CHAPTER XXV
That night Sheila went to bed to sleep out sleep. When Pennock asked, on leaving her arranged for slumber, “Will you be called at the usual hour, please?” Sheila answered, “I won’t be called at all, please!”
This privilege alone was like a title of gentility to a tired laundress. There would be no rehearsal on the morrow for her.
The other galley-slaves in the company must still bend to the oar, but she had shore leave of mornings, and after Saturday she was free altogether.
Now that she had time to be tired, old aches and fatigues whose consideration had had to be postponed came thronging upon her, till she wondered how she had endured the toil. Still more she wondered why.
Then she wondered nothing at all for a good many hours, until the old habit of being called awakened her. She glanced at her watch, saw that it was half past ten, and flung out of bed, gasping, “They’ll be rehearsing and I’m not there!”
Then she remembered her liberty, and stood feeling pleasantly foolish. The joy of toppling back to bed was more than payment for the fright she had suffered. It was glorious to float like a basking swimmer on the surface of sleep, with little ripples of unconsciousness washing over her face and little sunbeams of dream between.
In the half-awake moods she reviewed her ambitions with an indolent contempt. That man Winfield’s words came back to her. After all, she had no home except her father’s summer cottage. And she had been planning no home except possibly another such place whither she would retire in the late spring until the early fall, to rest from last season’s hotels and recuperate for next season’s. Yes, that was just about the home life she had sketched out!
It occurred to her now that her plans had been unhuman and unwomanly. “A woman’s place is the home,” she said. It was not an original thought, but it came to her with a sudden originality as sometimes lines she had heard or had spoken dozens of times abruptly became real.
She wanted a pretty little house where she could busy herself with pretty little tasks while her big, handsome husband was away earning a pretty little provender for both of them. She would be a young mother-bird haunting the nest, leaving the male bird to forage and fight. That was the life desirable and appropriate. Women were not made to work. An actress was an abnormal creature.
Sheila did not realize that the vast majority of home-keeping women must work quite as hard as the actress, with no vacations, little income, and less applause. The picture of the husband returning laughing to his eager spouse was a decidedly idealized view of a condition more unfailing in literature than in life. Some of those housewives who had grown tired of their lot, as she of hers, would have told her that most husbands return home weary and discontented, to listen with small interest to their weary and discontented wives. And many husbands go out again soon after they have come home again.
Sheila was doing what the average person does in criticizing the stage life—magnifying its faults and contrasting it, not with the average home, but with an ideal condition not often to be found, and less often lasting when found.
Sheila had known so little of the average family existence that she imagined it according to the romantic formula, “And so they were married and lived happily ever afterward.” She thought that that would be very nice. And she lolled at her ease, weltering in visions of cozy domesticity with peace and a hearth and a noble American citizen and the right number of perfectly fascinating children painlessly borne and painlessly borne with.
Anything, anything would be better than this business of rehearsing and rehearsing and squabbling and squabbling, and then settling down into a dismal repetition of the same old nonsense in the same old theater or in a succession of same old theaters.
How good it was, just not to have to learn a new play for next week! It was good that there was no opportunity to rehearse any further revisions even of poor Vickery’s play. There was almost a consolation in the thought that it had not succeeded with Reben. Perhaps Reben would be a long while discovering a substitute. Sheila hoped he would not find one till the new year. She almost hoped he would never find one.
She was awfully sorry for poor Vickery. He had suffered so cruelly, and she had suffered with him. Perhaps he would give up play-writing now and take up some less inhuman trade. To think that she had once dallied with the thought of marrying him! To play plays was bad enough, but to be the wife of a playwright—no, thank you! Better be the gambler’s wife of a less laborious gambler or the nurse to a moody lunatic under more restraint.
Worse yet, Sheila had narrowly escaped falling in love with an actor! They would have been Mr. and Mrs. Traveling Forever! Mr. and Mrs. Never Rest! To live in hotels and railroad stations, sleeping-car berths, and dressing-rooms of about the same size; to put on a lot of sticky stuff and go out and parrot a few lines, then to retire and grease out the paint, and stroll to a supper-room, and so to bed. To make an ambition of that! No, thank you! Not on yourjamais de la vie, never!
