CHAPTER XXXV
The next morning Pennock did not call Sheila till the last moment. Then her breakfast was on the table and her bath in the tub. The old dragon had again forbidden the telephone operator to ring the bell, and the bell-boys that came to the door with messages from Bret she shooed away.
Sheila found on her breakfast-tray a small stack of notes from Bret. They ranged from incredulous amazement at her neglect to towering rage.
Sheila was still new enough to wedlock to feel sorrier for him than for herself. She had a dim feeling that Bret had in him the makings of a very difficult specimen of that most difficult class, the prima donna’s husband. But she blamed her profession and hated the theater and Reben for tormenting her poor, patient, devoted, long-suffering lover.
Yet as the soldier bridegroom, however he hates the war, obeys his captain none the less, so Sheila never dreamed of mutiny. She was an actor’s daughter and no treachery could be worse than to desert a manager, a company, and a work of art at the crisis of the whole investment. She regretted that she was not even giving her whole mind and ambition to her work. But how could she with her husband in such a plight?
She wrote Bret a little note of mad regret, abject apology, and insane devotion, and asked Pennock to get it to him at once.
Pennock growled: “You better give that young man to me. You’ll never have time to see him. And his jealousy is simply dretful.”
At the theater Sheila met Reben in a morning-after mood. He had had little sleep and he was sure that the play was hopeless. The only thing that could have cured him would have been a line of people at the box-office. The lobby was empty, and few spaces can look quite so empty as a theater lobby. The box-office man spoke to him, too, with a familiarity based undoubtedly on the notices.
One of the papers published a fulsome eulogy that Starr Coleman would not have dared to submit. Of the opposite tenor was the slashing abuse of a more important paper that nursed one of those critics of which each town has at least a single specimen—the local Archilochus whose similar ambition seems to be to drive the objects of his satire to suicide.
His chief support is his knowledge that his readers enjoy his vigor in pelting transient actors as a small boy throws rocks at express trains. His highest reward is the town boast, “We got a critic can roast an actor as good as anybuddy in N’York, and ain’t afraid to do it, either.”
As children these humorists first show their genius by placing bent pins on chairs; later they pull the chairs from under old ladies and start baby-carriages on a downward path. Every day is April fool to them.
Reben was always arguing that critics had nothing to do with success or failure and always ready to document his argument, and always trembled before them, none the less. It is small wonder that critics learn to secrete vitriol, since their praise makes so little effect and only their acid etches.
Reben had tossed aside the paper that praised his company and his play, but he clipped the hostile articles. The play-roaster began, as usual, with a pun on the title, “The Woman Pays but the audience won’t.”
As a matter of fact, Reben was about convinced that the play was a failure. It had succeeded in France because it was written for the French. The process of adaptation had taken away its Gallic brilliance without adding any Anglo-Saxon trickery. Reben would make a fight for it, before he gave up, but he had a cold, dismal intuition which he summed up to Batterson in that simple fatal phrase:
“It won’t do.”
He did not tell Sheila so, lest he hurt her work, but he told Prior that the play was deficient in viscera—only he used the grand old Anglo-Saxon phrasing.
He gave Prior some ideas for the visceration of the play and set him to work on a radical reconstruction, chiefly involving a powerful injection of heart-interest. Till this was ready there was no use meddling with details.
When Sheila reached the theater the rehearsal was brief and perfunctory. Reben explained the situation, and told her to take a good rest and give a performance at night. He had only one suggestion:
“Put more pep in the love-scenes and restore the clutch at the last curtain.”
Sheila gasped, “But I thought it was so much more artistic the way we played it last night.”
Reben laughed: “Ah, behave! When the curtain fell last night the thud could be heard a mile. The people thought it fell by accident. If the box-office hadn’t been closed they’d have hollered for their money back. You jump into Eldon’s arms to-night and hug as hard as you can. The same to you, Eldon. It’s youth and love they come to see, not artistic omissions.”
Sheila felt grave misgivings as to the effect of the restoration on her own arch-critic and private audience. But she rejoiced at being granted a holiday. She telephoned to Bret from a drug-store.
“I’ve got a day off, honey. Isn’t it gee-lo-rious!”
Then she sped to him as fast as a taxicab could take her. He had an avalanche of grievances waiting for her, but the sight of her beauty running home to him melted the stored-up snows. The chafing-dish was still in place after its all-night vigil, and it cooked a luncheon that rivaled quails and manna.
That afternoon Bret chartered a motor and they rode afar. They talked much of their first moonlight ride. It was still moonlight about them, though people better acquainted with the region would have called it afternoon sunlight. When Bret kissed her now she did not complain or threaten. In fact, she complained and threatened when he did not kiss her.
They dined outside the city walls and scudded home in the sunset. Sheila would not let Bret take her near the theater, lest he be seen. Indeed, she begged him not to go to the theater at all that night, but to spend the hours of waiting at the vaudeville or some moving-picture house. He protested that he did not want her out of his sight.
The reason she gave was not the real one: “Everybody always plays badly at a second performance, honey. I’d hate to have you see how badly I can play. Please don’t go to-night.”
He consented sulkily; she had a hope that the romantic emphasis Reben had commanded and the final embrace would fail so badly that he would not insist on their retention. She did not want Bret to see the experiment. But there was no denying that warmth helped the play immensely. Sheila’s increased success distressed her. Her marriage had tied all her ambitions into such a snarl that she could be true neither to Bret nor to Reben and least of all to herself.
Reben was jubilant. “What d’I tell you? That’s what they pay for; a lot of heart-throbs and one or two big punches. We’ll get ’em yet. Will you have a bite of supper with us to-night?”
