CHAPTER XXVIII
When Sheila reached the home of her father and mother she spent her first few days renewing her kinship with them. They seemed older to her, but they had not aged as she had. They had been through just one more season. She had passed through an epoch.
They found her mightily changed. They were proud of her. They could see that she had taken good care of her body. They knew that she had succeeded in her art. They wondered what she had done with her soul. They had reached that thrilling, horribly anxious state of parentage when the girl child is grown to a woman and when every step is dangerous. Authority is ended; advice is untranslatable, and the parents become only spectators at a play whose star they have provided but whose cast they cannot select.
Sheila was not troubled about these things. Her chief excitement was in the luxury of having her afternoons to herself and every evening free. She was like a night-watchman on a vacation. It was wonderful to be her own mistress from twilight to midnight. She had no make-up to put on except for the eyes of the sun. There were no footlights. The only need for attention to her skin was to fight off sunburn and the attacks of the surf in which she spent hours upon hours.
The business of her neighbors and herself was improvising hilarities: the sea, the motors, saddle-horses, tennis, golf, watching polo-games, horse-races, airship-races, all the summer industries of Long Island.
The Kembles had a wide and easy acquaintance with the aristocracy. Roger and Polly forgot, if the others did not, that they were stage folk. They enjoyed the elegancies of life and knew how to be familiar without being vulgar. Sheila inherited their acquaintance and had been bred to their graces.
Young women and old of social importance made the girl one of their intimates. Any number of more or less nice young plutocrats offered to lead her along the primrose path as far as she would go. But she compelled respect, perhaps with a little extra severity for the sake of her maligned profession. Before many days she would have to return to it, but she was in no hurry.
One morning in the sun-flailed surf she grew weary of the jigging crowd of rope-dancers. Seeing that one of the floats was empty, she swam out to it. It was more of a journey than she thought, for we judge distances as walkers, not as swimmers. She climbed aboard with difficulty and rested, staring out to sea, the boundless sea where big waves came bowing in, nodding their white feathers.
She heard some one else swimming up, but did not look around. She did not want to talk to any of the men she had swum away from. She felt the float tilt as whoever it was sprang from the water and seated himself, dripping. Then she heard a voice with all the morning in it:
“Good morning!”
“Bret Winfield!” she cried, as she whirled on one hip like a mermaid.
“Sheila Kemble!” he laughed.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I’m not on earth; I’m alone in midocean with you.”
“But what brought you? Where did you come from?”
“Home. I just couldn’t stand it.”
“Stand what?”
“Being away from you.”
“Good heavens!”
“It’s been the other place to me.”
“Really?”
“I told Dad I needed a rest; that something was the matter with my mind. He admitted that, but blamed it to lack of use. Then I ducked. I shipped my car to New York, and flew down the Motor Parkway to here. Got here yesterday. Been hanging round, trying to find you alone. Swell chance! There’s a swarm after you all the time, isn’t there?”
“Is there?”
“Last night I saw you dancing at the hotel with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. I hoped you’d come out and sit on the piazza so that I could sandbag the man and carry you off. But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t care to be alone with any of them.”
“Lord bless your sweet soul! Were you thinking of me?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Are you glad to see me?”
“Oh yes. The more the merrier.”
This impudence brought his high hopes down. But they soared again when she said, with charming inconsistency:
“Dog-on it! here comes somebody!”
A fat man who somewhat resembled the globular figures cartoonists use to represent the world, wallowed out, splashing like a side-wheel raft-boat. He tried to climb aboard, but his equator was too wide for his short arms, and neither Sheila nor Winfield offered to lend him a hand. He gave up and propelled himself back to shore with the grace of a bell-buoy.
“Good-by, old flotsam and jetsam,” said Winfield.
Sheila could not but note the difference between the other man and Winfield. There was every opportunity for observation in both cases. Each inly acknowledged that the other was perfection physically. Each wished to be able to observe the other’s soul in equal completeness of display. But that power was denied them.
It would have served them little to know each other’s souls, since happiness in love is not a question of individual perfections, but of their combination and what results from it. Fire and water are excellent in their place, but brought together, the result is familiar—either the water changes the flame to sodden ashes, or the flame changes the water to steam. Both lose their qualities, change unrecognizably.
In any case, Winfield courted Sheila with all the impetuous stubbornness of his nature. He had no visible rivals to fight, but the affair was not denied the added charm of danger.
