The house seemed still to quiver after the neighbors’ young had left.
Mrs. Vickery moved about restoring order. And Dorothy bustled after her,
full of talk and snickers. But Eugene curled up in a chair by a window
as solemn as Sophokles.
Mrs. Vickery was still thinking of Sheila. She asked first of her, “How
did you come to meet this little Kemble girl?”
Dorothy explained: “Oh, I telephoned Clyde Burbage to come over and
play, and he said he couldn’t, ’cause they had comp’ny; and I said,
‘Bring comp’ny along,’ and he did, and she’s his cousin; her grandma
lives at his house, and her papa and mamma are going to visit there at
Clyde’s for a week. Isn’t Sheila a case, mamma? She says the funniest
things. I wish I could ’member some of ’em.”
Mrs. Vickery smiled and stared at Dorothy. In the grand lottery of
children she had drawn Dorothy. She saw in the child many of her own
traits, many of the father’s traits. She loved Dorothy, of course, and
had much good reason for her instinctive devotion, and many rewards for
it. And yet the child was singularly talentless, as her father was, as
Mrs. Vickery confessed herself to be.
She wondered at the strange distribution of human gifts—some dowered
from their cradles with the workaday virtues and commonplace vices, and
some mysteriously flecked with a kind of wildness that is both less and
more than virtue, an oddity that gives every speech or gesture an
unusual emphasis, a rememberable differentness.
Dorothy was a safe child to have; she would make a reliable, admirable,
good woman. But Mrs. Vickery felt that if Sheila had been her child she
would have been incessantly afraid of the girl and for her, incessantly
uncertain of the future. Yet, she would have watched her, and the
neighbors would have watched her, with a breathless fascination as one
watches a tight-rope walker who moves on a hazardous path, yet moves
above the heads of the crowd and engages all its eyes.
Little Eugene Vickery had a quirk of the unusual, but it was not
conspicuous; he was a burrower, who emerged like a mole in unexpected
places, and led a silent, inconspicuous life gnawing at the roots of
things.
His mother found him now, as so often, taciturn, brooding, thinking long
thoughts—the solemnest thing there is, a solemn child.
“Why are you so silent, Eugene?” she said.
He smiled sedately and shook his head with evasion. But Dorothy pointed
the finger of scorn at him; she even whittled one finger with another
and taunted him, shrilly:
“’Gene’s in love with Sheila! ’Gene’s in love with Sheila!”
“Am not!” he growled with a puppy’s growl.
“Are so!” cried Dorothy, jubilantly.
“Well, s’posin’ I am?” he answered, sullenly. “She’s a durned sight
smarter and prettier than—some folks.”
This sobered Dorothy and crumpled her chin with distress. Like her
mother, she had long ago recognized with helpless regret that she was
not brilliant.
Mrs. Vickery, amazed at hearing the somber Eugene accused of so
frivolous a thing as a love-affair, stared at him and murmured, “Why,
’Gene!”
Feeling a storm sultry in the air, she warned Dorothy that it was time
to practise her piano-lesson. Dorothy, whose other name was Dutiful,
made no protest, but began to trudge up and down the scales with a
perfect accuracy that was somehow perfectly musicless and almost
unendurable.
Mrs. Vickery knew that Eugene would speak when he was ready, and not
before. She pretended to ignore him, but her heart was beating high with
the thrill of that new era in a mother’s soul when she sees the first of
her children smitten with the love-dart and becomes a sort of painfully
amused Niobe, wondering always where the next arrow will come from and
which it will hit next.
After a long while Eugene spoke, though not at all as she expected him
to speak. But then he never spoke as she expected him to speak. He
murmured:
“Mamma?”
“Yes, honey.”
“Do you s’pose I could write a play as good as that old Shakespeare
did?”
“Why—why, yes, I’m sure you could—if you tried.”
Mrs. Vickery had always understood the rarely comprehended truth that
praise creates less conceit than the withholding of it, as food builds
strength and slays the hunger that cries for it.
Eugene was evidently encouraged, but he kept silence so long that
finally she gave him up. She was leaving the room when he murmured
again:
“Mamma.”
“Yes, honey.”
“I guess I’ll write a play.”
“Fine!” she said.
“For Sheila.”
“Oh!”
Mrs. Vickery cast up her eyes and stole out, not knowing what to say.
Already the child was turning his affections away from home and her.
An hour later she almost stepped on him again. He was lying on the rug
by the twilight-glimmering window of the dining-room, whither Dorothy’s
relentless scales had driven him. He was lying on his stomach with his
nose almost touching his composition-book, and he was scrawling large
words laboriously with a nub of pencil so stubby that he seemed to be
writing with his own forefinger bent like a grasshopper’s leg.
William Shakespeare, Gent., sleeping in Avon church, had no knowledge of
what conspiracy was hatching against his long-enough prestige. And if he
had known, that very human mind of his might have suspected the truth,
that the inspiration of his new rival was less a desire to crowd an old
gentleman from the top shelf of fame than to supplant him in the esteem
of a certain very young woman.
Shakespeare himself in that same kidnapped play of his called “Hamlet”
complained of the children’s theater that rivaled his own.
There was complaint now of the new children’s theater in the minor city
of Braywood. Three homes were topsy-turvied by the insatiable,
irrepressible mummers.