“Thanks ever so much,” said Sheila. “I have an engagement with—friends.”
She simply had not the courage to use the singular.
Reben laughed: “So long as it’s not just one. By the by, where were you all day? I tried all afternoon to get you at the hotel. I wanted to take you out for a little fresh air.”
“That’s awfully nice of you, but I got the air. I—I was motoring.”
“With friendzz?” he asked, peculiarly.
“Naturally not with enemies.”
She thought that rather quick work. But he gave her a suspicious look.
“Remember, Sheila—your picture is pasted all over town. These small cities are gossip-factories. Be careful. Remember the old saying, if you can’t be good, be careful.”
She blushed scarlet and protested, “Mr. Reben!”
He apologized in haste, convinced that his suspicions were outrageous, and glad to be wrong. He added: “I’ve got good news for you: the office sale for to-morrow’s matinee and night shows a little jump. That tells the story. When the business grows, we can laugh at the critics.”
“Fine!” said Sheila, half-heartedly. Then she hurried from the theater to the carriage waiting at the appointed spot. The door opened magically and she was drawn into the dark and cuddled into the arms of her “friends,” her family, her world.
After the first informalities Bret asked, “Well, how did it go?”
“Pretty well, everybody said. But it needs a lot of work. Reben is sure we’ve got a success, eventually.”
“That’s good,” Bret sighed.
When they reached the hotel they found that they had neglected to provide supplies for the chafing-dish. Sheila was hungry.
“We’re old married people now,” said Sheila. “Let’s have supper in the dining-room. There’ll be nobody we know in this little hotel.”
They took supper in the little dining-room. There were only two other people there. Sheila noted that they stared at her with frank delight and plainly kept talking about her. She was used to it; Winfield did not see anybody on earth but Sheila.
“Kind of nice being together in public like decent people,” he beamed.
“Isn’t it?” she gleamed.
“Let’s have another motor-ride to-morrow afternoon.”
“I can’t, honey. It’s matinée day.”
“We’ll get up early and go in the morning, then.”
“Oh, but I’ve got to sleep as late as I can, honey! It’s a hard day for me.”
The next morning they had breakfast served in their apartment at twelve o’clock. She called it breakfast. It was lunch for Bret.
He had stolen out of the darkened room at eight and gone down to his breakfast in the cafe. He had dawdled about the town, buying her flowers and gifts. When he got back at eleven she was still asleep. She looked as if she had been drowned.
He sat in the dim light till it was time to call her. They were eating grapefruit out of the same spoon when the telephone rang. A gruff voice greeted Bret:
“Is this Mr. Winfield?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“Is—Miss—is Sheila there?”
“Ye—yes. Who are you?”
“Mr. Reben.”
CHAPTER XXXVI
That morning Reben had wakened early with a head full of inspirations. He was fairly lyrical with ideas. He wanted to talk them over with Sheila. He called up her room. Pennock answered the telephone.
“Can I speak to Miss Kemble?”
“She—she’s not up yet.”
“Oh! Well, as soon as she is up have her let me know. I want a word with her.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pennock, in dismay, called up Winfield’s hotel to forewarn Sheila. But Winfield had gone out, leaving word that his wife was not to be disturbed. Pennock left a message that she was to call up Miss Pennock as soon as she was disturbable. The message was put in Winfield’s box. When he came in he did not stop at the desk to inquire for messages, since he expected none.
Reben grew more and more eager to explain his new ideas to Sheila. He called up Pennock again.
“Isn’t Miss Kemble up yet?”
“Oh yes,” said Pennock.
“I want to speak to her.”
The distracted Pennock groped for the nearest excuse:
“She—she’s gone out.”
“But I told you to tell her! Didn’t you tell her I wanted to speak to her?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing, sir; nothing,” Pennock faltered. She had told one big lie that morning and her invention was exhausted.
“That’s damned funny,” Reben growled. Slapping the receiver on the hook, he went to the cigar-stand, fuming, and bought a big black cigar to bite on.
When plays are failures one’s friends avoid one. When plays are successes strangers crowd forward with congratulations. The cigar girl said to the angry manager, who had given her free tickets the night before; “That’s a lovely show, Mr. Reben. I had a lovely time, and Miss Kemble is simpully love-la.”
A stranger who was poking a cheap cigar into the general chopper spoke in: “I was there last night, too—me and the wife. You the manager?”
Reben nodded impatiently.
The stranger went on: “That’s a great little star you got there—Miss Kemble—or Mrs. Winfield, I suppose I’d ought to say.”
Reben looked his surprise. “Mrs. Winfield?”
“Yes. She’s stopping at our hotel with her husband. Right nice-lookin’ feller. Actor, too, I s’pose? I’m on here buying furniture. I always stop at the Emerton. Right nice hotel. Prices reasonable; food fair to middlin’. Has she been married long?”
But Reben had moved off. He was in a mood to believe any bad rumor. This, being the worst news imaginable, sounded true. He felt queasy with business disgust and with plain old-fashioned moral shock. He rushed for the telephone-booth and clawed at the book till he found the number of the Emerton Hotel. He was puffing with anxious wrath.
When Winfield answered, Reben almost collapsed. While he waited he took his temper under control. When he heard Sheila’s voice quivering with all the guilt in the world he mumbled, quietly:
“Oh, Sheila, I’d like to have a word with you.”
“Wh-where?” Sheila quivered.
“Here. No—at the theater. No—yes, at the theater.”
