CHAPTER XXXI
The car was a handsomer car than their own, and in the quietest taste. Polly had somewhat softened the truth in the matter of its tender. Roger had protested mightily against offering the car to the Winfields, but Sheila and Polly had taken it away from him.
He had resisted their scheme for the dinner with even greater vigor, but Polly mocked him and gave her orders. Seeing himself committed to the plot, he said, “Well, if we’ve got to have this try-out performance we’ll make a production of it with complete change of costumes, calciums, and extra people.”
Polly and Roger did not approve of Bret any more than the Winfields approved of Sheila; but they resolved to jolt the Philistines while they were at it.
After a day in the Kemble limousine the Winfields picked up Sheila, who had been spending an hour on her toilet, though she apologized for the wreckage of rehearsals.
She dazzled both of them with her beauty. She did most of the talking, but permitted restful silences for meditation. The Winfields were as shy and as staring as children. It was the first time they had been so close to an actress.
The Kemble cottage on Long Island was a pleasant enough structure at any time, but at night under a flattering moon it looked twice its importance.
The dinner was elaborate and the guests impressive. Roger apologized for the presence of a famous millionaire, Tilton, his wife, and their visitor Lady Braithwaite. He said that they had been invited before, though it would have been more accurate to say that they had been implored at the last moment, and had consented because Roger said he needed them.
Sheila never acted harder. She never suffered worse from stage-fright and never concealed it more completely. She suffered both as author and as actor. Her little comedy was, like Hamlet’s brief tragedy, produced for an ulterior purpose. Which it accomplished.
The Kembles had succeeded in shifting the burden of discomfort to their observers. The Winfields felt hopelessly small town. Polly and Sheila were exquisitely gracious, and Lady Braithwaite kept my-dearing Polly, while the millionaire called Kemble by his first name. Roger set old Winfield roaring over his stories and, as if quite casually, he let fall occasional allusions to the prosperity of prosperous stage people. He referred to the fact that a certain actress, “poor Nina Fielding,” had “had a bad season, and cleared only sixty thousand dollars.”
Tilton exclaimed, “Impossible! that’s equivalent to six per cent, on a million dollars.”
Roger shrugged his shoulders. “Well, there are others that make more, and if Nina is worth a million, Sheila is worth two of her. And she’ll prove it, too. And why shouldn’t actors get rich? They do the world as much good as your manufacturers of shoes and electricity and automobiles. Why shouldn’t they make as much money?”
Tilton said: “Well, perhaps they should, but they haven’t done so till recently. It’s a big change from the time when you actors were rated as beggars and vagabonds; you’ll admit that much, won’t you?”
He had touched Kemble on a sensitive spot, a subject that he had fumed over and studied. Roger was always ready to deliver a lecture on the topic. He blustered now:
“That old idiocy! Do you believe it, too? Don’t you know that the law that branded actors as vagrants referred only to actors without a license and not enrolled in an authorized company? At that very time the chief noblemen had their own troupes and the actors were entertained royally in castles and palaces.
“For a time the monks and nuns used to give plays, and there was a female playwright who was a nun in the tenth century. The Church sometimes fought against the theater during the dark ages, but so it fought against sculpture and painting the human form. Actors were forbidden Christian burial once and were treated as outlaws, but so were the Catholics in Protestant countries and Protestants in Catholic regions, and Presbyterians and Episcopalians in each other’s realms, and Quakers in Boston.
“The Puritans did not believe in the theater any more than the theater believed in the Puritans, and there was a period in England when plays had to be given secretly in private houses. But what does that prove? Religious services had to be given the same way; and political meetings.
“There are plenty of people who hate the theater to-day. It always will have enemies—like the other sciences and arts.
“But one thing is sure. Wherever actors have been permitted at all, they have always gone with the best people. Several English actors have been knighted recently, but that’s nothing new. The actor Roscius was knighted at Rome in 50b.c.In Greece they carved the successful actors’ names in stone.
“We made big money then, too. The actor Æsopus—Cicero’s friend—left his good-for-nothing son so much money that the cub dissolved a pearl in vinegar and drank it. He tossed off what would amount, in our money, to a forty-thousand-dollar cocktail.
“In the Roman Empire actors like Paris stood so high at court that Juvenal said, ‘If you want to get the royal favor ask an actor, not a lord.’ When Josephus went to Rome to plead for the lives of some priests, a Jewish actor named Aliturus introduced him to Nero and his empress and got him his petition. It seems funny to think of a Jewish actor at the court of Nero. The Roman emperor Justinian married an actress and put her on the throne beside him.
“In Italy after the Renaissance one of the actresses—I forget her name—was so much honored that when she came to a town she was received with a salute of cannon.
“Louis XIV. loved Molière, stood godfather to his child, and suggested a scene for one of his plays. One of Napoleon’s few intimate friends was the actor Talma.
“David Garrick was in high favor at court and he sold his interest in Drury Lane, when he retired, for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
“And if I may speak of my own ancestors, Mrs. Siddons was one of the most highly esteemed and irreproachable women of her time. Sir Joshua Reynolds was proud to paint her as the Tragic Muse and old Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote his autograph on the canvas along the edge of her robe because he said he wanted his name to go down to posterity on the hem of her garment.
“Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was so successful that he bought a sixth share in Covent Garden for over one hundred thousand dollars. When it burned down it would have ruined him if the Duke of Northumberland had not made him a loan of fifty thousand dollars. And later he refused repayment.