One blistering day, when all of the populace that could slid off the hot land into the water like half-baked amphibians, Sheila and Winfield plunged into the nearest fringe of surf. The beach was like Broadway when the matinées let out. They swam to the float. It was as crowded as a seal-rock with sirens, sea-leopards, sea-cows, walruses, dugongs, and manatees. There was no room for Sheila till an obliging faun gallantly offered her his seat and dived from the raft more graciously than gracefully, for he smacked the water flatly in what is known as a belly-buster or otherwise. He nearly swamped her in his back-wash.
She felt a longing for the outer solitudes and, when she had rested and breathed a few times, she struck out for the open sea beyond the ropes. Winfield followed her gaily and they reveled in the life of mer-man and mer-girl till suddenly she realized that she was tired.
Forgetting where she was, she attempted to stand up. She thrust her feet down into a void. There is hardly a more hideous sensation, or a more terrifying, for an inexpert swimmer. She went under with a gasp and came up choking.
Winfield was just diving into a big wave and did not see her. The same wave caught Sheila by the back of her head and held her face down, then swept on, leaving her strangling and smitten into a panic. She struck out for shore with all awkwardness, as if robbed of experience with the water.
Winfield turned to her, and sang, “A life on the bounding waves for me.” An ugly, snarling breaker whelmed her again, and a third found her unready and cowering before its toppling wall. She called Winfield by his first name for the first time:
“Bret, I can’t get back.”
He crept to her side with all his speed, and spoke soothing words: “You poor child! of course you can.”
“I—I’m afraid.”
A massive green billow flung on her a crest like a cartload of paving-stones, and sent her spinning, bewildered. Winfield just heard her moan:
“I give up.”
He clutched her sleeve as she drooped under the petty wave that succeeded. He tried to remember what the books and articles said, but he had never saved anybody and he was only an ordinary swimmer himself.
He swam on his side, reaching out with one hand and dragging her with the other. But helplessly he kicked her delicate body and she floated face downward. He turned on his back and, suddenly remembering the instructions, put his hands in her armpits and lifted her head above all but the ripple-froth, propelling himself with his feet alone.
But his progress was dismally slow, and he could not see where he was going. The laughter of the bathers and their shrieks as the breakers charged in among them grew fainter. A longshore current was haling them away from the crowds. The life-savers were busy hoisting a big woman into their boat and everybody was watching the rescue. Nobody had missed Sheila. Her own father and mother were whooping like youngsters in the surf.
Winfield twisted his head and tried to make out his course, but his dim eyes could not see so far without the glasses he had left at the boat-house; and the light on the water was blinding.
He was tired and dismayed. He rested for a while, then struck out till he must rest again. At last he spoke to her: “Sheila.”
“Yes, dear.”
“You’ll have to help me. I can’t see far enough.”
“You poor boy!” she cried. “Tell me what to do.”
“Can you put your hands on my shoulders, and tell me which way to swim? I’m all turned round.”
He drew her to him, and revolved her and set her hands on his shoulders, then turned his back to her, and swam with all-fours. She floated out above him like a mantle, and, holding her head high, directed him. She was his eyes, and he was her limbs, and thus curiously twinned they fought their way through the alien element.
The sea seemed to want them for its own. It attacked them with waves that went over them with the roar of railroad trains. Beneath, the icy undertow gripped at his feet. His lungs hurt him so that he felt that death would be a lesser ache than breathing.
Sheila’s weight, for all the lightness the water gave it, threatened to drown them both. But her words were full of help. In his behalf she put into her voice more cheer than she found in her heart. The shore seemed rather to recede than to approach.
Now and then she would call aloud for help, but the salt-water had weakened her throat and there was always some new sensation ashore.
At length, Winfield could hear the crash of the breakers and at length Sheila was telling him that they were almost in. Again and again he stabbed downward for a footing and found none. Eventually, however, he felt the blessed foundation of the world beneath him and, turning, caught Sheila about the waist and thrust her forward till she too could stand.
The beach was bad where they landed and the baffled waters dragged at their trembling legs like ropes, but they made onward to the dry sand. They fell down, panting, aghast, and stared at the innocent sea, where joyous billows came in like young men running with their hands aloft. Far to their deft the mob shrieked and cavorted. Farther away to their right the next colony of maniacs cavorted and shrieked.
When breathing was less like swallowing swords they looked at each other, smiled with sickly lips, and clasped cold, shriveled hands.
“Well,” said Sheila, “you saved my life, didn’t you?”
“No,” he answered; “you saved mine.”
She gave him a pale-blue smile and, as the chill seized her, she spoke, with teeth knocking together, “We s-saved dea-dea chother.”
“Ye-yes,” he ch-chattered, “so w-we bu-bu-bu-bulong to wea-weachother.”