“All right,” she mumbled. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
Sheila went to the theater with the joyous haste of a child going up to the teacher’s desk for punishment. She wondered how Reben could have learned of the marriage. She wished she had told him of it when it was celebrated. She felt that poor Reben had a just grievance against her. It would be only fair to let him scold his anger out, and bear his tirade in quiet resignation.
Bret thought that he might as well come along, since he had been unearthed. But Sheila would not permit him to enter the theater lest Reben and he fall to blows. She did not want Reben to be beaten up. She left Bret in the alley, and promised to call for him if she were attacked.
The theater was quite deserted at this hour. Sheila found Reben pacing the corridor before her dressing-room. She advanced toward him timidly with shame that he misinterpreted. He fairly lashed her with his glare and groaned in all contempt:
“My God, Sheila, I’d never have thought it of you!”
“Thought what?” Sheila gasped.
He laughed harshly: “And you called me down for insulting you! And you got away with it! But, say, you ought to use your brains if you’re going to play a game like that. Coarse work, Sheila; coarse work!”
Sheila bit her lip to keep back the resentment boiling up in her heart.
He went on with his denunciation: “I warned you that you would be known everywhere you went. I told you your picture was all over town. And now your name is. A stranger comes up to me and says he saw you and your—your ‘husband,’ Mr. Winfield? Who’s the man? What’s his real name?”
“Mr. Winfield, of course.”
“Oh, of course! Where did you meet him? Does he live here?”
“Live here! Indeed, he doesn’t!”
“He followed you here, then?”
“He preceded me here.”
“It’s as bad as that, eh? Well, you leave him here, at once. If he comes near you again I’ll break every bone in his body.”
Sheila laughed. “You haven’t seen my husband, have you?”
“Your husband?” Reben laughed. “Are you going to try to bluff it out with me, too?”
Sheila blenched at this. “He is my husband!” she stormed. “And you’d better not let him hear you talk so to me.”
Reben’s knees softened under him. “Sheila! you don’t mean that you’ve gone and got yourself married!”
“What else should I mean? How dare you think anything else?”
“Oh, you fool! you fool! you little damned fool!”
“Thanks!”
“You little sneaking traitor. Didn’t you promise me, on your word of honor—”
“I promised to carry out my contract. And here I am.”
“I ought to break that contract myself.”
“You couldn’t please me better.”
He stood over her and glowered while his fingers twitched. She stared back at him pugnaciously. Then he mourned over her. She was both his lost love and his lost ward. His regret broke out in a groan:
“Why did you do this, Sheila? Why, why—in God’s name, why?”
Sheila had no answer. He might as well have shouted at her: “Why does the earth roll toward the east? Why does gravity haul the worlds together and keep them apart? Why are flowers? or June? what’s the reason for June?”
Sheila knew why no more than the rose knows why.
At length Reben’s business instinct came to the rescue of his heartbreak. He thought of his investment, of his contracts, of his hoped-for profits. His experience as a manager had taught him to be another Job. He ignored her challenge, and groaned, “How are we going to keep this crime a secret?”
Sheila, seeing that he had surrendered, forgot her anger. “Have we got to?”
“Of course we have. You know it won’t help you any to be known as a married woman. O Lord! what fools these mortals be! We’ve got to keep it dark at least till the play gets over in New York. If it’s a hit it won’t matter so much; if it’s a flivver, it will matter still less.”
He was heartsick at her folly and her double-dealing. Such things and worse had happened to him and to other managers. They force managers to be cynical and to drive hard bargains while they can. Like captains of ships, they are always at the ultimate mercy of any member of the crew. But they must make voyages somehow.
Feeling the uselessness of wasting reproaches, Reben left Sheila and groped through the dark house to the lobby. There he found a most interesting spectacle—a line at the box-office. It was a convincing argument. Sheila had draught. Even with a poor play in an unready condition, she drew the people to the box-office. He must make the most of her treason.
But his heart was sick. He was managing a married star. This was double trouble with half the fun.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
Now that the cat was out of the bag, and the husband out of the closet, Sheila decided to produce Bret at the train the next morning. He was about to get a taste of the gipsying life known as “trouping” and he was to learn the significance of the one-night stand.
He had felt so shamefaced for his part in the deception of Reben that when he visited the play during the evening performance, and saw the much-discussed embrace restored, he had no heart to make a vigorous protest. And Sheila was too weary after the two performances to be hectored. It was heartbreaking to him to see her so exhausted.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked, helplessly.
“Petoskey,” she yawned.
“Petoskey!” he gasped. “That’s in Russia. In Heaven’s name, do we—”
He was ready to believe in almost anything imbecile. But she explained that their Petoskey was in Michigan. He did not approve of Michigan.
His hatred of his wife’s profession began to take deeper root. It flourished exceedingly when they had to get up for the train the next morning at six. It was hard enough for him to begin the new day. Sheila’s struggles to fight off sleep were desperate. Sleep was like an octopus whose many arms took new hold as fast as they were torn loose. Bret was so sorry for her that he begged her to let the company go without her. She could take a later train. But even her sad face was crinkled with a smile at the impossibility of this suggestion.
Breakfast was the sort of meal usually flung together by servants alarm-clocked earlier than their wont. For all their gulping and hurry, Bret and Sheila nearly missed the train. It was moving as they clambered aboard.
“Which is the parlor-car?” Bret asked the brakeman.
“Ain’t none.”
“Do you mean to say that we’ve got to ride all day in a day coach?”
“That’s about it, Cap.”
Bret was furious. Worse yet, the train was so crowded that it was impossible for them even to have a double space. Their suit-cases had to be distributed at odd points in racks, under seats, and at the end of the car.