“Take an actress of our own time, Sarah Bernhardt. What woman in human history has had more honor, or made more money? Or take—”
Polly felt it time to intervene. “For Heaven’s sake, ring down! You’re not at Chautauqua, you know.”
Kemble started and blinked like a sleep-walker abruptly wakened. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was riding my hobby and he ran away.”
The Winfields were plentifully impressed and Mrs. Winfield completely overwhelmed when Lady Braithwaite said:
“He’s quite right, my dear. There’s no question of the social position of the stage. So many actresses have married into our peerage that you can’t tell which is the annex of which; and no end of young peers are going on the stage. They can’t act, but it keeps them out of mischief in a way. And I can’t see that stage-marriages are any less permanent than the others. Can you? I mean to say, I’ve known most charming cases. My poor friend the Duchess of Stonehenge had a son who was a hopeless little cad and rotter—and he married an actress—you know the one I mean—from the Halls she was, too. And you know she’s made a man of him—a family man, too, she has, really! And she’s the most devoted of mothers. Really she is!”
Somehow the character Lady Braithwaite gave the stage made more impression on Mrs. Winfield than all of Roger’s history.
On the long, late ride back to their hotel the old couple were meek, quite whipped-out. They had come to redeem an actress from perdition or bribe her not to drag their son to her own level; they returned with their ears full of stage glories and a bewildered feeling that an alliance with the Kemble family would be the making of them.
As the train bore them homeward, however, their old prejudices resumed sway. They began to feel resentful. If Sheila had been more lowly, suppliant, and helpless they might have stooped to her. But a daughter-in-law who could earn over fifty thousand dollars a year was a dangerous thing about the house. Sheila’s scenario had worked just a little too well.
Young Winfield met his parents at the train and searched their faces eagerly. They looked guilty and almost pouting. They said nothing till they were in their own car—it looked shabby after the Kemble turnout. Then Bret pleaded:
“Well, what do you think of Sheila?”
“She’s very nice,” said his mother, stingily.
“Is that all? She wrote me that you were wonderful. She said my father was one of the most distinguished-looking men she ever saw, and as for my mother, she was simply beautiful, so fashionable and aristocratic—an angel, she called you, mother.”
One may see through these things, but they can’t be resisted. As Roger Kemble used to put it: “Say what you will, a bouquet beats a brickbat for comfort no matter what direction it comes from.”
The Winfields blushed with pride and warmed over their comments on Sheila. In fact, they went so far as to say that she would never give up the fame and fortune and admiration that were waiting for her, just to marry a common manufacturer’s son.
This threw the fear of love into Bret and made him more than ever frantic to see Sheila and be reassured or put out of his misery. There was no restraining him. His father protested that he was needed at home. But it was mating-season with the young man, and parents were only in his way, as their parents had been in theirs.
CHAPTER XXXII
Bret telegraphed Sheila that he was coming to New York to see her. She telegraphed back:
Awfully love see you but hideously busy rehearsals souls devotion.
Awfully love see you but hideously busy rehearsals souls devotion.
These poor telegraph operators! The honey they have to transmit must fairly stick to the wires and gum up the keys.
Winfield determined to go, anyway—and to surprise her. He set out without warning and flew to the theater as soon as he reached New York. The tip-loving doorman declined so fiercely to take his card in that he frightened the poor swain out of the proffer of a bribe.
While Winfield loitered irresolutely near the stage entrance an actor strolled out to snatch a few puffs of a cigarette while he was not needed. Winfield was about to ask him to tell Miss Kemble that Mr. Winfield was waiting for her. He saw that the actor was Eldon.
He dodged behind the screen of a fire-escape from the gallery and slunk away unobserved. There was no fire-escape in his soul from the conflagration of jealousy that shot up at the sight of his rival, and the thought that Eldon was spending his days in Sheila’s company, while her affianced lover gnashed his teeth outside.
He hung about like Mary’s lamb for meekness and like Red Riding-Hood’s wolf for wrath. He would wait for Sheila to come out for lunch. Hours passed. He saw Eldon dash across the street to a little restaurant and return with a cup of coffee and a bundle of sandwiches. Ye gods, he was feeding her!
With all a lover’s fiendish ingenuity in devising tortures for himself, Winfield transported his soul from the vat of boiling oil to the rack and the cell of Little Ease and back again. He imagined the most ridiculous scenes in the theater and suspected Sheila of such treacheries that if he had really believed them he would surely have been cured of his love.
He saw that a policeman was regarding him with suspicion, and since he was faint with torture on an empty stomach, he went to a restaurant to kill time. When he returned he waited an hour before he ventured to steal upon the stage-door keeper again. Then he learned that the rehearsal had been dismissed two hours before. Aching with rage, he taxicabbed to Sheila’s hotel. She had not returned. Out riding with Eldon somewhere no doubt!
He went to the railroad station. He would escape from the hateful town where there was nothing but perfidy and vice. He called up the hotel to bid Sheila a bitter farewell. Pennock answered and informed him that Sheila had been at the dressmaker’s all afternoon and was just returned, so dead that Pennock had made her take a nap. She shouldn’t be disturbed till she woke, no, not for a dozen Winfields, especially as she had an evening rehearsal.
Winfield returned to her hotel and hung about like a process-server. He waited in the lobby, reading the evening papers, one after another, from “ears” to tail. He telephoned up to Pennock till she forbade the operator to ring the bell again.
