CHAPTER XX
Sheila wept more as Pennock helped her to undress and drew the sleeve tenderly over the invincible elbow. She wept into the bath and she wept into her pillow. She ran a gamut of emotions from self-pity to self-contempt for so unlady-like a method of extricating herself from a predicament that no lady would have got into. She reproached herself for being some kind of miserable reptile to have inspired either the affection or the insolence of so loathsome another reptile as Reben.
Then she bewailed the ruin of her career. That was gone forever. She bewailed the destruction of Vickery’s hopes—such a nice boy! If she had not permitted Reben to be so rude to Vickery he never would have been so rude to her. She would give up the stage and go live at her father’s house, and die an old maid or marry a preacher or a milkman or something.
She wept herself out so completely that she slept till one o’clock the next afternoon. When she was up she stood at her window and gazed ruefully across the city. On a distant roof she could just see the tall water-tanks marked “Odeon Theater,” and a wall of the theater carrying an enormous blazon of the play with Tom Brereton’s name in huge letters and hers in large. She would never appear there again. She supposed Reben would send her understudy on to-night. Of course the reading of Vickery’s play at three o’clock was all off.
It would be of no use to go to the office. Reben wouldn’t be there. He would doubtless be in a hospital with his face in splints.
She wondered if she had fractured his skull—and how many years they gave you for doing that to a man. She could claim that she did it in self-defense, of course, but she had no witnesses to prove it.
She spent hours in putting herself into all imaginable disasters. The breakfast Pennock commanded her to eat she only dabbed at.
At half past three the telephone rang. The office-boy at Reben’s hailed her across the wire:
“That choo, M’Skemble? This is Choey. Say, M’Skemble, Mis’ Treben wantsa speak choo. Hola wire a min’t, please.”
Sheila reached out and hooked a chair with her foot and brought it up to catch her when the blow fell. Reben’s voice was full of restrained cheerfulness:
“That you, Sheila? Are you ill?”
“Why, no! Why?”
“You had an appointment here at three. We’re still waiting.”
“But you don’t want to see—me, do you?”
“And why not?”
“But last night you said—”
“Last night I was talking to you about personal affairs. This is business. That was at your home. This is my office. Hop in a cab and come on over. I’ll explain.”
She was in such a daze as she made ready to go that when she had her hat on she could not find it with her hat-pin. Pennock performed the office for her. When she reached Reben’s office she meekly edged through the crowd of applicants waiting like the penniless souls on the wrong side of the River Styx. She thought that Eldon must have been one of these once. Some of these were future Eldons, future Booths.
Joey, the office-boy, hailed her with pride, swung the gate open for her, and led her to Reben’s door. He did that only for stars or managers or playwrights of recent success.
Reben was alone. He was dabbing his mumpsy cheek with a handkerchief he wet at a bottle. He smiled at her with a mixture of apology and rebuke.
“There you are! the suffragette that took my face for a shop window. I told everybody I stumbled and hit my head on the edge of a table. If you will be kind enough not to deny the story—”
“Of course not! I’m so sorry! I lost my head!”
“Thank you. So did I. Last night I made a fool of myself. To-day I’m a business man again. I made you a proposition or two. You declined both with emphasis. I ought not to have insisted. You didn’t have to assassinate me. I’ll forgive you if you’ll forgive me.”
“Of course,” said Sheila, sheepishly.
Reben spoke with great dignity, yet with meekness. “We understand each other better now, eh? I meant what I said about being crazy about you. If you’d let me, I could love you very much. If you won’t, I’ll get over it, I suppose. But the proposition stands. If you would marry me—”
“I’m not going to marry anybody, I tell you.”
“You promise me that?”
Sheila felt it safer not to promise forever, but safe enough to say, “Not for a long time, anyway.”
Reben stared at her grimly. “Sheila, I’m a business man; you’re a business woman. I’ll play fair with you if you’ll play fair with me. I’ll make a star of you if you’ll do your share. You wouldn’t flirt with me or let me make a fool of you. Then be a man and we’ll get along perfectly. If you’ll stick to me, not quit me, not hamper me, not play tricks on me, and abide by your contract, I’ll do the same for you. I’ll put you up in the big lights. Will you stand by me, Sheila, as man to man—on your honor as a gentleman?”
She repeated his words with a kind of amused solemnity: “As man to man, on my honor as a gentleman, I’ll stand by you and fulfil my contract.”
“Then that’s all right. Shake hands on it.”
They shook hands. His grasp was hot and fierce and slow to let go. His eyes burned over her with a menace that belied his icy words.
When the bond was sealed with the clasp of hands Reben breathed heavily and pressed a button on his desk. “Now for the young Shakespeare. We’ve kept him waiting long enough. He’s cooled his heels till he must have cold feet by now. Joey, show Mr. Vickery in; and then I don’t want to be disturbed by anybody for anything. I’ll wring your neck if you ring my telephone—unless the building catches on fire.”
“Yes, sir; no, sir,” said Joey; and, holding the door ajar, he beckoned and whistled to Vickery, and, having admitted him, dispersed the rabble outside with brevity: “Nothin’ doin’ to-day, folks. Mis’ Treben’s went home.”