Bret remembered that he had forgotten to get his ticket, but the business-manager, Mr. McNish, passed by and offered his congratulations and a free transportation, with Mr. Reben’s compliments. Bret did not want to be beholden to Mr. Reben, but Sheila prevailed on him not to be ungracious.
When the conductor came along the aisle she said, “Company.”
“Both?” said the conductor, and she smiled, “Yes,” and giggled, adding to Bret, “You’re one of the troupe now.”
Bret did not seem to be flattered.
Reben came down the aisle to meet the bridegroom. He was doing his best to take his defeat gracefully. Bret could not even take his triumph so.
Other members of the company drifted forward and offered their felicitations. They made themselves at home in the coach, sitting about on the arms of seats and exchanging family jokes.
The rest of the passengers craned their necks to stare at the bridegroom, crimson with shame and anger. Bret loathed being stared at. Sheila did not like it, but she was used to it. Both writhed at the well-meant humor and the good wishes of the actors and actresses. Their effusiveness offended Bret mortally. He could have proclaimed himself the luckiest man on earth, but he objected to being called so by these actors. If he had been similarly heckled by people of any sort—college friends, club friends, doctors, lawyers, merchants—he would have resented their manner, for everybody hazes bridal couples. But since he had fallen among actors, he blamed actors for his distress.
Eldon alone failed to come forward with good wishes, and Bret was unreasonable enough to take umbrage at that. Why did Eldon remain aloof? Was he jealous? What right had he to be jealous?
Altogether, the bridegroom was doing his best to make rough weather of his halcyon sea. Sheila was at her wits’ end to cheer him who should have been cheering her.
At noon a few sandwiches of the railroad sort were obtained by a dash to a station lunch-counter. Bret apologized to Sheila, but she assured him that he was not to blame and was not to mind such little troubles; they were part of the business. He minded them none the less and he hated the business.
The town of Petoskey, when they reached it, did not please him in any respect. The hotel pleased him less. When he asked for two rooms with bath the clerk snickered and gave him one without. He explained with contempt, “They’s a bath-room right handy down the hall and baths are a quarter extry.”
It was a riddle whether it were cleanlier to keep the grime one had or fly to a bath-room one knew not of. When Bret and Sheila appeared at the screen door which kept the flies in the dining-room they were beckoned down the line by an Amazonian head waitress. She planted them among a group of grangers who stared at Sheila and picked their teeth snappily.
The dinner was a small-hotel dinner—a little bit of a lot of things in a flotilla of small dishes.
The audience at the theater was sparse and indifferent. The play had begun to bore Winfield. It irritated him to see Sheila repeating the same love-scenes night after night—especially with that man Eldon.
After the play supper was to be had nowhere except at a cheap and ill-conditioned little all-night restaurant where there was nothing to eat but egg sandwiches and pie, the pastry thicker and hardly more digestible than the resounding stone china it was served on.
The bedroom at the hotel was ill ventilated, the plush furniture greasy, the linen coarse, and the towels few and new. Bret declared it outrageous that his beautiful, his exquisite bride should be so shabbily housed, fed like a beggar, and bedded like a poor relation. Almost all of his ill temper was on her account, and she could not but love him for it.
After a dolefully realistic night came again the poignant tragedy of early rising, another gulped breakfast, another dash for the train. The driver of the hack never came. Bret and Sheila waited for him till it was necessary to run all the way to the station. The station was handier to the railroad than to the hotel. Since red-caps were an institution unknown to Petoskey, they carried their own baggage.
The itinerary of the day included a change of trains and an eventual arrival at no less—and no more—a place than Sheboygan.
There they found a county fair in progress and the hotels packed. Decent rooms were not to be had at any price. It took much beseeching even to secure a shelter in a sample-room filled with long tables for drummers to display their wares on. They waited like mendicants for luncheon in an overcrowded dining-room where over-driven waitresses cowed the timorous guests. Sheila had not time to finish her luncheon before she must hurry away to a rehearsal. Bret left his and went with her, racing along the streets and growling:
“Why is Reben such a fool as to play in towns like this?”
“He has to play somewhere, honey, to whip the play into shape,” Sheila panted.
“Well, he’s whipping you out of shape.”
“I don’t mind, dearest. It’s fun to me. It’s all part of the business.”
“Well, I want you to get out of the business. It’s unfit for a decent woman.”
“Oh—honey!”
It was a feeble little wail from a great hurt. Plainly Bret would never comprehend the majestic qualities of her art, or realize that its inconveniences were no more than the minor hardships of an army on a great campaign.
At the rehearsal the first of Prior’s new scenes was gone over. It emphasized the “heart-interest” with a vengeance. Sheila trembled to think what her husband would do when he saw it played. She was glad that it was not to be tried until the following week. Every moment of postponement for the inevitable storm was so much respite.
They rehearsed all afternoon. The struggle for dinner was more trying than for the luncheon. The performance was early and hasty, as it was necessary to catch a train immediately after the last curtain, in order to reach Bay City for the Saturday matinée. Worse yet, they had to leave the car at four o’clock in the morning.
This time it was Bret who was hard to waken. His big body was so famished for sleep that Sheila was afraid she would have to leave him on the train. She was wiry, and her enthusiasm for the battle gave her a courage that her disgusted husband lacked. There was no carriage at the station and Bret stumbled and swore drowsily at the dark streets and the intolerable conditions.
He had nothing to interest him except the infinite annoyances and exactions of his wife’s career. There was nothing to reward him for his privations except to lumber along in her wake like a coal-barge hauled by a tug.