“All r-r-right-t-t-t.”
That was his proposal and her acceptance. They rose and clasped hands and ran for the bath-house, while agues of rapture made scroll-work of their outlines. They had escaped from dying together, but they were not to escape from living together.
CHAPTER XXIX
The betrothed couple had no opportunity to seal the engagement with the usual ceremonies. When they met again, fully clothed, she was so late to her luncheon that she had to fly.
Already, after their high tragedy and their rosy romance, the little things of existence were asserting their importance. That afternoon Sheila had an engagement that she could not get out of, and a dinner afterward. She had booked these dates without dreaming of what was to happen.
It was not till late in the evening that Sheila could steal away to Winfield, who stole across the lawn to her piazza by appointment.
The scene was perfectly set. An appropriate moon was in her place. The breeze was exquisitely aromatic. Winfield was in summer costume of dinner-suit and straw hat. Sheila was in a light evening gown with no hat.
They cast hasty glances about, against witnesses, and then he flung his arms around her, and she flung hers around him. He crushed her as fiercely as he dared, and she him as fiercely as she could. Their lips met in the great kiss of betrothal.
She was happy beyond endurance. She was in love and her beloved loved her.
All the Sheilas there were in her soul agreed for once that she was happy to the final degree, contented beyond belief, imparadised on earth. The Sheilas voted unanimously that love was life; love was the greatest thing in the world; that woman’s place was with her lover, that a woman’s forum was the home; and that any career outside the walls was a plaything to be put away and forgotten like a hobby-horse outgrown.
As for her stage career—pouf! into the attic with it where her little tin house and the tiny tin kitchen and her knitted bear and the glueless dolls reposed. She was going to have a real house and real children and real life.
While she was consigning her ambitions to the old trunk up-stairs, Winfield was refurbishing his ambitions. He was going to do work enough for two, be ambitious for both and make Sheila the proudest wife of the busiest husband in the husband business.
But these great resolutions were mainly roaring in the back parlors of their brains. On the piazzas of their lips were words of lovers’ nonsense. There is no use quoting them. They would sound silly even to those who have used them themselves.
They sounded worse than that to Roger and Polly, who heard them all.
Roger and Polly had come home from dancing half an hour before, and had dropped into chairs in the living-room. The moon on the sea was dazzling. They watched it through the screens that strained the larger mosquitoes, then they put out the lights because the view was better and because enough mosquitoes were already in the house.
The conversation of the surf had made all the necessary language and Roger and Polly sat in the tacit comfort of long-married couples. They had heard Sheila brought home by a young man whom she dismissed with brevity. Before they found energy to call to her, another young man had hurried across the grass. To their intense amazement he leaped at Sheila and she did not scream. Both merged into one silhouette.
Polly and Roger were aghast, but they dared not speak. They did not even know who the man was. Sheila called him by no name to identify him, though she called him by any number of names of intense saccharinity.
At length Roger’s voice came through the gloom, as gentle as a shaft of moonlight made audible: “Oh, Sheila.”
The silhouette was snipped in two as if by scissors.
“Ye-yes, dodther.” She had tried to say “Daddy” and “father” at the same time.
Roger’s voice went on in its drawing-roomest drawl: “I know that it is very bad play-writing to have anybody overhear anybody, but your mother and I got home first, and your dialogue is—well, really, a little of it goes a great way, and we’d like to know the name of your leading man.”
Winfield and Sheila both wished that they had drowned that morning. But there was no escape from making their entrance into the living-room, where Roger turned on the lights. All eyes blinked, rather with confusion than the electric display.
The elder Kembles had met Winfield before, but had not suspected him as a son-in-law-to-be. Sheila explained the situation and laid heavy stress on how Winfield had rescued her from drowning. She rather gave the impression that she had fallen off a liner two days out and that he had jumped overboard and carried her to safety single-handed.
Winfield tried to disclaim the glory, but he managed to gulp up a proposal in phrases he had read somewhere.
“I came to ask you for your daughter’s hand.”
“It looked to me as if you had both of them around your neck,” Roger sighed. Then he cleared his throat and said: “What do you say, Polly? Do we give our consent?—not that it makes any difference.”
Polly sighed. “Sheila’s happiness is the only thing to consider.”
“Ah, Sheila’s happiness!” Roger groaned. “That’s a large order. I suppose she has told you, Mr. Wyndham, that she is an actress—or is trying to be?”
“Oh yes, sir,” Winfield answered, feeling like a butler asking for a position. “I fell in love with her on the stage.”
“Ah, so you are an actor, too.”
“Oh no, sir! I’m a manufacturer, or I expect to be.”