Sheila, Vickery, and Reben regarded one another with the utmost anxiety. They were embarking on a cruise to the Gold Coast. Success would mean a fortune for all; the failure of any would mean disaster to all.
Usually it was next to impossible to persuade Reben to give three consecutive hours of his busy life to an audition; but, once engaged, he listened with amazing analysis. He tried to sit with an imaginary audience. He listened always for the human note. He criticized, as a woman criticizes with reference not to art or logic or truth, but to etiquette, morality, and attractiveness.
The virtuous and scholarly Vickery, as he read his masterwork, was astounded to find his ideals of conduct riddled by a manager, and especially by a Reben. He blushed to be told that his hero was a cad and his heroine a cat. And he could hardly deny the justice of the criticism from Reben’s point of view, which was that of an average audience.
Sheila, feeling that Vickery needed support, gave him only her praise, whatever she felt; little giggles of laughter, little gasps of “Delicious!” and cries of, “Oh, charming!” When with the accidental rarity of a scholar he stumbled into the greatness of a homely sincerity, he was amazed to see that tears were pearling at her eyelids suddenly.
His heart was melted into affection by the collaboration of her sympathy. Without it he would have folded up his manuscript and slunk away, for Reben’s comments were more and more confusingly cynical.
When he finished the ordeal Vickery was exhausted, parched of throat and of heart. Sheila flung him adjectives like flowers and his heart went out toward her, but Reben was silent for a long and cruelly anxious while. Then he spoke harshly:
“A manager’s main business is to avoid producing plays. It’s my business to imagine what faults the public would find and then beat ’em to ’em. There will be plenty of faults left. And don’t forget, Mr. Vickery, that every compliment I pay a playwright costs me a thousand dollars or more. Frankly, Mr. Vickery, I don’t think your play is right. The idea is there, but you haven’t got it.”
Vickery’s heart sickened. Reben revived it a little.
“Maybe you can fix it up. If you can’t I’ll have to get somebody to help you. It’s too late to produce it this season, anyway. Hot weather is coming on. You have all summer to work at it.”
Vickery wondered if he should live so long.
Reben went on: “I—I’ve been thinking, Sheila—Miss Kemble, that it might be a good idea to try this play out in a stock company. Then Mr. Vickery could see its faults.”
Sheila protested, “Oh, but I couldn’t let anybody else play it first.”
“You could join the company as a guest for a week and play the part yourself.”
“Fine!” Sheila exclaimed. “I’ve been planning to put in a good hard summer in stock. It’s such an education—limbers your mind up so, to play all sorts of parts. See if you can find me a good, coolish sort of town with a decent stock company that will let me in.”
“Ay, ay, sir!” said Reben, with a salute. “And now, Mr. Vickery, you’ve got your work cut out, too. See if you can get your play into shape for a stock production.”
Reben was attempting to scare Vickery just enough to make him toil, but he would have given up completely if Sheila had not begged him to go on, asked him to come to see her now and then and “talk things over.”
He promised with gratitude and went, carrying that burden of delay which weighs down the playwright until he reaches the swift judgment of the critics. When he had gone Reben spoke more confidently of the play. He was already considering the cast. He mentioned various names and discarded this actor or that actress because he or she was a blond or too dark, too tall, or too short, lean, fat, commonplace, eccentric. Nobody quite fitted his pictures of Vickery’s people. At length he said:
“I’ll tell you a man I’ve had in mind for the lead. He’d be ideal, I think. He’s young, handsome, educated; he’s got breeding; he can wear a dress-suit; and he hasn’t been on the stage long enough to be spoiled by the gush of fool women. He’s tall and athletic and a gentleman.”
“And who’s all that?” said Sheila. “The angel Gabriel?”
“Young fellow named—er—Elmore—no, Eldon; that’s it. You must know him. He was with you in the ‘Friend in Need’ company.”
“Oh yes,” Sheila murmured, “I know him.”
“How do you think he would do?”
“I think he would be—he would be splendid.”
“All right,” said Reben. “The stock experience would be good for him, too. He might make a good leading man for you. You could practise team-work together. If he pans out, I could place him with the company we select for you.”
“Fine!” said Sheila.
Reben could never have suspected from her tone how deeply she was interested in Eldon. Unwittingly he had torn them asunder just as their romance was ripening into ardor; unwittingly he was bringing them together.
As soon as she left Reben’s office Sheila hurried to her room to write Eldon of their reunion. She wrote glowingly and quoted their old phrases. When she had sent the letter off she had a tremor of anxiety. “What if he finds me changed and doesn’t like me any more? How will he have changed after a season of success and—Dulcie Ormerod?”
CHAPTER XXI
Sheila had earned a vacation. And she had nearly a thousand dollars in bank, which was pretty good for a girl of her years, and enough for a golden holiday. But her ambition was burning fiercely now, and after a week or two of golf, tennis, surf, and dance, at her father’s Long Island home, she joined the summer stock company in the middle-sized city of Clinton. She did twice her usual work for half her usual salary, but she was determined to broaden her knowledge and hasten her experience.