His pride was mutinous, and it seemed a degradation to permit his bride to run from place to place as if she were a fugitive from justice. He had wealth and the habit of luxury, and his idea of a honeymoon was the ultimate opposite of this frenzied gipsying.
He had always understood that actors were a lazy folk whose life was one of easy vagabondage, with all the vices that indolence fosters. Three days of trouping had wrecked his strength; yet he had done none of the work but the travel.
When he protested the next morning at early breakfast that the tour would be the death of them both Sheila looked up from the part she was studying and laughed:
“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. We haven’t made any long jumps yet. The route-sheet says we leave Bay City at one o’clock to-night and get to Ishpeming at half past four to-morrow afternoon. We rehearse Sunday night and all day Monday, play that night, and take a train at midnight back to Menominee. From there we rush back to Calumet, and then on to Duluth.”
Bret set his coffee-cup down hard and growled, “Well, this is where I leave you.”
He spoke truer than he knew. He had kept his family informed of his whereabouts by night-letters, in which he alluded to the blissful time he ought to have been having. When he took Sheila to the theater for the matinée he found a telegram for him.
He winced at the address: “Bret Winfield, Esq., care of Miss Sheila Kemble, Opera House, Bay City.” He forgot the pinch of pride when he read the message:
Please come home at once your father dangerously ill and asking for you.Mother.
Please come home at once your father dangerously ill and asking for you.
Mother.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Sheila saw the anguish of dread cover his face like a sudden fling of ashes. He handed the telegram to her, and she put her arms about his shoulders to uphold him and shelter him from the sledge of fate.
“Poor old dad!” he groaned. “And mother! I must take the first train.”
She nodded her head dismally.
He read the telegram again in a stupor, and mumbled, “I wish you could come with me.”
“If I only could!”
“You ought to,” he urged.
“Oh, I know it—but I can’t.”
“You may never see my father again.”
“Don’t say that! He’ll get well, honey; you mustn’t think anything else. Oh, it’s too bad! it’s just too bad!”
He felt lonely and afraid of what was ahead of him. He was afraid of his father’s death, and of a funeral. He was terrified at the thought of his mother’s woe. He could feel her clutching at him helplessly, frantically, and telling him that he was all she had left. His eyes filled with tears at the vision and they blinded him to everything but the vision. He put his hands out through the mist and caught Sheila’s arms and pleaded:
“You ought to come with me, now of all times.”
She could only repeat and repeat: “I know it, but I can’t, I can’t. You see that I can’t, don’t you, honey?”
His voice was harsh when he answered: “No, I don’t see why you can’t. Your place is there.”
She cast her eyes up and beat her palms together hopelessly over the complete misunderstanding that thwarted the union of their souls. She took his hands again and squeezed them passionately.
Reben came upon them, swinging his cane. Seeing the two holding hands, he essayed a frivolity. “Honeymoon not on the wane yet?”
Sheila told him the truth. He was all sympathy at once. His race made him especially tender to filial love, and his grief brought tears to his eyes. He crushed Bret’s hands in his own and poured out sorrow like an ointment. His deep voice trembled with fellowship:
“If I could only do anything to help you!”
Winfield caught at the proffer. “You can! Let Sheila go home with me.”
Reben gasped. “My boy, my boy! It’s impossible! The matinée begins in half an hour. She should be making up now.”
“Let somebody else play her part.”
“There is no understudy ready. We never select the understudy for the try-out performances. Sheila, you must understand.”
“I do, of course; but poor Bret—he can’t seem to.”
“Oh, all right, I understand,” Winfield sighed with a resignation that terrified Sheila. “What train can I get? Do you know?”
Reben knew the trains. He would get the company-manager to secure the tickets. Bret must go by way of Detroit. He could not leave till after five. He would reach Buffalo early Sunday morning and be home in the late afternoon.
The big fellow’s frame shook with anxiety. So much could happen in twenty-four hours. It would seem a year to his poor mother. He hurried away to send her a telegram. Sheila paused at the stage door, staring after his forlorn figure; then she darted in to her task.
Bret came back shortly and dropped into a chair in Sheila’s dressing-room. His eyes, dulled with grief, watched her as she plastered on her face the various layers of color, spreading the carmine on cheek and ear with savage brilliance, penciling her eyelashes till thick beads of black hung from them, painting her eyelids blue above and below, and smearing her lips with scarlet.
He turned from her, sick with disgust.
Sheila felt his aversion, and it choked her when she tried to comfort him. She painted her arms and shoulders white and powdered them till clouds of dust rose from the puff. Pennock made the last hooks fast and Sheila rose for the final primpings of coquetry.
Pennock opened the door of the dressing-room to listen for the cue. When the time came Sheila sighed, ran to Bret, clasped him in a tight embrace, and kissed his wet forehead. Her arms left white streaks across his coat, and her lips red marks on his face.
He followed to watch her make her entrance. She stood a moment between the flats, turned and stared her adoration at him through her viciously leaded eyelashes, and wafted him a sad kiss. Then she caught up her train and began to laugh softly as from a distance. She ran out into the glow of artificial noon, laughing. A faint applause greeted her, the muffled applause of a matinée audience’s gloved hands.
Bret watched her, heard her voice sparkle, heard it greeted with waves of hilarity. He could not realize how broken-hearted she was for him. He could not understand how separate a thing her stage emotions were from her personal feelings.
Good news would not have helped her comedy; bad news could hardly alter it. She went through her well-learned lines and intonations as a first-class soldier does the manual of arms without reference to his love or grief.
All Bret knew was that his wife was out there, laughing and causing laughter, while far away his mother was sobbing—sobbing perhaps above the chill clay of his father.
