motion was to be patterned on Sir Ralph’s wretched imitations of a woman she had never seen?
Sir Ralph not only threw his company into a panic, but he revealed a positive genius for offending the reporters, the critics, the public. Before the first curtain rose there was a feeling of hostility, against which the disaffected and disorganized players struggled in vain.
His play was a beautiful structure, full of beautiful thoughts expertly wrought into form. But Sir Ralph, like so many authors, seemed to contradict in his person everything worth while in his work.
His wife, Lady Incledon, knew him to be earnest, hard-working, emotional, timorous. His anxiety and modesty when at bay before the public gave the impression of conceit, contempt, and insolence. If he had been more cocksure of his play he would not have been so critical of its interpreters. If he had not been so afraid of the Americans he would not have tried to make them afraid of him. No tenderer-hearted novelist ever wrote than Dickens, yet he had the knack of infuriating mobs of people into a warm desire to lynch him. No sweeter-souled poet ever sang than Keats, yet Byron said he never saw him but he wanted to kick him.
Sir Ralph Incledon had the misfortune to belong to this class. He was not popular at home and he was maddening abroad. He made Americans remember Bunker Hill and long to avenge Nathan Hale. The critics felt it their patriotic duty to make reprisals for all the Americans who had failed in London and to send this Piccadillian back with his coat-tails between his legs.
The opening performance in New York was a first-class disaster. The audience did not follow the London custom of calling the author out and booing him. It left him in the wings, excruciated with ingrowing speech. He had drawn up one of the most tactless orations ever prepared in advance by a well-meaning author. He was not permitted to deliver it. He had a cablegram written out to send his anxious wife overseas. He did not send it. When he read the next morning’s papers he was simply dazed. He had come as a missionary direct from the capital to a benighted province and he was received with jeers—or “jahs,” as his dialect would be spelled in our dialect.
He wept privately and then put on an armor of contempt. He sailed shortly after, leaving the Americans marooned on their desert continent.
The actors were treated with little mercy by most of the critics, except to be used as bludgeons to whack the author with. Sheila’s notices were of the “however” sort. “Miss Sheila Kemble is a promising young actress; the part she played, however, was so irritating—” or, “In spite of all the cleverness of—” or, “Sheila Kemble exhausted her resources in vain to give a semblance of life to—”
Sheila sent the clippings to Mrs. Vining, and added: “Every bouquet had a brickbat in it. We are not long for this world, I fear.”
Reben fought valiantly for the play. He squandered money on extra spaces in the papers and on the bill-boards. He quoted from the critics who praise everything and he emphasized lines about the scenery. The play simply did not endure the sea change. People who came would not enjoy it, and would not recommend it. It was hard even to give away complimentary seats, and the result was one that would have been more amazing if it were less common; a successful play by a famous author produced with a famous cast at a leading theater in the largest city of the New World was played to a theater that could not be filled at any or no price. The receipts fell to forty dollars one night.
A newspaper wit wrote, “Last night the crowds on Broadway were so dense that a man was accidentally pushed into the Odeon Theater.” On another day he said, “Last night during a performance of Sir Ralph Incledon’s masterpiece some miscreant entered the Odeon Theater and stole all the orchestra chairs.”
The slow death of a play is a miserable process. The actors began to see the nobilities of the work once the author was removed from in front of it. They regretted its passing, but plays cannot live in a vacuum. Novels and paintings can wait patiently and calmly in suspended animation till their understanders grow up, but plays, like infants, must be nourished at once or they die and stay dead.
Sheila and all the company had fought valiantly for the drama. Once Sir Ralph’s back was turned, they fell to playing their rôles their own way, and they at least enjoyed their work more. But the audiences never came.
Sheila was plunged into deeps of gloom. She felt that she must suffer part of the blame or at least the punishment of the play’s non-success. She wished she had stayed with “A Friend in Need.”
But Reben had always been known as a good sport, a plucky taker of whatever medicine the public gave him. After a bastinado from the critics he had waited to see what the people would do. There was never any telling. Sometimes the critics would write pæans of rapture and the lobby would be as deserted as a graveyard, leaving the box-office man nothing to do but manicure his nails. Sometimes the critics would unanimously condemn, and there would be a queue at the door the next morning. Sometimes the critics would praise and the mob would storm the window. Sometimes they would blame and audiences would stay away as if by conspiracy. In any case, “the box-office tells the story.”