The heat seemed intentionally vindictive. The labor was almost incredible. One week she exploited all the anguishes of “Camille” for five afternoons and six evenings. During the mornings of that week and all day Sunday she rehearsed the pink plights of “The Little Minister,” learning the rôle of Lady Babbie at such odd moments as she could steal from her meals or her slumber or her shopping tours for the necessary costumes. The next week, while she was playing Lady Babbie eleven times, she was rehearsing the masterful heroine of “The Lion and the Mouse” of mornings. While she played this she memorized the slang of “The Chorus Lady” for the following week.
Before the summer was over she had lived a dozen lives and been a dozen people. She had become the pet of the town, more observed than its mayor, and more talked about than its social leader.
She had established herself as a local goddess almost immediately, though she had no time at all for accepting the hospitalities of those who would fain have had her to luncheons, teas, or dinners.
She had no mornings, afternoons, or evenings that she could call her own. The hardest-worked Swede cook in town would have given notice if such unceasing tasks had been inflicted on her; and the horniest-handed labor-unionist would have struck against such hours as she kept.
To the townspeople she was as care-free and work-free as a fairy, and as impossible to capture. After the matinées throngs of young women and girls waited outside the stage door to see her pass. After the evening performances she made her way through an aisle of adoring young men. She tried not to look tired, though she was as weary as any factory-hand after overtime.
At first she hurried past alone. Later they saw a big fellow at her side who proved to be a new-comer—Eldon. And now the matinée girls divided their allegiance. Eldon’s popularity quickly rivaled Sheila’s. But he had even less time for making conquests, for he had a slower memory and was not so habited to stage formulas.
Nor had he any heart for conquests. A certain number of notes came to his letter-box, some of them anonymous tributes from overwhelmed young maidens; some of them brazen proffers of intrigue from women old enough to know better, or bound by their marriage lines to do better.
Eldon, who had thought that vice was a city ware, and that actors were dangerous elements in a small town, got a new light on life and on the theory that women are the pursued and not the pursuers.
But these wild-oat seeds of the Clinton fast set fell upon the rock where Sheila’s name was carved. He found her subtly changed. She was the same sweet, sympathetic, helpful Sheila that had been his comrade in art; but he could not recapture the Sheila that had shared his dreams of love.
As in the old Irish bull of the two men who met on London Bridge, they called each other by name, then “looked again, and it was nayther of us.”
The Sheila and Eldon that met now were not the Sheila and Eldon that had bade each other good-by. They had not outgrown each other, but they had grown away from each other—and behold it was neither of them.
The Eldon that Sheila had grown so fond of was a shy, lonely, blundering, ignorant fellow of undisclosed genius. It had delighted Sheila to perceive his genius and to mother him. He was like the last and biggest of her dolls.
But now he was no longer a boy; he was a man whose gifts had proved themselves, who had “learned his strength” before audience after audience clear across the continent. Dulcie Ormerod had irritated him, but she had left him in no doubt of his power.
Already he had maturity, authority, and the confidence of a young Siegfried wandering through the forest and understanding the birds that sang him up and sang him onward.
He was a total stranger to Sheila. She could not mother him. He did not come to her to cure his despair and kindle ambition. He came to her in the armor of success and claimed her for his own.
At first he alarmed her more than Reben had. She felt that he could never truly belong to her again. And she felt no impulse to belong to him. She liked him, admired him, enjoyed his brilliant personality, but rather as a gracious competitor than any longer as a partner.
To Eldon, however, the change endeared Sheila only the more. She was fairer and wiser and surer, worthier of his love in every way. He could not understand why she loved him no longer. But he could not fail to see that her heart had changed. It seemed a treachery to him, a treachery he could feel and not believe possible.
When he sought to return to the room he had tenanted in her heart he found it locked or demolished. He could never gain a moment of solitude with her. Their former long walks were not to be thought of.
“Clinton isn’t Chicago, old boy,” Sheila said. “Everybody in this town knows us a mile off. And we’ve no time for flirting or philandering or whatever it was we were doing in Chicago. I’m too busy, and so are you.”
Eldon’s heart suffered at each rebuff. He murmured to her that she was cruel. He thought of her as false when he thought of her at all. But that was not so often as he thought. He was too horribly busy.
To a layman the conditions of a stock company are almost unbelievable: the actors work double time, day and night shifts both. Most of the company were used to the life. In the course of years they had acquired immense repertoires. They had educated their memories to amazing degrees. They could study a new rôle between the acts of the current production.
Sheila and Eldon had not that advantage. They spent the intermission after one act in boning up for the next, rubbing the lines into the mind as they rubbed grease-paint into the skin.
The barge of dreams was a freight-boat for them.
When Pennock wakened Sheila of mornings it was like dragging her out of the grave. She came up dead; desperately resisting the recall to life. At night she sank into her sleep as into a welcome tomb. She was on her feet almost always. Her hours in the playmill averaged fourteen a day. She grew haggard and petulant. Eldon feared for her health.