He hurried from the stage door to pack his trunk. He went cursing the theater, and himself for lingering in its infamous shadow. He did not come back till the play was over and Sheila in her street clothes. In her haste she had overlooked traces of her make-up—that odious blue about the eyes, the pink edging of the ears, the lead on the eyelashes.
Once more Sheila went to the train with her husband. They clung together in fierce farewells, repeated and repeated till the train was moving and the porter must run alongside to help Bret aboard.
When he looked back he could not see Sheila’s pathetic figure and her sad face. When he thought of her he thought of her laughing in her motley. All the next day he thought of her in the theater rehearsing.
He loved her perhaps the more for that unattainable soul of hers. He had won her, wed her, possessed her, made her his in body and name; but her soul was still uncaptured. He vowed and vowed again that he would make her altogether his. She was his wife; she should be like other wives.
When he reached home his father was dead. His mother was too weak with grief to rebuke him for being on a butterfly-hunt at such a time.
He knelt by her bed and held her in his arms while she told him of his father’s long fight to keep alive till his boy came back. She begged him not to leave her again, and he promised her that he would make her home his.
The days that ensued were filled with tasks of every solemn kind. There was the funeral to prepare for and endure, and after that the assumption of all his father’s wealth. This came to him, not as a mighty treasure to squander, but as a delicate invalid to nurture and protect.
Sheila’s telegrams and letters were incessant and so full of devotion for him that they had room for little about herself.
She told him she was working hard and missing him terribly, and what her next address would be. She tried vainly to mask her increasing terror of the dreadful opening in Chicago.
He wished that he might be with her, yet knew that he had no real help to give her. He prayed for her success, but with a mental reservation that if the play were the direst failure he would not be sorry, for it would bring them to peace the sooner.
He tried to school his undisciplined mind to the Herculean task of learning in a few days what his father had acquired by a life of toil. The factory ran on smoothly under the control of its superintendents, but big problems concerning the marketing of the output, consolidation with the trust, and enlargement of the plant, were rising every hour. These matters he must decide like an infant king whose ministers disagree.
To his shame and dismay, he could not give his whole heart to the work; his heart was with Sheila. He thought of her without rancor now. He recognized the bravery and honor that had kept her with the company. As she had told him once before, treachery to Reben would be a poor beginning of her loyalty to Bret. The very things he cherished bitterly against her turned sweet in his thoughts. He decided that he could not live without her, and might as well recognize it.
He found himself clenching his hands at his desk and whispering prayers that the play should be a complete failure. How else could they be reunited? He could not shirk his own responsibilities. It was not a man’s place to give up his career. There was only one hope—the failure of the play.
But “The Woman Pays” was a success. The Grand Rapids oracle guessed wrong. As sometimes happens, the city critics were kinder than the rural. Sheila sent Bret a double night-telegram. She said that she was sorry to say that the play had “gone over big.” She had an enormous ovation; there had been thirty curtain calls; the audience had made her make a speech. Reben had said the play would earn a mint of money. And then she added that she missed Bret “terribly,” and loved him “madly and nothing else mattered.”
The next day she telegraphed him that the critics were “wonderful.” She quoted some of their eulogies and announced that she was mailing the clippings to him. But she said that she would rather hear him speak one word of praise than have them print a million. He did not believe it, but he liked to read it.
He did not wait to receive the clippings. He gave up opposing his ravenous heart, and took train for Chicago. He could not bear to have everybody except himself acclaiming his wife in superlatives.
He decided to surprise her. He did not even telegraph a warning. Indeed, when he reached Chicago in the early evening, he resolved to see the performance before he let her know he was in town.
He could not get by Mr. McNish, who was “on the door,” without being recognized, but he asked McNish not to let “Miss Kemble” know that he was in the house. McNish agreed readily; he did not care to agitate Sheila during the performance. After the last curtain fell her emotions would be her own.
McNish was glowing as he watched the crowd file past the ticket-taker. He chuckled: “It’s a sell-out to-night I bet. This afternoon we had the biggest first matinée this theater has known for years. I told Reben two years ago that the little lady was star material. He said he’d never thought of it. She’s got personality and she gets it across. She plays herself, and that’s the hardest kind of acting there is. I discover her, and Reben cops the credit and the coin. Ain’t that life all over?”
Bret agreed that it was, and hurried to his seat. It was in the exact center of a long row. He was completely surrounded by garrulous women trying to outchatter even the strenuous coda of the band.
A fat woman on his right bulged over into his domain and filled the arm of his chair with her thick elbow. A lean woman on his left had an arm some inches too long for her space, and her elbow projected like a spur into Bret’s ribs. He could have endured their contiguity if they had omitted their conversation. The overweening woman was chewing gum and language with the same grinding motions, giving her words a kind of stringy quality.
“Jevver see this Sheilar Kemble?” she munched. “I seen her here some time ago. She didn’t have a very big part, but she played it perfect. She was simpully gurrand. I says at the time to the gempmum was with me, I says, ‘Somebody ought to star that girl.’ I guess I must ’a’ been overheard, for here she is.
“A lady frien’ o’ mine went last night, and told me I mustn’t miss it. She says they got the handsomest actor playin’ the lover—feller name of Weldon or Weldrum or something like that—but anyway she says he makes love something elegant, and so does Sheilar. This frien’ o’ mine says they must be in love with each other, for nobody could look at one another that way without they meant it. Well, we’ll soon see.”
To hear his wife’s name and Eldon’s chewed up together in the gum of a strange plebeian was disgusting.