“And is your factory one that can be carried around with you, or does Sheila intend—”
“Hum!” said Roger. “When?”
“Right away, I hope,” said Winfield.
“I’m off the stage now,” said Sheila. “I’ll just not go back.”
“I see,” said Roger, while Polly stared from her idolized child to the terrifying stranger, and wrung her hands before the appalling explosion of this dynamite in the quiet evening.
“Well, mummsy,” Sheila cried, taking her mother in her arms, “why don’t you say something?”
“I—I don’t know what to say,” Polly whimpered.
Roger’s uneasy eyes were attracted by the living-room table, where there was a comfortable clutter of novels and magazines. A copy ofThe Munseywas lying there; it was open, face down. Roger picked it up and offered the open book to Sheila.
She and Winfield looked down at a full-page portrait of Sheila.
“Had you seen this, Mr.—Mr.—Wingate, is it? It’s a forecast of the coming season and it says—it says—” He produced his eye-glasses and read:
“ ‘The most interesting announcement among the Reben plans is the statement that Sheila Kemble is to be promoted to stellar honors in a new play written especially for her. While we deplore the custom of rushing half-baked young beauties into the electric letters, an exception must be made in the case of this rising young artist. She has not only revealed extraordinary accomplishments and won for herself a great following of admirers throughout the country, but she has also enjoyed a double heritage in the gifts of her distinguished forebears, who are no less personages than’—et cetera, et cetera.”
“ ‘The most interesting announcement among the Reben plans is the statement that Sheila Kemble is to be promoted to stellar honors in a new play written especially for her. While we deplore the custom of rushing half-baked young beauties into the electric letters, an exception must be made in the case of this rising young artist. She has not only revealed extraordinary accomplishments and won for herself a great following of admirers throughout the country, but she has also enjoyed a double heritage in the gifts of her distinguished forebears, who are no less personages than’—et cetera, et cetera.”
Sheila and Winfield stared at the page from which Sheila’s public image beamed quizzically at herself and at the youth who aspired to rob her “great following” of their darling.
“What about that?” said Roger.
Winfield looked so pitiful to Sheila that she cried, “Well, my ‘great following’ will have to follow somebody else, for I belong to Bret now.”
“I see,” said Roger. “And when does the rising young star—er—set? When does the marriage take place?”
“Whenever Bret wants me,” said Sheila, and she added “Ooh!” for he squeezed her fingers with merciless gratitude.
“Oh, Sheila! Sheila!” said Polly, clutching at her other hand as if she would hold her little girl back from crossing the stile of womanhood.
Roger hummed several times in the greatest possible befuddlement. At length he said:
“And what do your parents say, Mr. Winston?—or are they—er—living?”
“Yes, sir, both of them, thank you. They don’t know anything about it yet, sir.”
“And do you think they will be pleased?”
“When they know Sheila they can’t help loving her.”
“It has happened, I believe,” said Roger, “that parents have not altogether echoed their children’s enthusiasms. And there are still a few people who would not consider a popular actress an ideal daughter-in-law.”
“Oh, they won’t make any trouble!” said Winfield. “They ought to be proud of—of an alliance with such—er—distinguished forebears as you.” He tried to include Polly and Roger in one look, and he thought the tribute rather graceful.
Roger smiled at the bungled compliment and answered, “Well, the Montagues and the Capulets were both prominent families, but that didn’t help Romeo and Juliet much.”
Winfield writhed at Roger’s light sarcasm. “It doesn’t matter what they say. I am of age.”
“So I judge, but have you an income of your own?”
“No, but— Well, I can take care of Sheila, I guess!” He was angry now.
Roger rather liked him for his bluster, but he said, “In any case there is no especial hurry, I presume.”
To the young lovers there seemed to be the most enormous necessity of haste to forsake the world and build their own nest in their own tree.
Roger was silent and Polly was silent. Winfield felt called upon to speak. At last he managed to extort a few words from his embarrassment:
“Anyway, I can count on your consent, can I?”
“Our consent!” laughed Roger. “What have we to say? We’re only the parents of a young American princess. If Sheila says yes, your next trouble is your own parents, for you are only an American man.”
“Anyway, you won’t oppose us?” Winfield urged.
“My boy, I would no more oppose Sheila than I would oppose the Twentieth Century Limited in full flight.”
Sheila pouted. “That’s nice! Now he’ll think I’m something terrible.”