The big fellow was almost hysterical when a hall-boy called him to the telephone-booth. He heard Sheila’s voice. She was fairly squealing with delight at his presence. Instantly chaos became a fresh young world, all Eden.
Sheila had just learned of Winfield’s arrival. She promised to be down as soon as she had scrubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She invited him to take her to dinner at Claremont before she went back to “the morgue,” as she called the theater—and meant it, for she was fagged out. Everything was wrong with the play, the cast, and, worst of all, with her costumes.
There was further tantalism for Bret in the greeting in the hotel lobby. A formal hand-clasp and a more ardent eye-clasp were all they dared venture. The long bright summer evening made it impossible to steal kisses in the taxicab, except a few snapshots caught as they ran under the elevated road. But they held hands and wrung fingers and talked rapturous nonsense.
The view of the Hudson was supremely beautiful from the restaurant piazza, until Reben arrived with his old Diana Rhys and the two of them filled the landscape like another Storm King and Dunderberg.
Mrs. Rhys had for some time resented Reben’s interest in Sheila and had made life infernal for him. She began on him at the table. He was furious with humiliation and swarthier with jealousy of the unknown occupant of the chair opposite Sheila.
Sheila explained to Winfield in hasty asides that she was in hot water. Reben did not like to have her appear in public places at all, and then only with the strictest chaperonage.
Winfield sniffed at such Puritanism from him.
“It isn’t that, honey,” Sheila said, “it’s business. He says that actresses, of all people, should lead secluded lives because—who wants to pay two dollars to see a woman who can be seen all over town for nothing? He’s planning a regular convent life for me, and he’s shutting down on all the personal publicity. I’m glad of it—for I really belong to you.
“Reben wants me to be especially strict because I’ve got to play innocent young girls, and he says that many a promising actress has killed herself commercially with the nice people, by thinking that it was none of the public’s business what she did outside the theater. Of course it isn’t really their business in a way, but the public make it so.
“And you can’t wonder at it. I know I’m not prudish or narrow, but when I see a play where a character is supposed to be terribly ignorant and pathetic and trusting, it sort of hurts the illusion when I know that the actress is really a hateful cat who has broken up a dozen homes.
“So you see Reben’s right. He’d come over here now and send me home if old Rhys would let him. He’s dying to know who you are. But of course I won’t tell him.”
This did not comfort Winfield in the least. It angered him, too, to think of Reben as right about anything; and he felt no thanks to him for his counsels of prudence. When it is insisted too strenuously that honesty is good policy, even honesty becomes suspect.
The tête-à-tête and the dinner were ruined and it was not yet dark enough on the way back to permit any of the embraces and kisses that Winfield was famished for. He took no pleasure even in the spectacular sunset along the Hudson—miles of assorted crimsons in the sky, with the cool green Palisades as a barrier between the radiant heavens and the long panel of the mirror-river that told the sky how beautiful it was.
Winfield was completely dissatisfied with life. It was peculiarly distressing to be so deeply in love with so dear a girl so deeply in love in turn, and to have her profession and its necessities brandished like a flaming sword between them.
This experience is likely to play an increasing part in the romances of the future as more and more women claim a larger and larger share of life outside the home. Existence has always been a process of readjustments, but certainly at no time in history has there been such a revolution as this in the relations of man and woman. From now on numbers of husbands will learn what wives have endured for ages in waiting for the spouse to come home from the shop.
The usual pattern of emotion was almost ludicrously reversed when Winfield took his sweetheart to her factory and left her at the door to resume her overtime night-work, while he idled about in the odious leisure of a housekeeper.
Winfield hated the situation with all the ferocity of a lover denied, and all the indignation of an old-fashioned youth who believed in taking the woman of his choice under his wing to protect her from the world.
But he had chosen a girl who proposed to conquer the world and who would find the shadow under his wing too close. He felt himself as feeble and misallied as a ring-dove mated with a falcon. She was an artist, a public idol, while he at best was as obscure as a vice-president; he was only the indolent heir of a self-made man.
He dawdled about, revolting against his dependency, till Sheila finished her rehearsal. Then she met him and they rode through the moonlit Park. She loved him immensely, but she was so exhausted that she fell asleep in his arm. He kissed the wan little moon of her face as it lay back on his shoulder. He loved her with all his might. He loved her enough to take her home to her hotel and surrender her to herself while he moped away to his own hotel.
The next day it was the same story except that she promised to ask for a respite at the luncheon hour and meet him at a restaurant near the theater. The appointment was for one o’clock. He waited until two-thirty before she appeared. And then she had only time to tell him that Reben had given her a merciless scolding for her escapade of the evening before.
Winfield expressed his desire to punch Reben’s head, and Sheila rejoiced at having a champion, even though (or perhaps because) the champion claimed her more exclusively than Reben did.
Bret had to endure another dismal wait until dinner, and then there was again an evening rehearsal. The time of production was approaching and Batterson was growing demoniac. After the rehearsal Bret from across the street watched all the other members of the company leave the theater. Even Eldon came forth, but not Sheila.
Another hour Bret spent of watchful waiting, and then she appeared with Reben and Prior. They had been having a consultation and a quarrel, and they continued it to the hotel, Sheila not daring to shake them off. Winfield shadowed them along the street, and waited outside till they left the hotel; then he made haste to find Sheila.
She was distraught between the demands of her play and her lover. Revisions had been made and she had a new scene to learn and a new interpretation of the character to achieve before morning. The only crumb of good news was the fact that Reben was to be out of town the next day and she could sneak Winfield in to watch a rehearsal, if he wanted to come.