And thus having with a drowsy royalty effaced all her plans from her books, she burned her books. Desdemona’s occupation was gone. She might as well get up. She bathed and dressed and breakfasted with splendid deliberation, and then, the day proving to be fine and sunny and cool when she raised her tardy curtains, she decided to go forth for a walk, the dignified saunter of a lady, and not the mad rush of a belated actress. It wanted yet an hour before she must make up for the matinée.
She had not walked long when she heard her name called from a motor-car checked at the curb. She turned to see Eugene Vickery waving his cap at her. Bret Winfield, at the wheel, was bowing bareheaded. They invited her to go with them for a ride. It struck her as a providential provision of just what she would have wished for if she had thought of it.
Vickery stepped down to open the door for her, and, helping her in, stepped in after her. Winfield reached back his hand to clasp hers, and Vickery said:
“Drive us about a bit, chauffeur.”
“Yes, sir!” said Winfield, touching his cap. And he lifted the car to a lively gait.
“Where did you get the machine?” said Sheila.
“It’s his—Bret’s—Mr. Winfield’s,” said Vickery. “He came down in it—to see that infernal play of mine. Do you know, I think I’ve discovered one thing that’s the matter with it. In that scene in the first act, you know, where—”
He rambled on with intense enthusiasm, but Sheila was thinking of the man at the wheel. He was rich enough to own a car and clever enough to run it. As she watched he guided it through a swarm of traffic with skill and coolness.
Now and then Winfield threw a few words over his left shoulder. They had nothing to do with things theatrical—just commonplace high spirits on a fine day. Sheila did like him ever so much.
By and by he drew up to the curb and got down, motioning to Vickery with the thumb of authority. “I’m tired of letting you monopolize Miss Kemble, ’Gene. I’m going to ask her to sit up with me.”
“But I’m telling her about my play,” said Vickery. “Now, in the middle of the last act—”
“If you don’t mind,” said Sheila, “I should like to ride awhile with Mr. Winfield. The air’s better.”
Winfield opened the door for her, helped her down and in again, and resumed his place.
“See how much better the car runs!” he said.
And to Sheila it seemed that it did run better. Their chatter ran about as importantly as the engines, but it was cheerful and brisk.
Every man has his ailment, at least one. The only flaw in Winfield’s powerful make-up was the astigmatism that compelled him to wear glasses. Sheila rather liked them. They gave an intellectual touch to a face that had no other of the sort. Besides, actor-people usually prefer a touch of what they call “character” to what they call “a straight.”
Winfield told Sheila that his glasses had kept him from playing football, but had not hampered his work in the ’varsity crew. He could see as far as the spinal column of the oarsman in front of him, and that was all he was supposed to see once the race began.
He explained that his glasses had fallen from his eyes when he stepped on the stage at Leroy. That had been one reason why Eldon had got home on him so easily.
Evidently this unpaid account was still troubling him.
“I hate to owe a man a dollar or a kindness or a blow,” he said. “I’ve lost my chance to pay that man Eldon what was due, and I’ll never get another chance. Our paths will never cross again, I’m afraid.”
“I hope not!” Sheila cried.
“Why?”
“Because you’re both such powerful men. He was a football-player, you know.”
“Oh, was he?”
“Oh yes. And he keeps himself in trim. Most actors do. They never know when they’ll have to appear bare-armed. And then they meet such awful people sometimes.”
“Oh, do they? And you think he would whip me, eh?”
“Oh no. I don’t think either of you could whip the other. But it would be terrible to have either of you hurt either of you.”
Winfield laughed, but all he said was, “You’re a mighty nice girl.”
She laughed, “Thanks.”
Then both looked about guiltily to see if Vickery were listening. Nothing important had been said, but their hearts had been fencing, or at least feinting, at a sort of flirtation.
Vickery was gone.
“For Heaven’s sake!” said Sheila.
“He probably dropped out when we stopped some time ago to let that wagon pass.”
“I wonder why?” Sheila said, anxiously.