Roger put his arm about his daughter, who was nearly taller than he was. “My child,” he said, “I think you are the finest woman in the world except your own mother. And if it would make you happy and keep you happy I’d cut off my right arm.” Then he kissed her, and his eyes were more like a sorrowful boy’s than a father’s. There was a lull in the conversation and he escaped with the words: “Mother, it’s time for the old folks to go to bed. The young people have a lot to talk over and we’re in the way. Good night, Mr. Win—my boy, and good luck to you—though God alone knows good luck when He sees it.”
When the veterans had climbed the stairs to the shelf on which younger romance had put them, Bret and Sheila resumed that interrupted embrace, but deliberately and solemnly. It was a serious matter, this getting married and all.
The next morning brought a flood of sunlight on an infinitely cheerful ocean and the two lovers’ thoughts flew to each other from their remote windows like carrier-pigeons.
Sheila was perturbed, and as she watched Winfield approach she thought that his very motor seemed to be a trifle sullen. Then she ran down to the piazza to meet him. She carried a letter in her left hand. She waved him welcome with the other.
As he ran up the walk he took from his pocket a telegram. They vanished into the house to exchange appropriate salutes, but Pennock was there as housemaid, and she was giving orders to Roger’s valet, who doubled as the butler in summer-time.
So they returned to the porch embraceless. This began the morning wrong. Then Winfield handed Sheila his telegram, a long night letter from his father, saying that his health was bad and he might have to take a rest. He added, vigorously:
“You’ve fooled away time enough. Get back on the job; learn your business and attend to it.”
Winfield shook his head dolefully. “Isn’t that rotten?”
“Mate it with this,” said Sheila, and handed him her letter.
Dear Sheila Kemble,—Better run in town and see me to-morrow. I’ve got a great play for you from France. Rehearsals begin immediately. Trusting your rest has filled you with ambition for a strenuous season, I am,Yours faithfully,Hy. Reben.
Dear Sheila Kemble,—Better run in town and see me to-morrow. I’ve got a great play for you from France. Rehearsals begin immediately. Trusting your rest has filled you with ambition for a strenuous season, I am,
Yours faithfully,
Hy. Reben.
This threw Winfield into a panic. “But you promised me—”
“Yes, dear,” she cooed, “and I’ve already written the answer. How’s this?” She gave him the answer she had worked over for an hour, trying to make it as business-like as possible:
Letter received regret state owing change plans shall not return stage this season best wishes.Sheila Kemble.
Letter received regret state owing change plans shall not return stage this season best wishes.
Sheila Kemble.
Even this did not allay Winfield’s alarm. “Why do you say ‘this season’?” he demanded. “Are you only marrying me for one season?”
“For all eternity,” she cried, “but I wanted to let poor old Reben down easy.”
Sheila found that Reben was not so easily let down as stirred up. An answer to the telegram arrived a few hours later, just in time to spoil the day:
You gave me word of honor as gentleman you would keep your contract better look it over again you will report for rehearsal Monday tena.m.Odeon Theater.Reben.
You gave me word of honor as gentleman you would keep your contract better look it over again you will report for rehearsal Monday tena.m.Odeon Theater.
Reben.
Winfield stormed at Reben’s language as much as at the situation:
“How dares he use such a tone to you? Are you his servant or are you my wife?”
“I’m neither, honey,” Sheila said, very meekly. “I’m just the darned old public’s little white slave.”
“But you don’t belong to the public. You belong to me.”
“But I gave him my word first, honey,” Sheila pleaded. “If it were just an ordinary contract, I could break it, but we shook hands on it and I gave him my word as a gentleman. If I broke that I couldn’t be trusted to keep my word to you, could I, dear?”
It was a puzzling situation for Winfield. How could he demand that the woman in whose hands he was to put his honor should begin their compact by a breach of honor? How could he counsel her to be false to one solemn obligation and expect her to be true to another assumed later?
Reben followed up his telegram by a letter of protest against Sheila’s bad faith. He referred to the expense he had been at; he had bought a great foreign play, paying down heavy advance royalties; he had given large orders to scene-painters, lithographers, and printers, and had flooded the country with her photographs and his announcements. The cast was selected, and her defection would mean cruelty to them as well as disloyalty to him.
She felt helpless. Winfield was helpless. She could only mourn and he rage. They were like two lovers who find themselves on separate ships.
Winfield went back to his father’s factory in a fume of wrath and grief. Sheila went to Reben’s factory with the meekness of a mill-hand carrying a dinner-pail.
Sheila made a poor effort to smile at the stage-door keeper, who lifted his hat to her and welcomed her as if she were the goddess of spring. The theater had been lonely all summer, but with the autumn was burgeoning into vernal activity.