He wanted to exceedingly. It was one way of borrowing trouble.
He stole in at the front of the house and sat in the empty dark, unobserved, but not unobserving. He had the wretched privilege of watching Eldon make love to Sheila and take her in his arms. A dozen embraces were tried before Batterson could find just the attitude to suit him. And that did not suit Sheila.
Partly because it is almost impossible for a man to show a woman how she would act, and partly because Sheila could almost see Bret’s gaze blazing from the dark like a wolf’s eyes, she was incapable of achieving the effect Batterson wanted.
The stage-manager was reaching his ugly phase, and after leaving Sheila in Eldon’s clasp for ten minutes while he tried her arms in various poses, all of them awkward, he walked to the table where Prior sat and muttered:
“Her mother would have grasped it in a minute. Isn’t it funny that the children of great actors are always damned fools?”
The whole company overheard and Winfield rose to his feet in a fury. But he heard Sheila say to Eldon, for Batterson’s benefit:
“Why, I didn’t know that Mr. Batterson’s parents were great actors, did you?”
Batterson caught this as Sheila intended, and he flew into one of the passions that were to be expected about this time. He slammed the manuscript on the table and made the usual bluff of walking out. Sheila did not follow. She sank into a chair and made signals to the invisible Bret not to interfere, as she knew he was about to do.
He understood her meaning and restrained his impulse to climb over the footlights once more.
Batterson fought it out with himself, then came back, and with a sigh of heavenly resignation resumed the rehearsal. The company was refreshed by the divertisement and Sheila and Batterson were as amiable as two warriors after a truce. The embrace was speedily agreed upon.
Sheila met Bret at luncheon, and now she had him on her hands. He was ursine with clumsy wrath.
“To think that my wife-to-be must stand up there and let a mucker like that stage-manager swear at her! Good Lord! I’ll break his head!”
Sheila wondered how long she would be able to endure these alternating currents, but she put off despair and cooed:
“Now, honey, you can’t go around breaking all the heads in town. You mustn’t think anything of it. Poor old Batty is excited, and so are we all. It’s just a business dispute. It’s always this way when the production is near.”
“And are you going to let that fellow Eldon fondle you like that?”
“Why, honey dear, it’s in the manuscript!”
“Then you can cut it out. I won’t have it, I tell you! What kind of a dog do you think I am that I’m to let other men hug my wife?”
“But it’s only in public, dearest, that he hugs me.”
At the recurrence of this extraordinary logic Winfield simply opened his mouth like a fish on land. He was suffocating with too much air.
Sheila and he kept silence a moment. They were remembering the somewhat similar dispute in another moonlit scene, at Clinton. Only then he was an audacious flirter; now he was a conservative fiancé. Her logic was the same, but he had veered to the opposite side. She murmured, dolefully:
“You don’t understand the stage very well, do you, dear?”
“No, I don’t!” he growled. “And I don’t want to. It’s no place for a woman. You’ve got to give it up.”
“I’ve promised to, honey, as soon as I can.”
“Well, in the mean while, you’ve got to cut out that hugging business with Eldon—or anybody else. I won’t have it, that’s all!”
To her intense amazement Sheila was flattered by this overweening tyranny. She rejoiced at her lover’s wealth of jealousy, the one supreme proof of true love in a woman’s mind, a proof that is weightier than any tribute of praise or jewelry or toil or sacrifice.
She said she would see if the embrace could be omitted. The next day Reben sat in the orchestra and she went down to sit at his side. She did not mention Winfield’s part in the matter, of course, but craftily insinuated:
“Do you know something? I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s a mistake to have that embrace in the second act. It seems to me to—er—to anticipate the climax.”
Reben, all unsuspecting, leaped into the snare:
“That’s so! I always say that once the hero and heroine clinch, the play’s over. We’ll just cut it there, and save it to the end of the last act.”
Sheila, flushed with her victory, pressed further:
“And that’s another point. Wouldn’t it be more—er—artistic if you didn’t show the embrace even then—just have the lovers start toward each other and ring down so that the curtain drops before they embrace? It would be novel, and it would leave something to the audience’s imagination.”
Reben was skeptical of this: “We might try it in one of the tank towns, but I’m afraid the people will be sore if they don’t see the lovers brought together for at least one good clutch. Nothing like trying things out, though.”
Sheila was tempted to ask him not to tell Batterson that it was her idea. The fear was unnecessary. Any advice that Reben accepted became at once his own idea. He advanced to the orchestra rail and told Batterson to “cut out both clutches.”
Batterson consented with ill grace and Eldon looked so crestfallen, so humiliated, that Sheila hastened to reassure him that it was nothing personal. But he was not convinced.
He was enduring bitter days. His love for Sheila would not expire. She treated him with the greatest formality. She paid him the deference belonging to a leading man. She was more gracious and more zealous for his success than most stars are. But he read in her eyes no glimmer of the old look.
He hoped that this was simply because she was too anxious and too busy to consider him, and that once the play was prosperously launched she would have time to love him.
This comfort sustained him through the loss of the two embraces. He could not have imagined that Sheila had cut them out to please Winfield, of whose presence in her environs he never dreamed.