“Oh,” Winfield laughed, “ ’Gene’s such an omni—om—he reads so much he’s probably read that two’s company and three’s a crowd.”
This was a trifle uncomfortable for Sheila, so she said, “What time is it, please?”
“Half past one, or worse,” said Winfield, pointing with his toe to the auto-clock. “That’s usually slow.”
“Good Lord! I ought to be in the shop this minute. Turn round and fly!”
They were far out in the country. Winfield looked regretfully at the vista ahead. Turning round in a narrow road was a slow and maddening process, and Sheila’s nerves grated like the clutch. Once faced townward, they sped ferociously. She doubted if she would ever arrive alive. There were swoops and skids and flights of chickens and narrow escapes from the murder of dogs who charged ferociously and vanished in a diminuendo of yelps.
There followed an exciting race with the voice of a motor-cycle coming up from the rear. Winfield laughed it to scorn until Sheila, glancing back, saw that it carried a policeman.
“He’s waving to us. Stop!”
“If I do we’ll never make it. I’ll put you in the theater on time if I go to jail for life.”
“No, no; I won’t get you into trouble. Please stop. He looks like a nice policeman. I’ll tell him you’re a doctor and I’m a trained nurse.”
Winfield slowed down, and the policeman came up, sputtering like his own blunderbuss. Sheila tried to look like a trained nurse, but missed the costume and the make-up. She began at once:
“Oh, please, Mr. Officer, it’s all my fault. You see, the doctor has a dying patient, and I—I—”
“Why, it’s Sheila Ke— Miss Kemble! Ain’t you playin’ this afternoon?”
“Oh yes, it’s me—and I ought to be, but I was detained, and that’s why—”
“Well, you better hurry up or you’ll keep folks waitin’. My wife’s there this afternoon. I seen you myself last night.”
“Did you? Oh, thank you so much! Good-by!”
As Winfield’s car slid forward they heard the policeman’s voice: “Better go kind o’ slow crossing Fifth Street. McGonigle is stricter ’n I am.”
Winfield was greatly impressed by the fame of his passenger. He carried Calphurnia; no harm could come to him. They crossed Fifth Street at such a pace that the car-tracks sent Sheila aloft. As she came down she remembered Officer McGonigle. She saw that he or a vague film of him was saluting her with admiring awe. The grinding toil of the stock actress has its perquisites, after all.
She made Winfield let her out at the alley and ran with all her might. Once more she was met at the stage door by the anxious Eldon. But now she resented his presence. His solicitude resembled espionage. But it was not he that had changed.
Pennock was in a furious mood and scolded Sheila roundly when she helped her into her costume at a speed a fireman would have envied. As she made up her face while Pennock concocted her hair, Sheila was studying some new lines that Vickery had determined to try out that afternoon.
The performance went excellently well. Sheila was refreshed by her sleep and the forced ventilation her soul had had. She dined with Vickery and Winfield. Vickery was aflame with new ideas that had come to him in Winfield’s car. He had dropped out, not to leave them alone, but to be alone with his precious thoughts.
Sheila’s ambitions, however, were asleep. She was more interested in the silent admiration of Winfield. The light on his glasses kept her from seeing his eyes, but she felt that they were soft upon her, because his voice was gentle when he spoke the few words he said.
It irritated Sheila to have to hurry back to the theater after dinner to repeat again the afternoon’s repetition. The moon seemed to call down the alley to her not to give herself to the garish ache of the calcium; and the breeze had fingers twitching at her clothes and a voice that sang, “Come walk with me.”
She played the play, but it irked her. When she left the theater at half past eleven she found Winfield waiting, in his car. Vickery was walking at her side, jabbering about his eternal revisions. Winfield offered to carry them to their hotels. He saw to it that he reached Vickery’s first. When they had dropped Jonah overboard Winfield asked Sheila to take just a bit of the air for her health’s sake.
She hesitated only a moment. The need of a chaperon hardly occurred to her. She had been living a life of independence for months. She had no fear of Winfield or of anybody. Had she not overpowered the ferocious Reben? She consented—for the sake of her health.