Cassard, the manager, once said that he could tell if a play were a success by merely passing the theater an hour after the performance was over. A more certain test at the Odeon Theater was the manner of Mr. Chittick, the box-office man. If he laid aside his nail-file without a sigh and proved patient and gracious with the autobiographical woman who loitered over a choice of seats and their date, the play was a failure. If Mr. Chittick insulted the brisk business man who pushed the exact sum of money over the ledge and weakly requested “the two best, please” the play was a triumph. Mr. Chittick was a very model of affability while Incledon’s play occupied the stage of the unoccupied theater.
Reben’s motto was “The critics can make or break the first three weeks of a play and no more. After that they are forgotten.” If he saw the business growing by so much as five dollars a night he hung on. But the Incledon play sagged steadily. At the end of a week Reben had the company rehearsing another play called “Your Uncle Dudley,” an old manuscript he had bought years ago to please a star he quarreled with later.
Reben talked big for a while about forcing the run; then he talked smaller and smaller with the receipts. Finally he announced that “owing to previous bookings it will be necessary,” etc. “Mr. Reben is looking for another theater to which to transfer this masterwork of Sir Ralph Incledon. He may take it to Boston, then to Chicago for an all-summer run.”
Eventually he took it to Mr. Cain’s storage warehouse.
“Your Uncle Dudley,” appealed to Reben as a stop-gap. It would cost little. The cast was small; only one set was required. The title rôle fitted Brereton to a nicety. He offered Sheila the heroine, who was a “straight.” She cannily chose a smaller part that had “character.” The play was flung on “cold”—that is, without an out-of-town try-out.
It caught the public at “the psychological moment,” to use a denatured French expression. The morning after the first night the telephone drove Mr. Chittick frantic. He almost snapped the head off a dear old lady who wanted to buy two boxes. It was a hopeless success.
The only sour face about the place except his was the star’s. The critics accused Tom Brereton of giving “a creditable performance.” All the raptures were for Sheila. She was lauded as the discovery of the year.
The critics are always “discovering” people, as Columbus discovered the Indians, who had been there a long while before. Two critics told Reben in the lobby between the acts that there was star-stuff in Sheila. He thanked them both for giving him a novel idea: “I never thought of that, old man.” And the old men walked away like praised children. Like children, they were very, very innocent when they were good and very, very incorrigible when they were horrid.
Tom Brereton behaved badly, to Sheila’s thinking. To his thinking she was the evil spirit. He gave one of those examples of good business policy which is called “professional jealousy” in the theater. He did what any manufacturer does who resists the substitution of a “just as good” for his own widely advertised ware. Tom Brereton was the star of the piece according to his contracts and his prestige. He had toiled lifelong to attain his height and he was old enough and wise enough to realize that he must maintain himself stubbornly or new ambitions would crowd him from his private peak.
Sheila had youth, femininity, and beauty, none of which qualities were Brereton’s. The critics and the public acclaimed the comet and neglected the planet. Reben’s press agent, Starr Coleman, flooded the press with Sheila’s photographs and omitted Brereton’s, partly because the papers will always give more space to a pretty woman than a plain man, and would rather publish the likeness of a rear-row chorus girl than of the eccentric comedian who heads the cast.
Coleman arranged interviews with Sheila, wrote them and gave them to dramatic editors and the gush-girls of the press. Coleman compiled what he called the “Sheila Kemble cocktail” and demanded it at the bars to which he led the arid newspaper men. He did not object to the recipe being mentioned.
Sheila won the audiences, and if Brereton omitted her at a curtain call the audience kept on applauding stubbornly till he was forced to lead her out. She was always waiting. She was greedy for points, and kept building her scenes, encroaching little by little.
Brereton sulked awhile, then protested formally to the stage-manager, who gave him little sympathy. Eventually Brereton tried to repress Sheila’s usurpations.