At dinner that evening Sheila told Bret how she had brought about the excision of the two embraces. He was as proud as Lucifer and she rejoiced in having contrived his happiness. This was her chief ambition now. She was thinking more of him and his peace than of her own success or of that disturbance of the public peace which makes actors, story-tellers, acrobats, and singers and other entertainers interesting.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Sheila was passing through the meanest phase of play production when the first enthusiasms are gone and the nagging mechanics of position, intonation, and speed are wearing away the nerves: when those wrenches and inconsistencies of plot and character that are inevitably present in so artificial a structure as a play begin to stick out like broken bones; when scenery and property and costumes are turning up late and wrong; and when the first audience begins to loom nearer and nearer as a tidal wave toward which a ship is hurried all unready and aquiver to its safety or to disaster.
At such a time Sheila found the presence of Winfield a cool shelter in Sahara sands. He was an outsider; he was real; he loved her; he didn’t want her to be an actress; he didn’t want her to work; he wanted her to rest in his arms. His very angers and misunderstandings all sprang from his love of herself.
Yet only a few days and she must leave him. The most hateful part of the play was still to come—the process of “trying it on the dog”—on a series of “dog-towns,” where the play would be produced before small and timid audiences afraid to commit themselves either to amusement or emotion before the piece had a metropolitan verdict passed upon it.
It was a commonplace that the test was uncertain, yet what other test was possible? There was too much danger in throwing the piece on “cold” before the New York death-watch of the first night. That would be to hazard a great investment on the toss of a coin.
Sheila was cowering before the terrors that faced her. The difficulties came rushing at her one after another. She was only a young girl, after all, and she had swum out too far. Winfield was her sole rescuer from the world. The others kept driving her farther and farther out to sea. He would bring her to land.
The thought of separating from him for a whole theatrical season grew intolerable. Fatigue and discouragement preyed on her reserve of strength. Fear of the public swept her with flashes of cold sweat. She could not sleep; herds of nightmares stampeded across her lonely bed. She saw herself stricken with forgetfulness, with aphasia; she saw the audiences hooting at her; she read the most venomous criticism; she saw herself in train wrecks and theater fires. She saw the toppling scenery crushing her, or weight-bags dropping on her from the flies.
The production was heavy and complicated and Reben believed in many scenery rehearsals. There were endless periods of waiting for stage carpenters to repair mistakes, for property-men to provide important articles omitted from the property plot. The big set came in with the stairway on the wrong side. Almost the whole business of the act had to be reversed and learned over again. The last-act scene arrived in a color that made Sheila’s prettiest costume hideous. She must have a new gown or the scene must be repainted. A new gown was decided on; this detail meant hours more of fittings at the dressmaker’s.
The final rehearsals were merciless. Sheila left Bret at the stage door at ten o’clock one morning and did not put her head out of the theater till three o’clock the next morning. And five hours later she must stand for costume photographs in a broiling gallery.
Reben, utterly discouraged by the look of the play in its setting, feared to bring it into New York even after the two weeks of trial performances he had scheduled. An opportunity to get into Chicago turned up, and he canceled his other bookings. Sheila was liked in Chicago and he determined to make for there. The first performance was shifted from Red Bank, New Jersey, to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Sheila was in dismay and Bret grew unmanageable. The only excuse for the excitement of both was the fact that lovers have always been the same. Romeo and Juliet would not wait for Romeo to come back from banishment. They had to be married secretly at once. The world has always had its Gretna Greens for frantic couples.
So this frantic couple—not content with all its other torments—must inflict mutual torment. Bret loved Sheila so bitterly that he could not endure the ordeal she was undergoing. The wearier and more harried she grew, the more he wearied and harrowed her with his doubts, his demands, his fears of losing her. He was so jealous of her ambition that he made a crime of it.
He looked at her with farewell in his eyes and shook his head as over her grave and groaned: “I’m going to lose you, Sheila. You’re not for me.”
This frightened her. She was even less willing to lose him than he her. When she demanded why he should say such things he explained that if she left him now he would never catch up with her again. Her career was too much for him, and her loss was more than he could bear.
She mothered him with eyes of such devoted pity that he said: “Don’t stare at me like that. You look a hundred and fifty years old.”
She felt so. She was his nurse and his medicine, and she was at that epoch of her soul when her function was to make a gift of herself.
When he sighed, “I wanted you to be my wife” it was the “my” that thrilled her by its very selfishness; it was the past tense of the verb that alarmed her.
“You wanted me to be!” she gasped. “Don’t you want me any more?”
“God knows there’s nothing else I want in the world. But I can’t have you. My mother said that I couldn’t get you; she said that your ambition and the big money ahead of you would keep you from giving yourself to me.”
The primeval feud between a man’s mother and his wife surged up in her. She said, less in irony than she realized: “Oh, she said that, did she? Well, then, I’ll marry you just for spite.”
“If you only would, then I’d feel sure of you. I’d have no more fears.”
“All right. I’ll marry you.”
“When?”
“Whenever you say.”
“Now?”
“This minute.”
It was more like a bet than a proposal. He seized it.
“I’ll take you.”
They had snapped their wager at each other almost with hostility. They glared defiantly together; then their eyes softened. Laughter gurgled in their throats. His hands shot across the table; she put hers in them, in spite of the waiters.
A fierce impulse to make certain of possession caught them to their feet. He paid his bill standing up, and would not wait for change. They found a jewelry-shop and bought the ring. They took the subway to City Hall; a taxicab would be too slow.
There was no difficulty about the license. Every facility is offered to those who take the first plunge into marriage. The ascent into Paradise is as easy as the descent into Avernus. It is the getting back to earth that is hard in both cases.