CHAPTER XXVI
There will always be two schools of preventive hygiene for women. One would protect girls from themselves and their suitors by high walls, ignorance, seclusion, and a guardian in attendance at every step. The other would protect them by encouraging high ideals through knowledge, self-respect, liberty, and industry.
Neither school ever succeeded altogether, or ever will. The fault of the former is that what is forbidden becomes desirable; high walls are scalable, ignorance dangerous, seclusion impossible, and guardians either corruptible or careless.
The fault of the latter is that emotions alter ideals and subdue them to their own color; that knowledge increases curiosity, self-respect may be overpowered or undermined, and that liberty enlarges opportunity.
It always comes back to the individual occasion and the individual soul in conflict with it. There has been much viciousness in harems and in more sacred inclosures. And there has been much virtue in dual solitudes, Liberty is not salvation, but at least it encourages intelligence, it enforces responsibility, and it avoids the infinite evils of tyranny. For that reason, while actresses and other women are not always so good as they might be, they are not often so bad as they might be.
Sheila, the actress, was put upon her mettle. She had no duenna to play tricks upon. She had herself to take care of, her preciousness to waste or cherish. Sometimes women respond to these encounters with singular dignity: sometimes with singular indifference.
The town of Clinton was almost all asleep. The very houses seemed tucked up in sheeted moonlight. And soon Sheila and her cavalier—or engineer—were beyond the point where the streets were subtly changed to roads. The last car on the suburban line growled and glittered past, lurching noisily on its squealing rails. And then they were alone under the moony vastitude of sky, with the dream-drenched earth revolving around them in a huge, slow wheel.
The car purred with the contentment of a great house-cat and lapped up the glimmering road like a stream of milk.
Sheila felt the spirit of the night, and felt that all the universe was in tender rapport with itself. She felt as never before the grace of love, the desire, the need of love. For years she had been exerting herself for her ambition, and now her ambition was tired. The hour of womanhood was striking, almost silently, yet as unmistakably as the distant town clock that published midnight, so far away as to be less overheard than felt in the slow throb of the air.
Bret Winfield’s response to the mood of the night was pagan. Sheila was a mighty nice girl and darned pretty and she had consented to take a midnight spin with him. But many darned pretty girls had done the same. A six-cylinder motor-car is a very winsome form of invitation.
In place of inviting a young man to a cozy corner in a parlor or a hammock on a piazza, the enterprising maiden of the day accepts his invitation—and seats herself in a flying hammock. Seclusion is secured and concealment attained by way of velocity.
A wonderful change had taken place in the world of lovers in the last ten years. For thousands of years before—ever since, indeed, the first man invented the taming of the first horse and took his cave-girl buggy-riding on a pair of poles or in a square-wheeled cart—lovers had been kept to about the same pace. Suddenly they were given a buggy that can go sixty miles an hour or better; so fast, indeed, that it is veiled in its own speed and its own dust. Even the naughty gods and the goddesses of Homer never knew any concealment like it.
Winfield was an average young man who had known average young women averagely well. He had found that demoiselles either would not motor with him at all or, motoring with him, expected to be paid certain gallant attentions. He always tried to live up to their expectations. They might struggle, but never fiercely enough to endanger the steering-wheel. They might protest, but never loudly enough to drown the engine.
Such was his experience with the laity. Sheila was his first actress, not including a few encounters with those camp-followers of the theater who are only accepted as “actresses” when they are arrested, and who have as much right to the name as washwomen for a convent have the right to be called “nuns,” when they drink too much.
But Winfield had reasoned that if the generality of pretty girls who motored with men were prepared for dalliance, by so much more would an actress be. Consequently, when he reached a hilltop where there was a good excuse for pausing to admire the view of a moon-plated river laid along a dark valley, he shut off the power and slid his left arm back of Sheila.
She sat forward promptly and his heart began to chug.
Making love is an old and foolish game, but strangely exciting at the time. Winfield was more afraid to withdraw his arm than to complete the embrace.
Sheila’s heart was spinning, too. She had thrilled to the love-croon of the night. The landscape before her and beneath her seemed to be filled with dreams. But she was in love with love and not with Bret Winfield.