Little unpleasantnesses developed into open wrangles. It was purely a business rivalry, and Sheila had no right to expect gallantry in a field where she condescended to put herself on an equality with men. But she expected it, none the less. The labor-unions show the same jealousy of women when they trespass on their profits in the mills or the coal-mines.
Sheila began to hate Brereton with a young woman’s vivacity and frankness, and to torment him mischievously. In one scene he had to embrace her with fervor. She used to fill her belt with pins and watch him wince as he smiled. He retaliated with as much dignity as he could muster. He could not always muster much. His heart was full of rage.
He visited Reben in his office and demanded his rights or his release. Reben tried to appease him; business was too good to be tampered with. Reben promised him complete relief—next season. Then he would put somebody else in Sheila’s place.
He could afford to be gracious because he felt that the hour had come to launch Sheila as a star. Her success in a character rôle of peculiarly American traits led him to abandon hope of finding a foreign success to float her in. Besides, he had lost so much money on Incledon’s London triumph that he was an intense partisan for the native drama—till the next American play should fail, and the next importation succeed.
One evening, during the secondentr’acte, he led a tall and scholarly-looking young man down the side aisle and back of a box to the stage. He left the uneasy alien to dodge the sections of scenery that went scudding about like sails without hulls. Then he went to dressing-room “No. 2” and tapped.
Old Pennock’s glum face appeared at the door with a threatening, “We-ell?”
The intruder spoke meekly. “It’s Mr. Reben.”
Pennock repeated, “We-ell?”
Reben shifted to his other foot and pleaded, “May I speak to Miss Kemble a moment?”
Pennock closed the door. Later Sheila opened it a little and peered through, clutching together a light wrapper she had slipped into.
“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. I’ve got a quick change, you know.”
Even the manager must yield to such conditions and Reben spoke around the casement. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that since you are so unhappy in this company you’d better have one of your own.”
“For Heaven’s sake!” Sheila gasped at this unexpected bouquet.
Reben went on: “Since we had such bad success with the masterpiece of the foremost English dramatist, perhaps you might have good luck by going to the other extreme. I’ve found the youngest playwright in captivity. Nowadays these kindergarten college boys write a lot of successes. Joking aside, the boy has a manuscript I’d like you to look over. There is a germ of something in it, I think. Will you just say Hello to him, please?”
Sheila consented with eagerness. Reben beckoned forward a long effigy of youthful terror.
“Miss Kemble, let me present Mr. Eugene Vickery.”
“How do you do, Mr. Nickerson?” said Sheila, and thrust one bare arm through the chink to give her hand to Vickery. The arm was all he could see of her except a narrow longitudinal section of silhouette against the light over her mirror.
Vickery was so hurt, and so unreasonably hurt, by her failure to recall him who had cherished her remembrance all these years, that his surprise escaped him: “I met you once before, but you don’t remember me.”
She lied politely, and squeezed the hand she felt around hers with a prevaricating cordiality. “Indeed I do. Let me see, where was it we met—in Chicago, wasn’t it, this fall?”
“No; it was in Braywood.”
“Braywood? But I’ve never been in Braywood, have I? Mr. Reben, have I ever played Bray—Oh, that’s where my aunt and uncle live! But was I ever there?”
“Very long ago.”
“Oh, don’t say that! Not before my manager!”
“As a very little girl.”
“Oh, that’s better. You see, I go to so many places. And that’s where I met you? You’ve changed, haven’t you?”
She could see nothing of him except the large hand that still clung to hers. She got it back as he laughed:
“Yes, I’ve grown some taller. I played Hamlet to your Ophelia. Then I wrote a play for you, but you got away without hearing it. Now I’ve written another for you. You can’t escape this time.”
“I won’t try to. I’m just dying to play it. What is it?”
A voice spoke in sternly: “Curtain’s going up. You ready, Miss Kemble?”
“Good Lord! Yes!” Then to Vickery. “I’ve got to fly. When can I see you, Mr. Bickerton?”
Reben solved the problem: “Got an engagement to supper?”
“Yes, but I’ll break it.”
“We’ll call for you.”
“Fine! Good-by, Mr.—Mr. Braywood!”