“Shall we be married here in the City Hall?” said the licentiate. “It’s quicker.”
“I—I had rather hoped to be married in church,” Sheila pouted. “But whatever you say—”
“It will make you late to rehearsal,” he said. He was very indulgent to her career now that he was sure of her.
“Who cares?” she murmured. “Let’s go to the Little Church Around the Corner.”
And so they did, and waited their turn at the busy altar.
Then there was a furious scurry back to the theater. Mrs. Winfield kissed her husband good-by and dashed into the stage door to take her scolding. But Mr. Winfield was laughing as he rode away to arrange for their lodging for the remaining two days. Also his wife had made him promise to break the news to Pennock. Her father and mother were traveling now in the mid-West.
If Bret had known Pennock he might not have promised so glibly.
When Pennock finished with Winfield there was nothing further to say in his offense. She told him he was a monstrous brute and Sheila was a little fool to trust him. She declared that he had blighted the happiness of the best girl in the world, and ruined her career just as it was beginning. Then Pennock locked him out and went to packing Sheila’s things. She wept all over the child’s clothes as if Sheila were buried already. Then she took to her bed and cried her pillow soppy.
Sheila, all braced for a tirade from Batterson for her truancy, found that she had not been missed. The carpenters had the scenery spread on the floor of the stage like sails blown over, and the theater was a boiler-factory of noise. Shortly after her appearance Batterson called the company into the lobby for rehearsal. He took up the act at the place where they had stopped in the forenoon—a point at which Eldon caught Sheila’s hands in his and lifted them to his lips.
Now, as Eldon took those two beloved palms in his and bent his gaze on her fingers it fell on Sheila’s shining new wedding-ring. The circlet caught his eye; he studied it with vague surprise.
“A new ring?” he whispered, casually, not realizing its significance.
Sheila blushed so ruddily and snatched her hand away with such guilt that he understood. He groaned, “My God, no!”
“I beg you!” she whispered.
“What’s that?” said Batterson, who had been speaking to Prior.
“I lost the line,” said Eldon, looking as if he had lost his life. Batterson flung it to him angrily.
There was nothing for Sheila to do but throw herself on Eldon’s mercy at the first moment when she could steal a word with him alone.
He did not say, “You had no mercy on me.”
She knew it. It was more eloquent unsaid. He was a gallant gentleman, and sealed away his hopes of Sheila in a tomb.
At dinner Sheila told Bret about the incident, and he was secure enough in the stronghold of her possession to recognize the chivalry of his ex-rival.
“Mighty white of him,” he said. “Didn’t anybody else notice it?”
“I put my gloves on right afterward,” said Sheila, “but I—I don’t dare wear it again.”
“Don’t dare wear your wedding-ring!” Winfield roared. “Say, what kind of a marriage is this, anyway?”
“I hope it’s not dependent on a piece of metal round my finger,” Sheila protested. “Your real wedding-ring is round my heart.”
This was not enough for Winfield. She explained to him patiently (and gladly because of the importance he gave the emblem) that she played an unmarried girl in the comedy. And the audience would be sure to spot the wedding-ring.
It simply had to come off, and she begged him to understand and be an angel and take it off himself.
He drew it away at last. But he did not like the omen. She put it on a ribbon and he knotted it about her neck. Then she remembered that she wore a dinner gown in the play, and it had to come off the ribbon. She would have to carry it in her pocketbook.
The omens were hopelessly awry.
CHAPTER XXXIV
The brand-new couple forgot problems of this and every other sort in the raptures and supernal contentments of belonging to each other utterly and forever.
The notifying of their parents was one of the unpleasantest of tasks. They put it off till the next day. Sheila’s father and mother had already begun their tour to the Coast and the news found them in the Middle West.
Sheila telegraphed to them:
Hope my good news wont seem bad news to you Bret and I were quietly married yesterday please keep it secret both terribly terribly happy play opens Grand Rapids Monday best love from us both to you both.
Hope my good news wont seem bad news to you Bret and I were quietly married yesterday please keep it secret both terribly terribly happy play opens Grand Rapids Monday best love from us both to you both.
Her good news was sad enough for them. It filled them with forebodings. That phrase “terribly happy” seemed uncannily appropriate. Between the acts of their comedy that night they clung to each other and wept, moaning: “Poor child! The poor child!”
Winfield’s situation was summed up in a telegram to his home.
Happiest man on earth married only woman on earth yesterday please send your blessings and forgiveness and five hundred dollars.
Happiest man on earth married only woman on earth yesterday please send your blessings and forgiveness and five hundred dollars.
Bret’s mother fainted with a little wail and his father’s weak heart indulged in wild syncopations. When Mrs. Winfield was resuscitated she lay on a couch, weeping tiny old tears and whimpering:
“The poor boy! The poor boy!”
The father sat bronzed with sick anger. He had built up a big industry and the son he had reared to carry it after him had turned out a loafer, a chaser of actresses, and now the worthless dependent on one of them.
Charles Winfield pondered like an old Brutus if it were not his solemn duty to punish the renegade with disinheritance; to divert his fortune to nobler channels and turn over his industry to a nephew who was industrious and loyal to the factory.
But he sent the five hundred dollars. In his day he had eloped with his own wife and alienated his own parents and hers. But that had been different. Now his mouth was full of the ashes of his hopes.