When she recognized that he was about to begin to initiate her by a familiar form of amorous hazing into the ancient society whose emblem is a spoon, she abruptly decided that she did not want to belong. Winfield became abruptly more of a stranger than ever.
Sheila did not want to hate this nice young man. She did not want to quarrel with her chauffeur so far from home at so compromising an hour. She did not want to wreck the heavenly night with idiotic combat. She hated the insincerity and perfunctoriness that must be the effect of any protest. She was actress enough to realize that the lines the situation required of her had long ago lost their effectiveness and their very sincerity.
But she did not want to be hugged. She loathed the thought of being touched by this man’s arm. She felt herself as precious and her body as holy as the lofty emotion of the night. Still, how could she protest till he gave her cause? He gave her cause.
Her very shoulder-blades winced as she felt Winfield’s arm close about her; she shivered as his big hand folded over her shoulder.
Sheila groped for appropriate words. Winfield’s big handsome face with the two dim lenses over his eyes was brought nearer and nearer to her cheek. Then, without giving him even the help of resistance, she inquired, quite casually:
“Is it true that they can send you to the penitentiary if you hit a man in the face when he’s wearing glasses?”
Sheila was as astounded as Winfield was at this most unexpected query. His lips paused at her very cheek to stammer:
“I don’t know. But why? What about it?”
“Because if it is true I want you either to take your arm away or take your glasses off.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to. All you have to understand is that I don’t want your arm around me. I’d rather go to the penitentiary than have you kiss me.”
“For the Lord’s sake!” Winfield gasped, relaxing his clutch.
Sheila went on with that sarcasm which is cold poison to romance: “I don’t blame you for attempting it. I know it’s the usual thing on such occasions. But I don’t like it, and that ought to be enough.”
Winfield sighed with shame and regret. “It’s quite enough! I beg your pardon very humbly. Shall we turn back now?”
“If you please.”
The very engine seemed to groan as Winfield started it up again. It clucked reprovingly, “Ts! ts! ts!”
Winfield was more angry than sorry. He had made a fool of himself and she had made another fool of him. He was young enough to grumble a little, “Are you in love with that man Eldon?”
“He’s very nice.”
“You love him, then?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, then, if you keep me at such a distance, why do you—how can you let him put his arms round you and kiss you twice a day before everybody?”
“He gets paid for it, and so do I.”
“That makes it worse.”
“You think so? Well, I don’t. Actors are like doctors. They have special privileges to do things that would be very wrong for other people.”
Winfield laughed this to scorn. Sheila was furious.
“If there weren’t any actors there wouldn’t be any Shakespeare or any of the great plays. Doctors save people from death and disease. Actors save millions from melancholy and from loneliness, and teach them sympathy and understanding. So it is perfectly proper for an actress to be kissed and hugged on the stage. Acting is the noblest profession in the world, the humanest and the most fascinating. And a woman can do just as much good and be just as good on the stage as she can anywhere else. If you don’t think so, then you have no right to speak to an actress. And I don’t want you to speak to me again—ever! for you come with an insult in your heart. You despise me and I despise you.”
Winfield was in a panic. He had sought this girl out to square himself with her, and he had wounded her deeper than before.
“Oh, please, Miss Kemble, I beg you!” he pleaded. “I don’t blame you for despising me, but I don’t despise you. I think you are wonderful. I’m simply crazy about you. I never saw a girl I—I liked so much. I didn’t mean anything wrong, and I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. I just thought—”
Sheila felt a little relentment. “I know what you thought, and I suppose I oughtn’t to blame you. Actresses ought to get used to being misunderstood, just as trained nurses are. But I hoped you were different. I know I am. I’ve had so much stage loving that it doesn’t mean anything to me. When I get the real I want it to be twice as real as it would have to be for anybody else. Just because I pretend so much I’d have to be awfully in love to love at all.”
“Haven’t you ever loved anybody?” Winfield asked, quite inanely.
She shook her head and answered, with a foolish solemnity. “I thought I was going to, once or twice, but I never did.”
“That’s just like me. I’ve never really loved anybody, either.”