The sharp-elbowed woman was talking all the while in a voice of affected accents:
“She’s almost a lady, this Kemble gull. Really, she was received in the veribest homes hyah lahst wintuh. Yes, I met hah everywhah. She was really quite refined—for an actress, of cawse. Several of the nicest young men made quite fools of themselves—quite. Fawtunately their people saved them from doing anything rahsh. I suppose she’ll upset them all again this season. There ought to be some fawm of inoculation to protect young men against actresses. Don’t you think so? It’s fah more dangerous than typhoid fevah, don’t you think so?”
All about him Bret heard Sheila’s name tossed carelessly as a public property.
The curtain rose at last and the play began. Sheila made a conspicuously inconspicuous entrance without preparation, without even the laughter she had formerly employed. She was just there. The audience did not recognize her till she spoke, then came a volley of applause.
Bret’s eyes filled with tears. She was beautiful. She seemed to be sad. Was she thinking of him? He wanted to clamber across the seats and over the footlights to protect her once more from the mob, not from its ridicule as at that first sight of her, but from its more odious familiarity and possession.
He hardly recognized the revised play. The character she played—and played in her very selfhood—was emotional now, and involved in a harrowing situation with a mystery as to her origin, and hints of a past, a scandal into which an older woman, an adventuress, had decoyed her.
Then Eldon came on the scene and they fell in love at once; but she was afraid of her past, and evaded him for his own sake. He misunderstood her and accused her of despising him because he was poor; and she let him think so, because she wanted him to hate her.
The audience wept with luxurious misery over her saintly double-dealing. The gum-chewer’s tears salted her pepsin and she commented: “Ain’t it awful what beasts you men are to us trusting girrls! Think of the demon that loored that girrl to her roon!”
The sharp-elbowed woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and said that it was “really quite affecting—quite. I’ve made myself ridiculous.” Then she blew her nose as elegantly as that proletarian feat can be accomplished.
Winfield was astounded at the changes in the play. A few new scenes altered the whole meaning of it. Everything pink before was purple now. The rôles of Sheila and Eldon had been rendered melodramatic. Sheila’s comedy was accomplished now in a serious way. With a quaint little pout, or two steps to the side and a turn of the head, she threw the audience into convulsions.
Suddenly Sheila would quench the hilarity with a word, and the hush would be enormous and strangely anxious; then the handkerchiefs would come out.
Bret would have felt with the mob had the actress been any woman on earth but his own. That made all the difference in the world. He told himself that she was the victim of her art. But his ire burned against Eldon, since Eldon made love to her for nearly three hours. And he said and did noble things that made her love him more and more. And there was no lack of caresses now.
In the second act Eldon overtook the fugitive Sheila and claimed her for his own. She broke loose and ran from him, weeping, because she felt “unworthy of a good man’s love.” But she followed him with eyes of doglike adoration. Her hands quivered toward him and she held them back “for his dear sake.” Then he caught her again and would not let her escape. He held her by both hands.
“Mary!”—that was her name in the play. “Mary,” he cried, “I love you. The sight of you fills my eyes with longing. The touch of your hand sets my very soul on fire. I love you. I can’t live without you!”
He seized her in his arms, crushed her fiercely. She struggled a moment, then began to yield, to melt toward him. She lifted her eyes to his—then turned them away again. The audience could read in them passion fighting against renunciation. She murmured:
“Oh, Jack! Jack! I—”
He pressed his conquest. “You do love me! You must! You can’t scorn a love like mine. I have seen you weeping. I can read in your eyes that you love me. Your eyes belong to me. Your lips are mine. Give them to me! Kiss me! Kiss me—Ma-ry!”
She quivered with surrender. The audience burned with excitement. The lover urged his cause with select language.
It was the sort of thing the women in the audience did not get from their own lovers or husbands; the sort of thing the men in the audience wanted to be able to say in a crisis and could not. Therefore, for all its banality, it thrilled them. They ate it up. It was a sentimental banquet served at this emotion restaurant every evening.
At length, as Eldon repeated his demand in tones that swept the sympathetic strings in every bosom to response, Mary began to yield; her hands climbed Eldon’s arms slowly, paused on his shoulders. In a moment they would plunge forward and clasp him about the neck.
Her lips were lifted, pursed to meet his. And then—as the audience was about to scream with suspense—she thrust herself away from him, broke loose, moaning:
“No, I am unworthy—no, no—I can’t, I don’t love you—no—no!”
The curtain fell on another flight.
Bret wanted to push through the crowd and go back to the stage to forbid the play from going on. But he would have had to squeeze past the fat woman’s form or stride across the lean woman’s protrusive knees. And fat women and men, and lean, were wedged in the seats on both sides of him. He was imprisoned in his wrath.
As if his own doubts and certainties were not torture enough, he had to hear them voiced in the dialects of others.
The gumstress was saying: “Well, I guess that frien’ o’ mine got it right when she says those two actors must be in love with each other. I tell you no girrl can look at a feller with those kind of looks without there bein’ somethin’ doin’, you take it from me. No feller like Mr. Eldon is goin’ to hold no beauty like Sheila in his arms every evening and not fall in love with her.”
Her escort was encouraged by her enthusiasm to rhapsodize over Sheila on his own account. It seemed to change the atmosphere. He had paid for both seats, but he had not bought free speech. He said—with as little tact as one might expect from a man who would pay court to that woman:
“Well, all I gotter say is, if that guy gets wore out huggin’ Sheila I’ll take his place and not charge him a cent. Some snap, he has, spendin’ his evenin’s huggin’ and kissin’ an A1 beaut like her and gettin’ paid for it.” He seemed to realize a sudden fall in the temperature. Perhaps he noted that the gum-crunching jaw had paused and the elastic sweetmeat hung idle in the mill. He tried to retreat with a weak:
“But o’ course she gets paid for huggin’ him, too.”