The door closed and Vickery turned away in such a whirl of elation that he almost walked into the scene where Tom Brereton was giving an unusually creditable performance, since Sheila was off the stage.
CHAPTER XVIII
It must be a strangely thrilling thing to be a woman and meet a man who has been so impressed by oneself in childhood that he has never forgotten—a man who has indeed devoted his gifts and ambitions to the perfection of a drama to exploit one’s charms and one’s gifts, and comes back years after with the extraordinary tribute.
The idol needs the idolater or it is no idol, and it doubtless watches the worshiper with as much respect and trepidation as the worshiper it. That is why gods, like other artists, have always been jealous. Their trade lies in their power to attract crowds and hold them. Rivals for glory are rivals for business.
Vickery was Sheila’s first playwright. She could not fail to regard him as a rescuer from mediocrity, and see a glamour about him.
She had planned to go to a late dance that night with some people of social altitude. But she would have snubbed the abbess of all aristocracy for a playwright who came offering her transportation to the clouds.
She had taken her best bib and tucker to her dressing-room and she put it on for Vickery. But she could not dredge up the faintest memory of him, and he found her almost utterly strange as he stared at her between the shaded candles on the restaurant table. She was different even from the girl he had seen on the stage recoiling from Bret Winfield’s unlucky chivalry. The few months of intermission had altered her with theatrical speed. She had had her sentiments awakened by Eldon and her authority enlarged by two important rôles. Her own character was a whole repertoire.
When Vickery had last seen her she was playing the second young woman under her aunt’s protection; now she was a metropolitan favorite at whose side the big manager of the country sat as a sort of prime minister serving her royalty.
First came the necessary business of ordering a supper. Sheila’s appetite amazed Vickery, who did not realize that this was her dinner, or how hard she had worked for it.
When the waiter had hurried off with a speed which he would not duplicate in returning, Sheila must hear about her first acquaintance with Vickery. He spoke with enthusiasm of the little witch she had been, and described with homage her fiery interpretation of Ophelia and her maniac shrieks. He could still hear them, he said, on quiet nights. He pictured her so vividly as she had sat on his mother’s knee and defended her family name and profession that Sheila’s eyes filled with tears and she turned to Reben for confirmation of her emotions. There are few children for whom we feel kindlier than for our early selves.
Her eyes glistened as Vickery recounted his own boyish ambitions to write her a play; the depths of woe he had felt when he found her gone. Then he described his retrieval of her during the riot at Leroy. He told how his friend Bret Winfield had been knocked galley-west by some actor in her troupe. He had forgotten the man’s name, but his words brought Eldon back in the room and seated him like a forlorn and forgotten Banquo at the table. Sheila blushed to remember that she had owed the poor fellow a letter for a long time.
Then Vickery explained that Winfield had gone to her defense and not to her offense, and she felt a pang of remorse at her injustice to him, also. A pretty girl has to be unjust to so many men.
She had a queer thrill, too, from Vickery’s statement that Winfield had vowed to meet her some day and square himself with her; also to meet “that actor” some day and square himself with him.
This strange man Winfield began to loom across her horizon like an approaching Goliath. She tried to remember how he had looked, but recalled only that he was very big and that she was very much afraid of him.
This confusion of retrospect and prospect was dissipated, however, when Vickery began to talk of the play he had written for her. Then Sheila could see nothing but her opportunity, and that strange self an actor visualizes in a new rôle. The rest of us think of Hamlet as a certain personage. The actor thinks of “Hamlet as Myself” or “Myself as Hamlet.”
Vickery’s play, as Reben’s play-reader had told him, contained an idea. But an idea is as dangerous to a playwright as a loaded gun is to a child. The problem is, What will he do with it?
When Vickery told Sheila the central character and theme of his play she was enraptured with the possibilities. When he began to describe in detail what he had done with them she was tormented with disappointments and resentments. She gave way to little gasps of, “Oh, would she do that?” “Oh, do you think you ought to have her say that?”
Vickery was young and opinionated and had never seen one of his plays after the critics and the public had made tatters of it. He could only realize that he had spent months of intense thought upon every word. He was shocked at Sheila’s glib objections.