There was such unqualified juvenility in their words that they recognized it themselves. Sheila could not help laughing. He laughed, too, like a cub.
Then Sheila said, with the earnestness of a child playing doll’s house: “You’re too young to love anybody, and I haven’t time yet. I’ve got much too much work ahead of me to waste any time on love.”
“I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, too,” said Winfield.
“You have?” said Sheila. “What is your work—doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief?”
She was surprised to realize that she had come to know this man pretty well before she knew anything at all about him. She was discussing Winfield’s future before she had heard of his past. Vickery’s introduction had been his only credentials, his only history. And yet she had already rested briefly in his arms. She was surprised further when he said:
“I’m a— That is, my father is— We are Winfield’s Scales.”
She took this so blankly that he gasped, “Good heavens! didn’t you ever hear of Winfield’s Scales?”
“I never did,” said Sheila.
“I’ll bet you were weighed in one of ’em when you were born.”
“I couldn’t read when I was born,” said Sheila.
“And you’ve never heard of them since?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Winfield shook his head amiably over her childlike ignorance. But then, what information could one expect of theatrical people? He went on:
“Well, anyway, my father is one of the biggest manufacturers of scales and weighing-machines and such things that there is. He’s about the only independent one left out of the trust. Haven’t you heard of the tremendous fight we’ve been putting up?”
Sheila was less interested in the war than in the soldier.
“We?” she said.
“Well, I’m not in the firm yet, but my father expects me to step in right away, so that he can step out. He’s not very well. That makes him rather cranky. He didn’t want me to come down here, but I wanted to see Vickery’s play and square myself with you. And I’ve made a mess of that.”
“Oh no! we’re square now, I fancy,” said Sheila.
“Then I ought to be at home,” he sighed.
“Instead of sowing wild oats with actresses,” said Sheila.
“These oats are not very wild,” Winfield grumbled, not quite cured of regret.
“Rather tame, eh?” Sheila laughed. “Well, you’ll find that most actresses are. We’re such harness-broken, heart-broken hacks, most of us, there’s not much excitement left in us. So you’re to be a scale manufacturer. You’re awfully rich, I suppose.”
“When the market’s good, Dad makes a pile of money. When it’s bad—whew! And it’s expensive fighting the trust.”
“Is it anything like the theatrical trust?”
“Is there a theatrical trust?”
“Good heavens! Haven’t you read about the war?”
“Was there a war?”
“For years. Millions of dollars were involved.”
“Is that so?”
“Why, yes! and Reben was right in the thick of it. Both sides were trying to get him in.”
“Who’s Reben?” said Winfield. “What does he manufacture?”
Sheila laughed, shocked at his boundless ignorance. It was like asking, “What does St. Peter do for a living?”
“You don’t know much about the theater, do you?”
“No,” he laughed, “and you don’t know much about weighing-machines.”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I’ve got to learn.”
“Then you’d better be hurrying home. I wouldn’t for worlds interfere with your career.”
She felt quite grandmotherly as she said it. She did not look it, though, and as he stole a glance at her beauty, all demure and moonlike in the moon, he sighed: “But I can’t bear to leave you just as I’m beginning to—” he wanted to say “to love you,” but he had not prepared for the word, so he said, “to get acquainted with you.”
She understood his unspoken phrase and it saddened her. But she continued to be very old and extremely sage. “It’s too bad; but we’ll meet again, perhaps.”
“That’s so, I suppose. Well, all right, we’ll be sensible.”
And so, like two extremely good children, they put away temptation and closed the door of the jam-closet. Who can be solemner than youth at this frivolous age? What can solemnize solemnity like putting off till to-morrow the temptation of to-day?
The moment Sheila and Winfield sealed up love in a preserve-jar and labeled it, “Not to be opened till Christmas,” and shelved it, that love became unutterably desirable.
Nothing that they could have resolved, nothing that any one else could have advised them, could have mutually endeared them so instantly and so pathetically as their earnest decision that they must not let themselves grow dear to each other.
They finished their ride back in silence, leaving behind them a moon that seemed to drag at their flying shoulders with silver grappling-hooks. The air was humming forbidden music in their ears and the locked-up houses seemed to order them to remain abroad.