Reben was yet to be told. Sheila said that he had troubles enough on his mind and was in such a state of temper, anyway, that it would be kinder to him not to tell him. This was not altogether altruism.
She dreaded the storm he would raise and longed for a portable cyclone-cellar. She knew that he would denounce her for outrageous dishonor in her treatment of him, and from his point of view there was no justifying her unfealty. But she felt altogether assured that she had accomplished a higher duty. In marrying her true love she was fulfilling her contract with God and Nature and Life, far greater managers than any Reben.
She had, therefore, for her final rapture the exquisite tang of stolen sweets. And to the mad completeness of the escapade was added the hallowing sanction of law and the Church.
It was a honeymoon, indeed, but pitilessly interrupted by the tasks of departure, and pitifully brief.
The question of whether or not her husband—how she did read that word “husband”!—should travel on the same train with her to Grand Rapids was a hard riddle.
Both of them were unready to publish the delirious secret of their wedding.
There was to be a special sleeping-car for the company. For Sheila as the star the drawing-room was reserved, while Reben had claimed the stateroom at the other end of the coach.
To smuggle Bret into her niche would be too perilous. For her to travel in another car with him was equally impossible. If he went on the same train he might be recognized in the dining-car. For her to take another train would not be permitted. A manager has to keep his flock together.
At length they were driven to the appalling hardship of separation for the journey. Bret would take an earlier train, and arrange for their sojourn at the quietest hotel in Grand Rapids. She would join him there, and no one would know of her tryst.
So they agreed, and she saw him off on the noon express. Of all the topsy-turvy households ever heard of, this was the worst! But they parted as fiercely as if he were going to the wars.
The company car left at five o’clock in the afternoon, and was due in Grand Rapids at one the next day. Eldon and Pennock alone knew that the young star was a young bride. Both of them regarded Sheila with such woeful reproach that she ordered Pennock to change her face or jump off the train, and she shut herself away from Eldon in her drawing-room.
But she was soon routed out by Batterson for a reading rehearsal of a new scene that Prior had concocted. She was so afraid of Eldon’s eyes and so absent-minded with thoughts of her courier husband that Batterson thought she had lost her wits.
Twice she called Eldon “Bret” instead of “Ned,” the name of his rôle. That was how he learned who it was she had married.
Even when she escaped to study the new lines she could not get her mind on anything but fears for the train that carried her husband.
After dinner Reben called on her for a chat. He alluded to the fact that he had wired ahead for the best room in the best hotel for the new star.
Sheila was aghast at this complication, which she would have foreseen if she had ever been either a star or a bride before.
Reben was in a mood of hope. The voyage to new scenes heartened everybody except Sheila. Reben kept trying to cheer her up. He could best have cheered her by leaving her. He imputed her distracted manner to stage-fright. It was everything but that.
That night Sheila knew for the first time what loneliness really means. She pined in solitude, an early widow.
The train was late in arriving and the company was ordered to report at the theater in half an hour. The company-manager informed Sheila that her trunk would be sent to her hotel as soon as possible. She thanked him curtly, and he growled to Batterson:
“She’s playing the prima donna already.”
She was all befuddled by this new tangle. How was she to smuggle her trunk from the hotel to her husband’s lodgings, and where were they? He had arranged to leave a letter at the theater instructing her where they were to pitch their tent. She went directly to the theater.
She found a corpulent envelope in the mail-box at the stage door. It was full of mourning for the lost hours and full of enthusiasm over the cozy nook Bret had discovered in the outer edge of town. He implored her to make haste.
As she set out to find a telephone and explain to him the delay for rehearsal, she was called back by Reben to the dark stage where Batterson and Prior and Eldon were gathered under the glimmer of a few lights on an iron standard. They were discussing a new bit of business.
Sheila was aflame with impatience, but she could not leave. Before the council of war was finished the general rehearsal was called—a distracting ordeal, with the company crowded to the footlights and struggling to remember lines and cues in the battle-like clamor of getting the scenery in, making the new drops fast to the ropes and hoisting them away to the flies. Hammers were pounding, canvases going up, stage-hands shouting and interrupting.
The rehearsal was vexatious enough in all conscience, but its crudities were aggravated by the icy realization that this was the final rehearsal before the production. In a few hours the multitude of empty chairs would be occupied by the big jury.
Under this strain the actors developed disheartening lapses of memory that promised complications at night. When the lines had been parroted over, Reben spoke a few words like a dubious king addressing his troops before battle. The stage-manager sang out with unwonted comradery:
“Go to it, folks, and good luck!”
Sheila dashed to the stage door, only to be called again by Reben. He offered to walk to the hotel with her. She dared not refuse. He invited her to dine with him. She said that she would be dining in her room. In the lobby of the hotel he had much to say and kept her waiting. He was trying to cheer up a poor fluttering girl about to go through the fire. He found her peculiarly ill at ease.
At last she escaped him and flew to her room to telephone Bret. She knew he must be boiling over by now. Pennock met her with exciting news. Certain articles of her costume had not arrived as promised. Shopping must be done at once, since the stores were about to close.
All things must yield to the battle-needs, and Sheila postponed telephoning Bret; it was the one postponable duty. By the time she had finished her purchases it was too late to make the trip out to the cozy nook he had selected. She was bitterly disappointed on his account—and her own.
She reached the telephone at last, only to learn that he had gone out, leaving a message that if his wife called up she was to be told to come to their lodgings at once. But this she could not do. And she could not find him to explain why.