The company in its warm-weather clothes made little spots of color in the dimly lighted cave of the stage. The first of the members to greet Sheila was Floyd Eldon.
Eldon seized both of Sheila’s hands and wrung them, and his heart cried aloud in his soft words: “God bless you, Sheila. We’re to be together again and I’m to play your lover again. You’ve got to listen to me telling you eight times a week how much I—”
“Why, Mr. Batterson, how do you do?”
The director—Batterson again—came forward with other troupers, old friends or strangers. Then Reben called to Sheila from the night beyond the footlights. She stumbled and groped her way out front to him, and he scolded her roundly for giving him such a scare.
The director’s voice calling the company together rescued her from answering Reben’s questions as to the mysterious “change of plans” that had inspired her telegram.
“I guess you must have been crazy with the heat,” he said.
“Call it that,” said Sheila. And she rejoined the company, trying not to be either uppish or ’umble in her new quality as the star.
The author of the play was a Parisian plutocrat whose wares had traversed all the oceans, though he had never ventured across the English Channel. So he was not present to read the play aloud. Ben Prior, the adapter, was a meek hack afraid of his own voice, and Batterson was not inclined to show the company how badly their director read. His assistant distributed the parts, and the company, clustered in chairs, read in turn as their cues came.
Each had hefted his own part, and judged it by the number of its pages. One might have guessed nearly how many pages each had by the vivacity or the dreariness of his attack.
“Eight sides!” growled old Jaffer as he counted his brochure.
It is a saddening thing to an ambitious actor to realize that his business for a whole season is to be confined to brief appearances and unimportant speeches.
People congratulated old Jaffer because he was out of the play after the first act. But, cynic as he was, he was not glad to feel that he would be in his street mufti when the second curtain rose. It is pleasant to play truant, but it is no fun to be turned out of school when everybody else is in.
Of all the people there the most listless was the one who had the biggest, bravest rôle, the one round which all the others revolved, the one to whom all the others “fed” the words that brought forth the witty or the thrilling lines.
Sheila had to be reminded of her cue again and again. Batterson’s voice recalled her as from a distance.
It is as strange as anything so usual and immemorial can be, how madly lovers can love; how much agony they can extract from a brief separation; what bitter terror they can distil from ordinary events. As the tormented girl read her lines and later walked through the positions or stood about in the maddening stupidities of a first rehearsal, she had actually to battle with herself to keep from screaming aloud:
“I don’t want to act! I don’t want the public to love me! I want only my Bret!”
The temptation to hurl the part in Reben’s face, to mock the petty withes of contract and promise, and to fly to her lover, insane as it was, was a temptation she barely managed to fight off.
CHAPTER XXX
In a similar tempest of infinitely much ado about next to nothing the distant Bret Winfield was browbeating himself silently, pleading with himself not to disgrace himself by running away from his loathsome factory. His father needed his presence, and Sheila needed his absence.
But gusts of desire for the sight of her swept through him like manias. He would try to reach her on the long-distance telephone. At the theater, where there was as yet no one in the box-office, it was usually impossible to get an answer or to get a message delivered. The attendants would as soon have called a priest from mass as an actor from rehearsal. Sometimes, after hours of search with the long-distance probe, he would find Sheila at the hotel and they would pour out their longings across the distance till strange voices broke in and mocked their sentimentalities or begged them to get off the wire. It was strange to be eavesdropped by ghosts whose names or even whereabouts one could never know.
Winfield’s mother observed her son’s distress and insisted that he was ill. She demanded that he see a doctor; it might be some lingering fever or something infectious. It was both, but there is no inoculation, no antitoxin, yet discovered to prevent the attack on a normal being. The mumps, scarlet fever, malaria, typhoid and other ailments have their serums, but love has none. Light attacks of those affections procure immunity, but not of this.
Winfield finally told his mother what his malady was. “Mother, I’m in love—mad crazy about a girl.”
Mrs. Winfield smiled. “You always are.”
“It’s real this time—”
“It always was.”
“It means marriage.”
This was not so amusing.
“Who is she?”
“Nobody you ever saw.”
This was reassuring. Mrs. Winfield had never seen any girl in town quite good enough for her daughter-in-law.
Mrs. Winfield was very strict, and very religious in so far as religion is concerned with trying one’s neighbors as well as oneself by very lofty and very inelastic laws of conduct.
Bret dreaded to tell his mother who Sheila was or what she was. He knew her opinion of the stage and its people. She had not expressed it often because she winced even at the mention of hopelessly improper subjects like French literature, the theater, classic art, playing cards, the works of Herbert Spencer, Ouida, Huxley, and people like that.