Yet the theater was her gymnasium. She was acquiring a post-graduate knowledge of stage practice, supplying her mind as well as her muscles, like a pianist who practises incessantly. If she kept at it too long she would become a mere audience-pounder. If she quit in time the training would be of vast profit.
One stifling afternoon Eldon begged her to take a drive with him between matinée and night, out to “Lotus Land,” a tawdry pleasure-park where one could look at water and eat in an arbor. She begged off because she was too busy.
She had no sooner finished the refusal than he saw her face light up. He saw her run to meet a lank, lugubrious young man. He saw idolatry in the stranger’s eyes and extraordinary graciousness in Sheila’s. He heard Sheila invite the new-comer to buggy-ride with her to “Lotus Land” and take dinner outdoors.
Eldon dashed away in a rage of jealousy. Sheila did not reach the theater that night till after eight o’clock.
She nearly committed the unpardonable sin of holding the curtain. The stage-manager and Eldon were out looking for her when they saw a bouncing buggy drawn by a lean livery horse driven by a lean, liverish man. Up the alley they clattered and Sheila leaped out before the contraption stopped.
She called to the driver: “G’-by! See you after the performance.” She called to the stage-manager: “Don’t say it! Just fine me!” Eldon held the stage door open for her. All she said was: “Whew! Don’t shoot!”
She had no time to make up or change her costume. She walked on as she was.
After the performance Eldon came down in his street clothes to demand an explanation. He saw the same stranger waiting for Sheila, and dared not trust himself to speak to her.
The next morning, at rehearsal, he said to Sheila, with laborious virulence, “Where’s your friend this morning?”
“He went back to town.”
“How lonely you must feel!”
Sheila was startled at the same twang of jealousy she had heard in Reben’s voice when she and Vickery first met. It angered and alarmed her a little. She explained to Eldon who Vickery was, and that he had run down to discuss his new version of the play. Eldon was mollified a little, but Sheila was not.
Vickery, whose health was none too good, found it tedious to make a journey from Braywood to Clinton every time he wanted to ask Sheila’s advice on a difficulty. He suddenly appeared in Clinton with all his luggage. He put it on the ground of convenience in his work. It must have been partly on Sheila’s account.
Eldon noted that Sheila, who had been rarely able to spare a moment with him, found numberless opportunities to consult with this playwright. Sheila’s excuse was that business compelled her to keep in close touch with her next starring vehicle; her reason was that she found Vickery oddly attractive as well as oddly irritating.
In the first place, he was writing a play for her, for the celebration of her genius. That was attractive, certainly. In the second place, he was not very strong and not very comfortable financially. That roused a sort of mother-sense in her. She felt as much enthusiasm for his career as for her own. And then, of course, he proceeded to fall in love with her. It was so easy to modulate from the praise of her gifts to the praise of her beauty, from the influence she had over the general public to her influence over him in particular.
He exalted her as a goddess. He painted her future as the progress of Venus over the ocean. He would furnish the ocean. He wrote poems to her. And it must be intensely comforting to have poems written at you; it must be hard to remain immune to a sonnet.
Vickery quoted love-scenes from his play and applied them to Sheila. He very slyly attempted to persuade her to rehearse the scenes with him as hero. But that was not easy when they were buggy-riding.
When he grew demonstrative she could hardly elbow his teeth down his throat; for his manner was not Reben’s. It needed no blow to quell poor Vickery’s hopes. It needed hardly a rebuke. It needed nothing more than a lack of response to his ardor. Then his wings would droop as if he found a vacuum beneath them.
To repel Reben even by force of arms had seemed the only decent thing that Sheila could do. She was keeping herself precious, as her father told her to. To keep Eldon at a distance seemed to be her duty, at least until she could be sure that she loved him as he plainly loved her. But to fend off Vickery’s love seemed to her a sin. That would be quenching a fine, fiery spirit.
But, dearly as she cherished Vickery, she felt no impulse to surrender, not even to that form of conquest which women call surrender. And yet she nearly loved him. Her feeling was much, much more than liking, yet somehow it was not quite loving. She longed to form a life-alliance with him, but a marriage of minds, not of bodies and souls.
And Vickery proposed a very different partnership from the league that Eldon planned. Eldon was awfully nice, but so all the other women thought. And if she and Eldon should marry and co-star together, there could be no success for them, not even bread and butter for two, unless lots and lots of women went crazy over Eldon. Sheila had little doubt that the women would go crazy fast enough, but she wondered how she would stand it to be married to a matinée idol. She wondered if she had jealousy in her nature—she was afraid she had.
In complete contrast with Eldon’s life, Vickery’s would be devoted to the obscurity of his desk and the creation of great rôles for her to publish. If any fascinating were to be done, Sheila would do it. She thought it far better for a man to keep his fascination in his wife’s name.
Thus the young woman debated in her heart the merits of the rival claimants. So doubtless every woman does who has rival claimants.
Sometimes when Vickery was unusually harrowing in his inability to write the play right, and Eldon was unusually successful in a performance, Sheila would say that, after all, the better choice would be the great, handsome, magnetic man.