How could one who simply heard his story for the first time know what ought to be done with it? He forgot that a play’s prosperity, like a joke’s, lies in the ear of those who hear it for the first time.
He responded to Sheila’s skepticisms with all the fanatic eloquence of faith. He convinced her against her will for the moment. She liked him for his ardor. She liked the reasons he gave. She could not help feeling: “What a decent fellow he is! What a kind, wholesome view of life he takes!”
Woman-like, as she listened to his ideas she fell to studying his character and the features that published it. She was contrasting him with Eldon—Eldon so powerful, so handsome, so rich-voiced, so magnetic, and so obstinate; Vickery so homely, so lean, so shambling of gait and awkward of gesture, his voice so inadequate to the big emotions he had concocted. And yet Eldon only wanted to join her in the interpretation of other people’s creations. This spindle-shanks was himself a creator; he had idealized and dramatized a play from and for Sheila’s very own personality.
She began to think that there was something a trifle more exhilarating about an alliance with a creative genius than with just another actor. In her youth and ignorance she used the words “creative” and “genius” with reverence. She had never known a “creative genius” before—except Sir Ralph Incledon, and she loathed him. Vickery was different.
Suddenly in the midst of Vickery’s description of the complexest tangle of his best situation Sheila dumfounded him by saying, “You have gray eyes, haven’t you?”
He collapsed like a punctured balloon and a look of intense discouragement dulled his expression. Misunderstanding the cause of his collapse entirely, she hastened to add:
“Oh, but I like gray eyes! Really! Please go on!”
Vickery understood her misunderstanding, smiled laboriously, then with an effort gathered together the wreckage of his plot for a fresh ascension. Just as he was fairly well away from the ground again Sheila turned to Reben and spoke very earnestly:
“He ought to write a good play. He has the hands of a creative genius—those spatulate fingers, you know. See!”
Since she had known Vickery from childhood, she felt at liberty to stop his hand in the midst of an ardent gesture and submit it to Reben’s inspection. Vickery was hugely embarrassed. Reben was gruff:
“If he’s such a genius you’d better not hold his hand. Let him gene.”
She stared at Reben in amazement; there was a clang of anger in his sarcasm. Abruptly she realized that she had quite ignored him. She had lent Vickery her eyes and ears for half an hour. Reben’s anger was due to hurt pride, the miff of a great manager neglected by a minor actress and an unproduced author. But as she glanced up into the Oriental blackness of his glare she saw something lurking there that frightened her. Her instant intuition was, “Jealousy!” Slower-footed reason said, “Absurd!”
Reben had been closely attached for years to the exaltation of the famous actress, Mrs. Diana Rhys, who had floated to the stage on the crest of a famous scandal from a city where she had been known as Diana the Huntress. She had behaved rather better as an actress than as a housewife, but none too well in either calling. For some years she had been bound to Reben by ties that were supposed to be permanent.
Sheila reproached herself for imagining that Reben could be jealous of herself. Yet she cherished a superstitious belief that when she disregarded her intuition she went wrong. The superstition had fastened itself on her, as superstitions do, from her habit of remembering the occasional events that seemed to confirm it and forgetting the numberless events that disproved it.
She restored her attention to Vickery’s plot, but the background of her thoughts was full of ominous lightnings and rumblings like a summer sky when a storm is far off but inevitable.
Now the plight of Vickery’s heroine seemed much less thrilling than her own. Here she sat almost betrothed to the distant Eldon, almost bewitched by the new-comer, Vickery, and threatened with the wrath of an unexpected claimant who was her manager and held both her present and her future in his hand.
She studied Reben out of the corner of her eye. This new, this utterly unsuspected phase of his, made necessary a fresh appraisal of him. He was now something more and something less than her manager. He was something of a conquest of hers; but did he hope to be a conqueror, too?
It was strange to think of him as a suitor—an amorous manager! a business man with a bouquet! In this guise he looked younger than she had seen him, yet more crafty, more cruel than ever. The Orientalism that had made him so shrewd a bargainer in the bazar was now in a harem humor. His black hair was, after all, in curls; his big eyes were shadowy, wet; his fat hands wore rings—a sanguine ruby twinned with a gross diamond and a shifty opal, like the back of an iridescent and venomous beetle.