But he drew up at her little apartment-hotel and took her to the door, where a sleepy night-clerk-plus-elevator-boy opened the locked door for her and went back to sleep.
Sheila and Winfield defied the counsel of the night by primly shaking hands. Sheila spoke as if she were leaving a formal reception.
“Thank you ever so much for the lovely ride. And—er— Well, good night—or, rather good-by, for I suppose you’ll be leaving to-morrow.”
“I ought to,” he groaned, dubiously. “Good night! Good-by!”
He climbed in, waved his hat to her, and she her gloves at him. Far down the street he turned again to stare back and to wave farewell again. He could not see her, but she was there, mystically sorrowing at the lost opportunity of happiness, the unheeded advice of nature—in the mood of Paul Bourget’s elegy as Debussy set it to music:
“Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des chosesEt monter vers le cœur troublé,Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au mondeCependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau;Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde—Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau.”
“Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des chosesEt monter vers le cœur troublé,Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au mondeCependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau;Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde—Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau.”
“Un conseil d’être heureux semble sortir des choses
Et monter vers le cœur troublé,
Un conseil de goûter le charme d’être au monde
Cependant qu’on est jeune et que le soir est beau;
Car nous nous en allons, comme s’en va cette onde—
Elle à la mer, nous au tombeau.”
CHAPTER XXVII
Winfield had said, “I ought to!” It is strange that we always say “I ought to” with skepticism, wondering both “Shall I?” and “Will I?” If our selves are our real gods, we are all agnostics.
The next morning Sheila woke with less than her yester joy. Leisure was not so much a luxury and more of a bore. Not that she felt regret for the lack of rehearsals. She was not interested in plays, but in the raw material of plays, and she was not so proud of her noble renunciation of Bret Winfield as she had been.
To fight off her new loneliness she decided to go shopping. When men are restless they go to clubs or billiard-parlors or saloons. Women go prowling through the shops. The Clinton shops were as unpromising to Sheila as a man’s club in summer. But there was no other way to kill time.
As she set out she saw Bret Winfield’s car loafing in front of her hotel. He was sitting in it. The faces of both showed a somewhat dim surprise. Sheila quickened her steps to the curb, where he hastened to alight.
“You didn’t go,” she said, brilliantly.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I—I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Well, I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and—”
“I didn’t close my eyes, either.”
It was a perfectly sincere statement on both sides and perfectly untrue in both cases. Both had slept enviably most of the time they thought they were awake. Sheila tried to make conversation:
“What was on your mind?”
“You!”
His words filled her with delicious fright. On the lofty hill under the low-hanging moon he had scared love off by attempted caresses. With one word he brought love back in a rose-clouded mantle that gave their communion a solitude there on the noisy street with the cars brawling by and the crowds passing and peering, people nudging and whispering: “That’s her! That’s Sheila Kemble! Ain’t she pretty? She’s just grand in the new show! Saw it yet?”
They stood in gawky speechlessness till he said, “Which way you going?”
“I have some shopping to do.”
“Oh! Too bad. I was going to ask you to take a little spin.”
They span.
Winfield did not leave Clinton till the week was gone and Sheila with it. They were together constantly, making little efforts at concealment that attracted all manner of attention in the whole jealous town.
Vickery and Eldon were not the least alive to Winfield’s incursion into Sheila’s thoughts. Both regarded it as nothing less than a barbaric danger. Both felt that Winfield, for all his good qualities, was a Philistine. They knew that he had little interest in the stage as an institution, and no reverence for it. It was to him an amusement at best, and a scandal at worst.
But to Vickery the theater was the loftiest form of literary publication, and to Eldon it was the noblest forum of human debate. To both of them Sheila was as a high priestess at an altar. They felt that Winfield wanted to lure her or drag her away from the temple to an old-fashioned home where her individuality would be merged in her husband’s manufacturing interests, and her histrionism would be confined to an audience of one, or to the entertainment of her own children.
This feeling was entirely apart from the love that both of them felt for Sheila the woman. Each was sure in his heart that his own love for Sheila was far the greatest of the three loves.