Playwrights and things were pretty sure to be uncertain, absent-minded, moody, querulous. She had heard much about the moods of creative geniuses and the terrible lives they led their wives. Wasn’t it Byron or Bulwer Lytton or somebody who bit his wife’s cheek open in a quarrel at the breakfast-table or something? That would be a nice thing for Vickery to do in a hotel dining-room.
He might develop an insane jealousy of her and forbid her to appear to her best advantage. Worse yet, he might devote some of his abilities to creating rôles for other women to appear in.
He might not always be satisfied to write for his wife. In fact, now and then he had alluded to other projects and had spoken with enthusiasm of other actresses whom Sheila didn’t think much of. And, once—oh yes!—once he spoke of writing a great play for Mrs. Rhys, that statue in cold lava whom even Reben could endure no longer.
A pretty thing it would be, wouldn’t it, to have Sheila’s own husband writing a play for that Rhys woman? Well—humph! Well! And Sheila had wondered if jealousy were part of her equipment!
Between the actor and the playwright there was little choice.
A manager also had offered himself to Sheila. She could have Reben for the asking. If he were not so many things she couldn’t endure the thought of, he might make a very good husband. He at least would be free from temperament and personality. Two temperaments in one family would be rather dangerous.
These thoughts, if they were distinct enough to be called thoughts, drifted through her brain like flotsam on the stream of the unending demands of her work. This was wearing her down and out till, sometimes, she resolved that whoever it might be she married he needn’t expect her to go on acting.
This pretty well cleared her slate of suitors, for Reben, as well as the other two, had never suggested anything except her continuance in her career. As if a woman had no right to rest! As if this everlasting battle were not bad for a woman!
In these humors her fatigue spoke for her. And fatigue is always the bitter critic of any trade that creates it. Frequently Sheila resolved to leave the stage. Often, as she fell into her bed and closed her lead-loaded eyelashes on her calcium-seared eyes and stretched her boards-weary soles down into the cool sheets, she said that she would exchange all the glories of Lecouvreur, Rachel, Bernhardt, and Duse for the greater glory of sleeping until she had slept enough.
When Pennock nagged her from her Eden in the morning Sheila would vow that as soon as this wretched play of that brute of a Vickery was produced she would never enter a theater again at the back door. If the Vickery play were the greatest triumph of the cycle, she would let somebody else—anybody else—have it. Mrs. Rhys and Dulcie Ormerod could toss pennies for it.
CHAPTER XXII
Eventually Vickery’s play was ready for production. At least Reben told him, with Job’s comfort:
“We’ve all worked at it till we don’t know what it’s about. We’ve changed everything in it, so let’s put it on and get rid of it.”
The weather of the rehearsal week for the Vickery play was barbarously hot. The theater at night was a sea of rippling fans. The house was none the less packed; the crowd was almost always the same. People had their theater nights as they had their church nights. The prices were very low and a seat could be had for the price of an ice-cream soda. People were no hotter in the theater than on their own porches, and the play took their minds off their thermometers.
Reben had come down for the rehearsals. There were to be few of them—five mornings and Sunday. There was no chance to put in or take out. The actors could do no more than tack their lines to their positions.
Still Reben found so much fault with everything that Vickery was ready for the asylum. Sheila simply had to comfort him through the crisis. Eldon proceeded to complicate matters by developing into a fiend of jealousy. Fatigue and strain and the weather were all he could bear. The extra courtesies to Vickery were the final back-breaking straws.
He told Sheila he had a mind to throw the play. The distracted girl, realizing his irresponsible and perilous state, tried to tide him over the ordeal by adopting him and mothering him with melting looks and rapturous compliments. This course brought her into further difficulties with the peevish author.
While they were rehearsing Vickery’s play they were of course performing another.
By some unconscious irony the manager had chosen to revive a melodrama of arctic adventure, thinking perhaps to cool the audience with the journey to boreal regions. The actors were forced to dress in polar-bear pelts, and each costume was an ambulant Turkish bath. The men wore long wigs and false beards. The spirit gum that held the false hair in place frequently washed away from the raining pores and there were astonishingly sudden shaves that sent the audience into peals of laughter.
Eldon congratulated himself that his face at least was free, for he was a faithful Eskimo. But in one scene, which had been rehearsed without the properties, it was his duty to lose his life in saving his master’s life. On the first night of the performance the hero and the villain struggled on two big wabbly blocks of blue papier-maché supposed to represent icebergs. Eldon, the Eskimo, was slain and fell dead to magnificent applause. But his perspiratory glands refused to die and his diaphragm continued to pant.
And then his grateful master delivered a farewell eulogy over him. And as a last tribute spread across his face a great suffocating polar-bear skin! There were fifteen minutes more of the act, and Sheila in the wings wondered if Eldon would be alive or completely Desdemonatized when the curtain fell.
He lived, but for years after he felt smothered whenever he remembered that night.
During the rest of the week his master’s farewell tribute was omitted at Eldon’s request. But it was impossible to change the scene to Florida and the arctic costumes had to be endured. Sheila’s own costumes were almost fatal to her.
And that was the play they played afternoons and evenings while they devoted their mornings to whipping Vickery’s drama into shape.