Sheila thought of David and Solomon with their many loves, and she felt that perhaps Mrs. Rhys was not sufficient for this man. If he should claim her, too, what should she say to him? Must she sacrifice her career at its very outset just because this man turned monster?
She became so involved in her own meditations that Vickery found her almost deaf to his narrative. He lost the thread of his spinning and tangled himself in it like another Lady of Shalott.
Finally Sheila confessed her bewilderment. She spoke with an assumption of vast experience: “I never could tell anything from a scenario. The play is written out, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” said Vickery. “May I send it to your hotel?”
“I’d rather you’d read it to me,” Sheila pleaded. “You could explain it, you know. I’m so stupid.”
“That would be splendid!” said Vickery. “When? Where?”
Before Sheila could answer, Reben broke in, “At my office, at three to-morrow, if that suits you, Miss Kemble.”
She demurred feebly that they would be interrupted all the time. Reben promised absolute peace and said, with a grim finality: “That’s settled, then, Mr. Vickery. To-morrow, my office, three o’clock.”
There was such a sharp dismissal in his tone that Vickery found himself standing with his hand out in farewell before he quite realized what had lifted him from his chair.
“You’re not going?” said Sheila. “You haven’t finished your coffee.”
“I’ve had more than is good for me,” said Vickery. “Good night, and thank you a thousand times. Good night, Mr. Reben.”
As he shambled through the tables to the door Sheila said, “Nice boy.”
“So you seem to think,” Reben growled.
She stared at him again, troubled at his manner, confirmed in her suspicion, afraid of it and of him. But she said nothing.
“Want a liqueur?” he snapped.
She shook her head.
He said to her, “I’ll take you home,” and to the waiter, “Check!”
“Just put me in a cab,” said Sheila.
He fumed with impatience over the waiter’s delay with the check and the change, the time Sheila spent getting her wrap from the cloak-woman, and her gloves and her hand-bag. He tapped his foot with impatience while the starter whistled up a taxicab. Then he spoke to the driver and got in with her.
He said nothing but, “May I smoke?” But she noted his fearsome mien as the light of his match painted it with startling vividness against the dark. The ruby of his ring was like an evil eye. His thick brows drew down over the black fire of his own eyes, and his lips were red over the big teeth that clenched the cigar. Then he puffed out the match and his face vanished. He said nothing till they reached the apartment-hotel where she lived. He helped her out and paid the driver. She put forth her hand to bid him good night, but he said:
“I want a word with you, please.”
CHAPTER XIX
He led the way into the lobby. She was intensely disturbed, but she could not find the courage to quarrel with him in the presence of the hall-boys. Those who had suites of rooms were permitted to receive guests in them. Reben was the first man that had come alone to Sheila’s rooms, and she felt that the elevator-boy was trying to disguise his cynical excitement.
What could she say to him? how rebuke an unexpressed comment? She hoped that Pennock would be there or would come along speedily to save the situation. She was angry and discomfited as she unlocked her door, switched on the lights, and offered Reben a chair in her little parlor.
Sheila saw that Reben’s eyes were eagerly searching the apartment for signs of a third person. She was tempted to go to Pennock’s room and call some message to her imaginary presence. But she resented her own cowardice and her need of a duenna. She laid off her hat, seated herself with smiling hospitality, and waited for Reben to say his say.
He indicated his cigar with a querying lift of the eyebrows, and she nodded her consent.
Then the business man of him began at the beginning as if he had much to say in a short time and did not want to lose the momentum of his emotion:
“Sheila, you’re a wonderful girl. If you weren’t I shouldn’t be taking you up from the army of actresses that are just as ambitious as you are. I’d be very blind not to see what the whole public sees and not to feel what everybody feels.
“This cub Vickery felt your fascination when you were a child. He never forgot you. He’s trying to put something of you into his play. That other fellow he told you about has made a vow to get to you. You have draught, and all that it means.
“But the brighter the light, the firmer its standard must be. The farther your lantern shines, the bigger and stronger and taller a lighthouse it needs. You know there’s such a thing as hiding a light under a bushel.