He found her at last by telephone, and when she described her plight to him he was furious with disappointment and wrath. He had bought flowers lavishly and decorated the rooms and the table where they were to have had peace at last for a while. Nullified hope sickened him.
He could not visit her at the theater during her make-up periods or between the acts. He had to skulk about during the performance, dodging Reben, who watched the play from the front and shifted his position from time to time to get various points of view, and overhear what the people said.
Numberless mishaps punctuated the opening performance of “The Woman Pays,” as the play had been relabeled for the sixth time at the eleventh hour. Lines were forgotten and twisted, and characters called out of their names.
In the scene where Eldon was to propose to Sheila and she to accept him, the distraite Sheila, unable to remember a line exactly, gave its general meaning. Unfortunately she used a phrase that was one of Eldon’s cues later on. He answered it mechanically as he had been rehearsed, and then gave Sheila the right cue for the wrong scene. Her memory went on from there and she heard herself accepting Eldon before he had proposed. He realized the blunder at the same time.
They paused, stared, hesitated, wondering how to get back to the starting-point, and improvised desperately while the prompter stood helpless in the wings, not knowing where to throw what line. Reben swore silently and perspired. The audience blamed itself for its bewilderment.
But even amid such confusion Sheila was fascinating. There was no doubt of that. When she appeared the spectators sat forward, the whole face of the house beamed and smiled “welcome” with instant hospitality. Reben recognized the mysterious power and told Starr Coleman and the house-manager that Kemble was a gold-mine.
Bret felt his heart go out to the brave, pretty thing she was up there, sparkling and glowing and making people happy. He was proud that she belonged to him. He felt sorry for the public because it had to lose her. But he was not the public’s keeper. He was glad he had made her cut out that embrace with Eldon—both of the embraces.
The last curtain fell just before the lovers moved into each other’s open arms. This was the “artistic” effect that Sheila had persuaded Reben to try. Even Bret felt a lurch of disappointment in the audience. There was applause, but the rising curtain disclosed the actors bowing. There was something wanting. Bret would have regretted it himself if he had not been the husband of the star.
He was aching with impatience to see her and tell her how wonderful she was. He did not dare go back on the stage, lest his presence in Grand Rapids should require explaining. He must wait in the alley—he, the owner of the star, must wait in the alley!
He hated the humiliation of his position, and thanked Heaven that after this season Sheila would be at home with him. He hoped that it would not take her long to slip into her street clothes.
He was the more eager to see her as he had prepared a little banquet in their rooms. In his over-abundant leisure he had bought a chafing-dish and the other things necessary to a supper. Everything was set out, ready. He chuckled as he trudged up and down the alley and pictured Sheila’s delight, and the cozy housewifeliness of her as she should light the lamp and stir the chafing-dish. They would begin very light housekeeping at once, with never a servant to mar their communion.
But Sheila did not come. None of the company emerged from the stage door. It was long after twelve and nobody had appeared. He did not know that the company had been held after the performance for criticism. Aligned in all its fatigue and after-slump, it waited to be harangued by Reben while the “grips” whisked away the scenery. Reben read the copious notes he had made. He spared no one. Every member in turn was rebuked for something, and he carefully refrained from any words of approval lest the company should become conceited.
Reben believed in lashing his horses to their tasks. Others believe otherwise and succeed as well, but Reben was known as a “slave-driver.” He paid good prices for his slaves and it was a distinction to belong to him; but he worked them hard.
Batterson and Prior had also made notes on the performance and the dismal actors received spankings one after another. Sheila was not overlooked. Rather she was subjected to extra severity because she carried the success or failure on her young shoulders.
As usual, the first performance found the play too long. The first rough cuts were announced and a rehearsal called for the next morning at ten.
It was half past twelve when the forlorn and worn-out players were permitted to slink off to their dressing-rooms.
Sheila knew that her poor Bret must have been posting the alley outside like a caged hyena. She was so tired and dejected that she hardly cared. She sent Pennock out to explain. Pennock could not find him. She did not look long. She did not like him. When at length Sheila was dressed for the street she found Reben waiting for her with the news that he had ordered a little supper in a private room at the hotel, so that she and Batterson, Prior and Eldon and the company-manager and the press agent, Starr Coleman, and the house-manager, might discuss the play while it was fresh in their minds.
Sheila had never sat on one of these inquests before, and she had not foreseen the call to this one. Such conferences are as necessary in the theater as a meeting of generals after a hard day’s battle. Long after the critics have turned in their diatribes or eulogies and gone home to bed, the captains of the drama are comparing notes, quoting what the audience has said, searching out flaws and discussing them, often with more asperity than the roughest critic reveals.
In these anxious night-watches the fate of the new play may be settled, and advance, retreat, or surrender decided upon.
Sheila, thinking of her poor husband, asked Reben to excuse her from the conference.
His look of amazement and his sharp “Why?” found her without any available excuse. She drearily consented and was led along.
During and after the cold supper everybody had much to say except Sheila. Endless discussions arose on minutely unimportant points or upon great vague principles of the drama and of public appeal. At three o’clock Sheila began to doze and wake in short agonies. There was a hint of daybreak in the sky when the meeting broke up. She was too sleepy to care much whether she lived or died or had a husband or had just lost one. She made a somnambulistic effort to search for Bret, but Reben and the others had adjourned to the hotel lobby for further debate and she dared not challenge their curiosity.
She went to the room the manager had reserved for her and slept there like a Juliet on her tomb.