She knew so little of the theater that when she made him tell her the girl’s name, “Sheila Kemble” meant nothing to her.
Mrs. Winfield demanded full information on the vital subject of her son’s fiancée. Bret dodged her cross-examination in vain. He dilated on Sheila’s beauty, her culture, her fascination, her devotion to him. But those were details; Mrs. Winfield wanted to know the important things:
“What church does she belong to?”
“I never thought to ask her.”
“Are her people in good circumstances?”
“Very!”
“What is her father’s business?”
“Er—he’s a professional man.”
“Oh! A lawyer?”
“No.”
“Doctor?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Er—well—you see—he’s very successful. He’s famous in his line—makes a heap of money. He stands very high in his profession.”
“That’s good, but what is it?”
“Why—he— If you knew him—you’d be proud to have him for a father-in-law or—a—whatever relative he’d be to you.”
“No doubt; but whatdoesthis wonderful man do for a living?”
“He’s an actor.”
Mrs. Winfield would have screamed the word in echo, but she was too weak. When she got her breath she hardly knew which of the myriad objections to mention first.
“An actor! You are engaged to the daughter of an actor! Why, that’s nearly as bad as if she were an actress herself!”
Bret mumbled, “Sheila is an actress.”
Then he ran for a glass of water.
At length his mother rallied sufficiently to flutter tenderly, with a mother’s infinite capacity for forgiving her children—and nobody else:
“Oh, Bret! Bret! has my poor boy gone and fallen into the snare of some adventuress—some bad, bad woman?”
“Hush, mother; you mustn’t speak so. Sheila is a good girl, the best in the world.”
“I thought you said she was an actress.”
This seemed to end the argument, but he amazed her by proceeding: “She is! and a fine one, the best actress in the country—in the world.”
When Mrs. Winfield tried to prove from the profundity of her ignorance and her prejudice that an actress must be doomed he put his hand over his ears till she stopped. Then she began again:
“And are you going to follow this angel about, or is she going to reform?”
“She can’t quit just now. She has a contract, but after this season she’ll stop, and then we’ll get married.”
Mrs. Winfield caught at this eagerly. “You’re not going to marry her at once then?”
“No. I wish I could, but she can’t break her contract.”
Mrs. Winfield smiled and settled back with relief. She felt as if an earthquake had passed by, leaving her alive and the house still on its foundations. She knew Bret and she was sure that any marriage scheduled for next year was as good as canceled already.
She wanted nothing more said about it. Her son’s relations with an actress might be deplorable, but, fortunately, they were only transient and need not be discussed.
But Bret would not permit his love to be dismissed with scorn. He insisted that he adored Sheila and that she was adorable. He produced photographs of her, and the mother could not deny the girl’s beauty. But she regarded it with an eye of such hostility that she found all the guiles and wiles that she wanted to find in it.
Bret insisted on his mother’s meeting Sheila, which she refused to do. She announced that she would not meet her if she became his wife. She would not permit the creature to sully her home. She warned Bret not to mention it to his father, for the old man’s heart was weak and he was discouraged enough over the conflict with the scales trust. The shock of a stage scandal might kill him.
The elder Winfield wandered into the dispute at its height. He insisted on knowing what it was. His wife tried to break it to him gently and nearly drove him mad with her delay. When she finally reached the horrible disclosure he did not swoon; he just laughed.
“Is that all! Mother, where’s your common sense of humor? The young cub has been sowing some wild oats and he’s trying to spare your feelings. Think nothing more about it. Bret is going to settle down to work, and he won’t have time for much more foolishness. And now let’s drop it. Get your things packed and mine, for I’ve got to run over to New York for a board of directors’ meeting with some big interests, and while I’m there I’ll just go to a real doctor. These fossils here all prescribe the same pills.”
Bret glared at his father almost contemptuously. He was heavily disappointed in his parents. They were unable to rise to a noble occasion.
An inspiration occurred to him. Their trip to New York came pat to his necessities. They had been cold to his description of Sheila. But once they met her, they could not but be swept off their feet—not if they had his blood in their veins.
He sent a voluminous telegram to Sheila asking her to call on his father and mother and make them hers. It was a manlike outrage on the etiquette of calls, but Sheila cared little for conventions of the stupid sort.
Bret could not persuade his mother to consent to meet Sheila and be polite until he implored her to treat Sheila at least with the humanity deserved by a Magdalen. That magic word disarmed Mrs. Winfield and gave her the courage of a missionary. She saw that it was plainly her duty to see the misguided creature. She might persuade her to change her ways. Of course she would incidentally persuade her of the impossibility of a marriage with Bret. She would appeal to the girl’s better nature, for she imagined that even an actress was not totally depraved.