Vickery forgot even his own vain struggles to make the heroine of his play behave, in his eagerness to save Sheila from ruining the dramatic unity of her life by interpolating a commercial marriage as the third act. He found a chance to speak to her one afternoon just before the second curtain rose. He was as excited as if he had been making a curtain speech and nearly as awkward:
“Sheila,” he hemmed and hawed, “I want to speak to you very frankly about Bret. Of course, he’s a splendid fellow and a friend I’m very fond of, but if he goes and makes you fall in love with him I’ll break his head.”
“He’s bigger than you are,” Sheila laughed.
“Yes,” Vickery admitted, “but there are clubs that are harder than even his hard head. If he takes you off the stage I’ll never forgive myself for introducing him to you. I’ll never forgive him, either—or you. In Heaven’s name, Sheila, don’t let him take you off the stage. I’ve heard of hitching your wagon to a star, but this would be hitching a star to a wagon. I can’t ask you to marry me for the Lord knows how long; even assuming that you would consider me if I had a million instead of being a penniless playwright; but I at least would try to help you on in your career. I’d rather you wouldn’t marry either of us than marry him.”
Sheila chuckled luxuriously: “Don’t you lose any sleep over me, Vick. In the first place, Mr. Winfield has never even suggested that I should marry him.”
Which was fact.
“In the second place, if he did I should decline him with thanks.”
Which was prophecy.
Vickery was so relieved that he returned to the discussion of his play. He promised to have it ready for fall rehearsals. Sheila assured him that she would be ready whenever the play was. Then her cue came and she walked into her laboratory, while Vickery hastened out front to study the effect of his new lines on the audience.
When Sheila issued from her dressing-room for the third act, in which she did not appear for some time after the curtain was up, she found Eldon waiting for her. He was suffering as from stage-fright, and he delivered the lines he had been rehearsing in his dressing-room nearly as badly as the lines he had forgotten the night he played the farmer with the dark lantern. The substance of what he jumbled was this:
“Sheila, I want to speak very frankly to you. Don’t take it for mere jealousy, though you have hardly looked at me since Mr. Vickery and the Winfield fellow struck town. I don’t Suppose you care for me any more, but I beg you not to let anybody take you off the stage. You belong. You have the God-given gifts. Your success proves where your duty to yourself lies.
“If you can’t marry me and you must marry some one, marry our author. It would break my heart, but I’d rather he’d have you than anybody but me, for he’d keep you where you belong, anyway. I suppose this Winfield has some extraordinary charms for you. He seems a nice enough fellow and he’ll come into a heap of money. But if I thought there was any danger of his carrying you off, I’d knock him so far out of the theater that he’d never—”
Sheila was bristling up to say that two could play at the same game, but Eldon had heard his signal for entrance, and, leaving his gloomy earnestness in the wings, he breezed on to the stage with all imaginable flippancy. He came off just as gaily a little later, only to resume his sobriety and his speech the moment he passed the side-line:
“As I was saying, Sheila, I implore you not to ruin your life by marrying that man.”
Sheila had many things to say, but her actress self had heard the approach of her cue, and she spoke hastily: “You are worrying yourself needlessly, Floyd. In the first place, Mr. Winfield has never even suggested that I should marry him; in the second place, if he did, I’d decline with—”
And then she slipped into the scene and became the creature of Vickery’s fancy.
On Saturday night the house-manager gave a farewell supper to Sheila on the stage and naturally failed to include Winfield in the invitations. He sulked about the somnolent town in a dreadful fit of loneliness, but he could not get a word with Sheila. Sheila, now that she was leaving the company, felt a mingling of fondness for the shabby old stage and the workaday troupe and of happiness at being pardoned out of the penitentiary.
On the morrow Winfield asked her by telephone if he might take her to the train in his car. She consented. She was late getting ready, and he had to go at high speed, with no chance for farewell conversation. As they reached the station his agony at leaving her wrenched from him a desperate plea:
“Won’t you kiss me Good-by?”
In the daylight, among the unromantic hacks, she laughed at the thought:
“Kiss youGood-by? Why, I haven’t kissed youHow-d’-do?yet!”