“Now, I’m already as big a manager as you’ll ever be a star. I can give you advantages nobody else can give you. I’ve given you some of them already. I can give you more. In fact, nobody else can give you any, for I’ve got you under a contract that makes it possible for me to keep anybody else from exploiting you. But I’m willing and anxious to do everything I can for you. The question is, what are you willing to do for me?”
Sheila knew what he meant, but she answered in a shy voice: “Why, I’ll do all I can—of course. I’ll work like a slave. I’ll try to make you all the money I’m able to.”
“Money? Bagh!” he sneered. “What’s money to me? I love it—as a game, yes. But I don’t mind losing it. You’ve known me to drop forty or fifty thousand at a throw and not whimper, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll do all you can, you say. But will you? There’s something in life besides money, Sheila. There’s—there’s—” He tried to say “love,” but it was an impossible word to get out at once. Instead he groped for her hand and took it in his hot clench.
She drew her cold, slim fingers away with a petulant, girlish, “Don’t!”
He sighed desperately and laughed with bitterness. “I knew you’d do nothing for me. You’d let me work for you, and make you famous and rich, and squander fortunes on your glory, and you’d let me die of loneliness. You’d let me eat my heart out like a love-sick stage-door Johnny and you wouldn’t care. But I tell you, Sheila, even a manager is a man, and I can’t live on business alone. I’ve got to have some woman’s companionship and tenderness and devotion.”
Sheila could not refrain from suggesting, “I thought Mrs. Rhys—”
“Mrs. Rhys!” he snarled. “That worn-out, burned-out volcano? She’s an old woman. I want youth and beauty and—Oh, I want you, Sheila.”
“I—I’m sorry,” she almost apologized, trying not to insult such ardor.
“Oh, I know I’m not young or handsome, but I’ll surround you with youth. I’ll buy that play of your friend Vickery’s; I’ll get the biggest man in the country to whip it into shape; I’ll give it the finest production ever a play had; I’ll make the critics swallow it; I’ll buy the ones that are for sale, and I’ll play on the vanity of the others. If it fails, I’ll buy you another play and another till you hit the biggest success ever known. Then I’ll name a theater after you. I’ll produce you in London, get you commanded to court. I’ll make you the greatest actress in the world. These young fellows may be pretty to play with, but what can they do for you except ruin your career and interfere with your ambition and make a toy of you? I can give you wealth and fame and—immortality! And all I ask you to give me is your—your”—now he said it—“your love.”
“I—I’m sorry,” Sheila mumbled.
“You mean you won’t?” he roared.
“How can I?” she pleaded, still apologetic. “Love isn’t a thing you can just take and give to anybody you please, is it? I thought it was something that—that takes you and gives you to anybody it pleases. Isn’t that it? I don’t know. I’m not sure I know what love is. But that’s what I’ve always understood.”
He grunted at the puerility of this, and said, brusquely, “Well, if you can’t give me love, then give me—you.”
“How do you mean—give you me?”
“Oh, you’re no child, Sheila,” he snarled. “Don’t play the ingenue with me. You know what I mean.”
Her voice grew years older as she answered, icily: “When you say I’m no child, it makes me think I understand what you mean. But I can’t believe that I do.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’ve known my father and mother so long and they like you so much, and—well—it doesn’t seem possible that you would mean me any harm.”
No amount of heroics could have shamed him like that. His eyes rolled like a cornered wolf’s. He shut them, and with one deep breath seemed to absolve himself and purify his soul. He mumbled, “I—I want you to—to marry me, Sheila!”
Sheila seemed to breathe a less stifling air. She felt sorry for him now; but he asked a greater charity than she could grant. She answered: “Oh, I couldn’t marry anybody; not now. I don’t want to marry—at all.” She sought for the least-insulting explanation. “It—it would hurt me professionally.”
His self-esteem blinded him to her tact. He persisted: “We could be married secretly. No one needs to know.”
She protested, “You can’t keep such a thing secret.”
He retorted: “Of course you can. They never found out that Sonia Eccleston was married to her manager.”
“She never was!”