And now Reben, goaded by the heat as by innumerable gnats, and fuming at the time he was wasting in the dull, hot town where there was nothing to do of evenings but walk the stupid streets or visit a moving-picture shed or see another performance of that detestable arctic play—Reben proceeded to resent Sheila’s graciousness to both actor and author and to demand a little homage for the lonely manager.
Sheila said to Pennock: “I’m going to run away to some nice quiet madhouse and ask for a padded cell and iron bars. I want to go before they take me. If I don’t I’ll commit murder or suicide. These men! these men! these infernal men! Why don’t they let me alone?”
All Pennock could say was: “There, there, there, you poor child! Let me put a cold cloth on your head.”
“If you could pour cold water on the men I’d be all right,” Sheila would groan. She had hysterics regularly every night when she got to her room. She would scream and pull her hair and stamp her feet and wail: “I vow I’ll never act again. Or if I do, I’ll never marry; or if I marry, I’ll marry somebody that never heard of the stage. I’ll marry a Methodist preacher. They don’t believe in the theater, and neither do I!”
Thus Sheila stormed against the men. But her very excitement showed that love was becoming an imperious need. She was growing up to her mating-time. Just now she was like a bird surrounded by suitors, and they were putting on their Sunday feathers for her, trilling their best, and fighting each other for her possession. She was the mistress of the selection, coy, unconvinced, and in a runaway humor.
Three men had made ardent love to her, and her heart had slain them each in turn. She was a veritable Countess of Monte Cristo. She had scored off “One!” “Two!” and “Three!”
This left her with nothing to wed but her career. And she was disgusted with that.
Only her long training and her tremendous resources of endurance could have carried her through that multiplex exhaustion of every emotion.
Numbers of soldiers desert the firing-line in almost every battle. Occasional firemen refrain from dashing into burning and collapsing buildings. Policemen sometimes feel themselves outnumbered beyond resistance. But actors do not abstain from first-night performances. Even a death-certificate is hardly excuse enough for that treachery.
So on the appointed night Sheila played the part that Vickery wrote for her, and played it brilliantly. She stepped on the stage as from a bandbox and she flitted from scene to scene with the volatility of a humming-bird.
Eldon covered himself with glory and lent her every support. The kiln-dried company danced through the other rôles with vivacity and the freshness of débutancy. They had had the unusual privilege of a Monday afternoon off.
The big face of the audience that night glistened with joy and perspiration, and found the energy somewhere to demand a speech from the author and another from Sheila.
Vickery was in the seventh heaven. If there were an eighth it would belong to playwrights who see the chaos of their manuscripts changed into men and women applauded by a multitude. Vickery could not believe the first howl of laughter from the many-headed, one-mooded beast. The second long roll of delight rendered him to the clouds. He went up higher on the next, and when a meek little witticism of his was received with an earthquake of joy, followed by a salvo of applause, he hardly recognized the moon as he shot past it.
Later, there were moments of tautness and hush when the audience sat on the edge of its seats and held its breath with excitement. That was heroic bliss. But when from his coign of espionage in the back of a box he saw tears glistening on the eyes of pretty girls, and old women with handkerchiefs at their wet cheeks, and hard-faced business men sneaking their thumbs past their dripping lashes, the ecstasy was divine. When the tension was relaxed and the audience blew its great nose he thought he heard the music of the spheres.
The play was almost an hour too long, but the audience risked the last street-cars and stuck to its post till the delightful end. Then it lingered to applaud the curtain up three times. As the amiable mob squeezed out, Vickery wound his way among it, eavesdropping like a spy, and hearing nothing but good of his work and of its performers.
As soon as he could he worked his way free and darted back to the stage. There he found Sheila standing and crying her heart out with laughter, while Eldon held one hand and Reben the other.
Vickery thrust in between them, caught her hands away from theirs, and gathered her into his arms. And kissed her. Both were laughing and both were crying. It was a very salty kiss, but he found it wonderful.
CHAPTER XXIII
Were it not for hours like these, the hope of them or the memory of them, few people would continue to trudge the dolorous road of the playwright. Such hours come rarely and they do not linger unspoiled, but they are glimpses of heaven while they last. It was not for long that Vickery and Sheila were left seated upon the sunny side of Saturn with the rings of unearthly glory swirling round them.
Their return to earth was all the more jolting for the distance they had to fall.
Sheila saw Eldon turn away in a sudden rancor of jealousy. She saw Reben turn swart with rage. His cruel mouth twisted into a sneer, and when Vickery turned to him with the gratitude of a child to a rescuing angel Reben’s comments wiped the smile off Vickery’s rosy face and left it white and sick.
Sheila suffered all her own shocks and vicariously those of each of the three she had embroiled. She suffered most for the young creator who had seen that his work was good but must yet hear Satan’s critique. And Reben looked like a wise and haughty Lucifer when in answer to Vickery’s appealing “Well?” he said:
“Well, you certainly got over—here. They like it. No doubt of that. But they liked ‘The Nautilus.’ It broke all records here in Clinton and lasted two nights in New York.