In an important conference with her husband Mrs. Winfield drew up a splendid campaign. She would try the effect of reason, and, if she failed, her husband would bring up the heavy artillery.
Mr. Charles Winfield determined to do his share by pointing out to the woman that Bret had no income and would have none. This would scare the creature away, for she was undoubtedly after the boy’s money. What else could she want? If worst came to worst, they might even buy her off. A few thousand dollars would be a cheap blackmail to pay for the release of their son.
The train that carried the elder Winfields to the ordeal of meeting with the threatening invader of their family was due in New York in the forenoon.
When Charles Winfield bought a paper to glance over it during his dining-car breakfast he was pleased to find a brief mention of the meeting of the directors. His own name was included in small type, with the initials wrong. Still, it was pleasant to be named in a New York paper.
As he turned the page he was startled to see a familiar face pop up before him as if with a cheerful “Good morning!” He studied it. It was familiar, but he could not place it. He read the name beneath—“Sheila Kemble”!
It was a large portrait and the text accompanying it was an adroit piece of press-agency. Reben’s publicity man, Starr Coleman, had smuggled past the dramatic editor’s jealous guard a convincing piece of fiction purporting to describe Sheila’s opinions on woman suffrage as it would affect the home. He had been unable to get at Sheila during rehearsals and he had concocted the interview out of his own head.
Winfield passed the paper across to his wife. Both were decidedly shaken. Winfield’s logical mind automatically worked out a problem in ratio. If he himself felt important because a New York newspaper included his name in a list of arrivals, how important was Sheila, who received half a column of quotation and a photograph?
Furthermore, Sheila’s name was coupled with that of a prominent woman whose social distinction was nation-wide.
Mrs. Winfield fetched forth her spectacles, read Sheila’s dictum carefully and with some awe. There were two or three words in it that Mrs. Winfield could not understand—neither could Sheila when she read it. Starr Coleman liked big words. But in any case the interview scared Mrs. Winfield out of her scheme to play the missionary. By the same token Mr. Winfield decided not to offer Sheila a bribe.
Their plans were in complete disarray when they reached New York.
They had not been settled long in their hotel when the telephone-bell rang.
Mrs. Winfield answered the call, since her husband was belatedly shaving himself.
The telephone operator said, “M’ Skemble to speak to M’ Swinfield.”
Mrs. Winfield’s heart began to skip. She answered, feebly, “This is Mrs. Winfield.”
The operator snapped, “Go ahead,” and another voice appeared, putting extraordinary music into a lyrical “Hello!”
Mrs. Winfield answered: “Hello! This is Mrs. Winfield.”
“Oh, how do you do? This is Mrs. Kemble, Sheila’s mother. Your son asked her to call you up as soon as you got in, but she is rehearsing and asked me to.”
“That’s very n-nice of you.”
“Why, thank you. Your son probably explained to you that Sheila is a horribly busy young woman. I know you are busy, too. You’ll be doing a lot of shopping, I presume. I should like to call on you as one helpless parent on another, but my husband and I are leaving in a day or two for one of our awful tours to the Coast. The ocean is so beautiful that I wondered if you wouldn’t be willing to run out here and take dinner with us to-night.”
Mrs. Winfield’s wits were so scattered that she had not the strength even to improvise another engagement. She was not an agile liar. She murmured, feebly: “It would be very nice. Thank you.”
Then the irresistible Polly Farren voice purred on: “That’s splendid! We’ll send our car for you. It’s not a long run out here, and the car can bring Sheila out at the same time. You can have a little visit together.”
“That would be very nice. Thank you,” Mrs. Winfield babbled.
“One more thing, if I may,” Polly chanted. “Our town car is in New York. It took Sheila in, you know. The driver has nothing at all to do till five. My husband says he would be ever so pleased if you’d let me put it at your disposal. Please call it your very own while you’re in the city, won’t you? The chauffeur is quite reliable, really.”
Poor Mrs. Winfield could only wail, “Hold the wire a moment, please.”
She was unutterably miserable. She dropped the receiver and called her lather-jawed husband in conference. They whispered like two counterfeiters with the police at the door. They could see no way of escape without brutality.
Mrs. Winfield took up the receiver and wailed, “My husband says it is very nice of you and of course we accept.”
“Oh, that’s splendid!” throbbed in her ear. “I’ll telephone the man to call for you at once. Good-by till dinner, then. Good-by.”
Mr. Winfield glared at his wife, and she looked away, sighing:
“She has a right nice voice, anyway.”