The anxious escort bent forward to look into his companion’s face. He caught a glimpse of Bret’s eyes and wondered how that maniac came there. He sank back alarmed just as Bret realized that, however unendurable such comment was, he could not resent it while his wife belonged to the public; he could only resolve to take her out of the pillory.
But his Gehenna was not ended yet, for he must hear more from the woman.
“Well, o’ course, Mr. Jeggle, if you’re goin’ to fall for an actress as easy as that, you’re not the man I should of thought you was. But that’s men all over. An actress gets ’em every time.
“I could of went on the stage myself. Ma always said I got temper’munt to beat the band. But she said if I ever disgraced her so far as to show my face before the footlights I need never come home. I’d find the door closed against me.
“And my gempmum friend at that time says if I done so he’d beat me with a rollin’-pin. The way he come to use such words was he was travelin’ for a bakery-supply house—he was kind of rough in his talk—nice, though—and eyes!—umm! Well, him and I quarreled. I found he had two other wives on his route and I refused to see him again—that’s his ring there now. He was a wicked devil, but he did draw the line at actresses. He married often, but he drew the line: and he says no actress should ever be a wife of his.
“And he had it right. No sane man ain’t goin’ to leave his wife layin’ round loose in the arms of any handsome actor, not if he’s a real man. If she’ll kiss him like that in public—well, I say no more. Not that I blame a poor actress for goin’ wrong. I never believe in being merciless to the fallen. It’s the fault of the stage. The stage is a nawful immor’l place, Mr. Jeggle. The way I get it is this: if a girl’s not ummotional she’s got no right on the stage. If she is ummotional she’s got no chance to stay good on the stage. Do you see what I mean?”
Mr. Jeggle said he saw what she meant and he forbore to praise Sheila further. He changed the perilous subject hastily and lowered his voice.
Bret, on a gridiron of intolerable humiliation, could hear now the dicta of the elbow-woman.
“I fancy the young men in Chicago are quite safe from that Kemble gull this season. She must be hopelessly infatuated with that actor. And no wonder. If she doesn’t keep him close to hah, though, he’ll play havoc with every gull in town. He’s quite too beautiful—quite!”
In the last act Sheila poured out the confession of her sins to Eldon. This was a bit that Bret had not seen, and it poured vinegar into his wounds to hear his own wife announcing to a thousand people how she had been duped and deceived by a false marriage to a man who had never understood her. That was bad enough, but to have Eldon play the saint and forgive her—Bret gripped the chair arms in a frenzy.
Eldon offered her the shelter of his name and the haven of his love. And she let him hold her in his arms while he poured across her shoulder his divine sentiments. Now and then she would turn her head and gaze up at him in worship and longing, and at last, with an irresistible passion, she whirled and threw her arms around him and gave him her kisses, and his arms tightened about her in a frenzy of rapture.
That could not be acting. Bret swore that it was real.
They clung together till several humorous characters appeared at doors and windows and she broke away in confusion. There were explanations, untying of knots and tying of others, and the play closed in a comedy finish.
The curtain went down and up and down and up in a storm of applause, and Sheila bowed and bowed, holding Eldon’s hand and generously recommending him to the audience. He bowed to her and bowed himself off and left her standing and nodding with quaint little ducks of the head and mock efforts to escape, mock expressions of surprise at finding the curtain up again and the audience still there.
Bret had to wait till the women got into their hats and wraps. They were talking, laughing, and sopping up their tears. They had been well fed on sorrow and joy and they were ready for supper and sleep.
Bret wanted to fight his way through in football manner, but he could hardly move. The crowd ebbed out with the deliberation of a glacier, and he could not escape either the people or their comments. The Chicago papers had not heard of Sheila’s marriage to him. He was a nonentity. The sensation of the town was the romance of Sheila Kemble and Floyd Eldon.
When at last Bret was free of the press he dashed round to the stage entrance. The old doorkeeper made no resistance, for the play was over and visitors often came back to pay their compliments to the troupe. Bret was the first to arrive.
In his furious haste he stumbled down the steps to the stage and almost sprawled. He had to wait while a squad of “grips” went by with a huge folded flat representing the whole side of a canvas house.
He stepped forward; a sandbag came down and struck him on the shoulder. He tripped on the cables of the box lights and lost his glasses. While he groped about for them he heard the orchestra, muffled by the curtain, playing the audience out to a boisterous tune. His clutching fingers were almost stepped on by two men carrying away a piece of solid stairway.
Before he found his glasses he was demoniac with rage. He rubbed them on his sleeve, set them in place, and again a departing wall obstructed his view. An actress and an actor walked into him. At last he found the clear stage ahead of him. He made out a group at the center of it. McNish, Batterson, and Prior were in jovial conference, slapping each other’s shoulders and chortling with the new wine of success.
He brushed by them and saw Sheila at last. Reben was holding her by one arm; his other hand was on Eldon’s shoulder. He was telling them of the big leap in the box-office receipts.
Sheila seemed rapturous with pride and contentment. Bret saw her murmur something to Eldon. He could not hear what it was, but he heard Eldon chuckle delightedly. Then he called:
“Eldon!”
Eldon looked forward just in time to see Bret coming on like a striding giant, just in time to see the big arm swing up in a rigid drive, shoulder and side and all.
The clenched fist caught Eldon under the chin and sent him backward across a heavy table.