“You mustn’t let ’em fool you, my boy. This stock company is a kind of religion to these yokels. They snap up whatever you throw ’em the way a sea-lion snaps up a fish. Anything on God’s earth will go here. Just copper your bets all round. Whatever went here will flop in New York, andvice versa. Did you hear ’em howl at that old wheeze in the first act? Broadway would throw the seats at you if you sprung it. The one scene that fell flat to-night is the one scene worth keeping in.
“You’ve got a lot of work to do. You’d better let me bring Ledley or somebody down here to whip it into shape. As it stands, I don’t see how I can use it. Look me up next time you’re in town—if you can bring me some new ideas.”
Then he turned to Sheila and, taking her by that dangerous elbow, led her aside and murdered her joy. He was perfectly sincere about his distrust of the piece. He had seen so many false hopes come up like violets in the snow, only to wither at the first sharp weather.
He answered Sheila’s defiant “Say it” with another icy blast:
“You poor child!” he said. “You were awful. I want you to close with this stock company and take a good rest. You’re all frayed out. You looked a hundred years old and you played like a hack-horse. That man Eldon was the only one of you who played up to form. He’s a discovery. Now I’m going back to town to see if I can get a real play for you, and you run along home to your papa and mamma and see if you can’t get back your youth. But don’t be discouraged.” Having absolutely crushed her, he told her not to be discouraged.
When he had pointed out that the laurel crowns were really composed of poison ivy he waved a cheerful good-by and hurried off to catch the midnight train to New York.
Sheila turned the eyes of utter wretchedness upon Vickery, in whose face was the look of a stricken stag. They had planned to take supper together, but she begged off. She felt that it was kinder.
Besides, Vickery would have to work all night. The stage director had told him that he must cut at least an hour out of the manuscript before the special rehearsal next morning. And the cuts must be made in chunks because the company had to begin rehearsals at once of the next week’s bill, an elaborate production of one of Mr. Cohan’s farces, in his earlier manner.
As Sheila left the stage she met Eldon staring at her hungrily. Reben had not spoken to him. Sheila had to tell him that the manager’s only praise was for him. But he could get no pleasure from the bouquet because it included rue for Sheila:
“He’s a liar. You were magnificent!” Eldon cried.
“Thank you, Floyd,” she sighed, and, smiling at grief like Patience, shook her head sadly and went to her dressing-room. She was almost too bankrupt of strength to take off her make-up. She worked drearily and smearily in disgust, leaving patches of color here and there. Then she slipped into a mackintosh and stumbled to the waiting carriage.
When she got to her room she let Pennock take off the mackintosh and her shoes and stockings; she was asleep almost before she finished whimpering her only prayer:
“O God, help me to quit the stage—forever. Amen!”
Pennock stared at her dismally and saw that even her slumber was shaken with little sobs.
CHAPTER XXIV
Sheila was late at the rehearsal the next morning, and so dejected that she hardly felt regret at hearing Vickery tell her how many of her favorite scenes had to be omitted because they were not essential. Vickery held command of the company with the plucky misery of a Napoleon retreating from his Moscow.
When this rehearsal was over the director told Sheila that she need not stay to rehearse the next week’s bill, since Reben had asked him to release her from further work. He had telegraphed to New York for a woman who had played the same part with great success, and received answer that she would be able to step in without inconvenience. Sheila was dolefully relieved. She felt that she could never have learned another rôle. She felt almost grateful to Reben. “My brain has stopped,” she told Pennock; “just stopped.”
The Tuesday afternoon matinée was always the worst of the week. The heat was like a persecution. The actors played havoc with cues and lines, and the suffocated audience was too indifferent to know or care.
After the performance Vickery was so lost to hope that he grew sardonic. He said with a tormented smile:
“It’s a pity Reben didn’t stay over. If he had seen how badly this performance went he would have sworn that the play would run a year on his dear damned Broadway. I’m going to telegraph him so.”
Tuesday night the house was again poor, though better than at the matinée. The company settled down into harness like draught-horses beginning a long pull. The laughter was feeble and not focused. It was indeed so scattered that the voice of one man was audible above the rest.
Out of the silences or the low murmurs of laughter resounded the gigantic roars of this single voice. People in the audience twisted about to see who it was. The people on the stage were confused at first, and later amused. They also made more or less concealed efforts to place the fellow.
By and by the audience began to catch the contagion of his mirth. It laughed first at his laughter, and then at the play. During the third act the piece was going so well that it was impossible to pick out any individual noise.
After the last curtain a number of townspeople went back on the stage to tell Sheila how much they liked the play, and especially her work. They had read the glowing criticisms in the morning and evening papers. They had not heard what Reben had said of what Broadway would say. They would not have cared. Broadway was suspect in Clinton.
These bouquets had the savor of artificial flowers to Sheila, but she enacted the rôle of gratitude to the best of her ability. Back of the knot surrounding her she saw Vickery standing with a towering big fellow evidently waiting to be presented. Then she saw Eldon shaking hands with the stranger.