“I saw her with their child in Switzerland.”
“Then it was true! I’ve heard so many people say so. But I never could be sure.”
“It’s true. Our marriage could be kept just as secret as that.”
“Just about!” she laughed, with sudden triumph.
He was too earnest to realize that he had set a trap and stepped into it till he sprung it.
He was suddenly enraged at her and at himself. He would not accept so farcical a twist to his big scene. He broke out into a flame of wrathful desire, and rose threateningly:
“Marriage or no marriage, Sheila, you’ve got to belong to me, or—or—”
“Or what?”
“Or you’ll never be a star. You’ll never play that play of Vickery’s or anybody else’s. You’ll play whatever part I select for you, as your contract says, or you’ll play nothing at all.”
He only kindled Sheila’s tindery temper. She leaped to her feet and stormed up in his face: “Is this a proposal of marriage or a piece of blackmail? I signed a contract, you know, not a receipt for one slave. Marry you, Mr. Reben? Humph! Not if you were the last man on earth! Not if I had to black up and play old darky women.”
The passion that overmastered him resolved to overmaster her.
“You can’t get away from me. I love you!”
He thrust his left arm back of her and enveloped her in a huge embrace, seizing her right arm in his hand. Sheila had been embraced by numerous men in her stage career. She had stood with their arms about her at rehearsal and before the public. She had replied to their ardors according to the directions of the manuscript—with shyness, with boldness, with rapture.
At one of the rehearsals of “Uncle Dudley,” indeed, Reben himself, after complaining of Brereton’s manner of clasping Sheila, had climbed to the stage and demonstrated how he wanted Sheila embraced. She had smiled at his awkwardness and thought nothing of it.
But that was play-acting, with people looking on. This was reality, in seclusion. Intention is nearly everything. Then it was business. Now the touch of his hand upon her elbow made her flesh creep; the big arm about her was as repulsive as a python’s coil. She fought away from him in a nausea of hatred. While his muscles exerted all their tyranny over her little body, his lips were pleading, maundering appeals for a little pity, a little love.
She fought him in silence, dreading the scandal of a scream. She wanted none of that publicity. Her silence convinced him that her resistance was not sincere; he thought it really the primeval instinct to put up an interesting struggle and sweeten the surrender.
With a chuckle of triumph he drew her to his breast and thrust his head forward toward the cheek dimly aglow. But just as he would have kissed her she twisted in his clutch and lurched aside, wrenched her right arm free, and bent it round her head to protect her precious flesh. Then as he thrust his head forward again in pursuit of her, she swung her arm back with all her might and drove her elbow into his face.
Some Irish instinct of battle inspired her to swing from waist and shoulder and put her whole weight into the blow. Only his Reben luck saved him from having a mouthful of loose teeth, a broken nose, or a squashed eye. As it was, the little bludgeon fell on his eminent cheek-bone with an impact that almost knocked him senseless amid a shower of meteors.
Reben’s heartache was transferred to his head. His arms fell from her and romance departed in one enormously prosaic “Ouch!”
The victorious little cave-woman cowered aside and rubbed her bruised elbow, and pouted, and felt ashamed of herself for a terrible brute. Then, as the ancient Amazons must undoubtedly have done after every battle, she began to cry.
Reben was too furious to weep. He nursed his splitting skull in his hands and thought of the Mosaic law “an eye for an eye.” He longed for surcease of pain so that he might devise a perfect revenge against the little beast that had tried to murder him just because he paid her the supreme honor of loving her. He could not trust himself to speak. He found his hat and went out, closing the door softly.
The elevator that took him down returned shortly with Pennock. She had seen Reben cross the hotel lobby, and she came in with a glare of horror. She sniffed audibly the cigar-smoke in the precincts. Her wrath was so dire that she stared at Sheila weeping, and made no motion toward her till Sheila broke out in a clutter of sobs:
“I—I—want some witch-hazel for my elbow. I think I b-b-broke it on old Reben’s j-j-jaw.”
Then the amazing Pennock caught her in her arms and laughed aloud. It was the first time Sheila had heard her laugh aloud. But when she looked up Pennock was weeping as well, the tears sluicing down into her smile.