Bret Winfield was suffering from stage-fright. He had met Vickery in New York and had promised to run down to see his play, and incidentally to square himself with the girl he had frightened. In the generally disheveled state of brains that characterizes a playwright during rehearsal, Vickery had neglected to tell Winfield that the company contained also the man that Winfield had vowed to square himself with.
When, years before at Leroy, Eldon, as the taxicab-driver, had floated Winfield over the footlights, he had worn a red wig and disguising make-up. When Winfield saw him on the stage as a handsome youth perfectly groomed, there was no resemblance. Eldon’s name was on the program, but Winfield was one of those who pay little heed to programs, prefaces, and title-pages. He was one of those who never know the names of the authors, actors, composers, printers, and architects whose work pleases them. They “know what they like,” but they never know who made it.
As he waited to reach Sheila, Winfield noted Eldon standing in a little knot of admirers of his own. He said to Vickery, with that elegance of diction which has always distinguished collegians:
“That lad who played your hero is a great little actor, ’Gene. He’s right there all the time. I’d like to slip it to him.”
Vickery absently led him to Eldon and introduced the two, swallowing both names. The two powerful hands met in a warm clutch that threatened to become a test of grip. Winfield poured out his homage:
“You’re certainly one actor, Mr.—er—er— You’ve got a sad, solemn way of pulling your laughs that made me make a fool of myself.”
“You’re very kind to think so,” said Eldon, overjoyed to get such praise from a man of such weight. And he crushed Winfield’s fingers with a power that enhanced the layman’s respect still further. Winfield crushed back with all his might as he repeated:
“Yes, sir. You’re sure some comedian, Mr.—Mr.—”
“Eldon,” said Eldon.
Winfield’s grip relaxed so unexpectedly that Eldon almost cracked a bone or two before he could check his muscles. Winfield turned white and red in streaks and said:
“Eldon? Your name’s Eldon?”
Eldon nodded.
“Are you the Eldon that knocked a fellow about my size about ten yards for a touch-down across the footlights once?”
Eldon blushed to find his prowess fame, and said: “Yes. Once.”
“Well, I’m the fellow,” said Winfield, trying to call his ancient grudge to the banquet. “I’ve been looking for you ever since. I promised myself the pleasure of beating you up.”
Eldon laughed: “Well, here I am. I’ve been ashamed of it for a long time. I took an unfair advantage of you.”
“Advantage nothing,” said Winfield. “I ought to have been on my guard.”
“Well,” Eldon suggested. “Suppose I stand down here on the apron of the stage and let you have a whack at me. See if you can put me into the orchestra chairs farther than I put you.”
Winfield sighed. “Hell! I can’t hit you now. I’ve shaken hands with you, unbeknownst. I guess it’s all off. I couldn’t slug a man that made me laugh so hard. Shake!”
He put out his hand and the enemies gripped a truce. Winfield was laughing, but there was a bitterness in his laugh. He had been struck in the face and he could not requite the debt.
Then Vickery called him to where Sheila, having rid herself of her admirers, was making ready to leave the stage.
“Miss Kemble, I want to present my old friend, Mr. Bret Winfield. He’s been dying to meet you again for a long while.”
“Again?” thought Sheila, but she said, as if to her oldest friend: “Oh, I’m delighted! I haven’t seen you since—since— Chicago, wasn’t it?”
Vickery laughed and explained: “Guess again! You’ve met before, but you were never introduced.”
Slowly Sheila understood. She stared up at Winfield and cried, “This isn’t the man who—”
“I’m the little fellow,” said Winfield, enfolding her hand in a clasp like a boxing-glove. “I scared you pretty badly, I’m afraid. But Vickery tells me he told you my intentions were honorable. I’ve come to apologize.”
“Oh, please don’t! I’m the one that ought to. I made an awful idiot of myself; but, you see, I was afraid you were going to—to—well, kidnap me.”
“I wish I could now!”
“Kidnap me?” Sheila gasped with a startled frown-smile, drawing her brows down and her lips up.
He lowered his high head and his low voice to murmur, with an impudence that did not offend her, “You’re too darned nice to waste your gifts on the public.”
“Waste them!—on the public?” Sheila mocked. “And what ought I to do with them, then?”
He spoke very earnestly. “Invest them in a nice quiet home. You oughtn’t to be slaving away like this to amuse a good-for-nothing mob. You let some big husky fellow do the work and build you a pretty home. Then you just stay home and—and—bloom for him—like a rose on a porch. I tell you if I had you I’d lock you up where the crowds couldn’t see you.”
Sheila put back her head and laughed at the utter ridiculousness of such insolence. Then her laugh stopped short. The word “home” got her by the throat. And the words “bloom just for him” brought sudden dew to her eyes.
She had hurt Winfield by her laughter. Under the raillery of it he had muttered a curt “Good night” without heeding her sudden softness.
He had rejoined Eldon and Vickery. Of the three tall men he was the least gifted, the least spiritual. But he was the only one of the three, the only one of all her admirers, who had not urged her forward on this weary climb up the sun-beaten hill. He was the only one who had suggested twilight and peace and home.
At any other time his counsel would have wakened her fiery dissent. Now in her fatigue and her loneliness it soothed her like the occasional uncanny wisdom of a fool.