The play that Sheila was surrendered to, “A Friend in Need,” proved a
success and raised its young author to such heights of pride and elation
that when his next work, an ambitious drama, was produced, he had a long
distance to fall. And fell hard.
Young Trivett had tossed off “A Friend in Need” and had won from it the
highest praise as a craftsman. He had worked five years on his drama,
only to be accused of being “so spoiled by success as to think that the
public would endure anything he tossed off.”
But the miserable collapse of his _chef-d’œuvre_ did not even check the
triumph of his _hors-d’œuvre_. “A Friend in Need” ran on “to capacity”
until the summer weather turned the theater into a chafing-dish. Then
the company was disbanded.
In the early autumn following it was reorganized for a road tour. Of the
original company only four or five members were re-engaged—Sheila, Mrs.
Vining, Miss Griffen, and Tuell.
During the rehearsals Sheila had paid little attention to the new
people. She was doomed to be in their company for thirty or forty weeks
and she was in no hurry to know them. She was gracious enough to those
she met, but she made no advances to the others, nor they to her. She
had noticed that a new man played the taxicab-driver, but she neither
knew nor cared about his name, his aim, or his previous condition of
servitude.
The Freshmen of Leroy University brought him to her attention with a
spectacular suddenness in the guise of a hero. The blow he struck in her
supposed defense served as an ideal letter of introduction.
As soon as the curtain had fallen on the riot, cutting off the view of
the battle between the police and the students, Sheila looked about for
the hero who had rescued her from Heaven alone knew what outrage.
The neglected member of the troupe had leaped into the star rôle, the
superstar rôle of a man who wages a battle in a woman’s defense. She ran
to him and, seizing his hands, cried:
“How can I ever, ever, ever thank you, Mr.—Mr.—I’m so excited I can’t
remember your name.”
“Eldon—Floyd Eldon, Miss Kemble.”
“You were wonderful, wonderful!”
“Why, thank you, Miss Kemble. I’m glad if you—if—To have been of
service to you is—is—”
The stage-manager broke up the exchange of compliments with a “Clear!
clear! Damn it, the curtain’s going up.” They ran for opposite wings.
When the play was over Eldon was not to be found, and Sheila went with
her aunt to the train. At the hour when Winfield was being released from
his cell the special sleeping-car that carried the “Friend in Need”
company was three hundred miles or more away and fleeing farther.
When Sheila raised the curtain of her berth and looked out upon the
reeling landscape the morning was nearly noon. Yet when she hobbled down
the aisle in unbuttoned shoes and the costume of a woman making a hasty
exit from a burning building, there were not many of the troupe awake to
observe her. Her aunt, however, was among these, for old age was robbing
Mrs. Vining of her lifelong habit of forenoon slumber. Like many another
of her age, she berated as weak or shiftless what she could no longer
enjoy.
But Sheila was used to her and her rubber-stamp approval of the past and
rubber-stamp reproval of the present. They went into the dining-car
together, Sheila making the usual theatrical combination of breakfast
and lunch. As she took her place at a table she caught sight of her
rescuer of the night before.
He was gouging an orange when Sheila surprised him with one of her best
smiles. His startled spoon shot a geyser of juice into his eye, but he
smiled back in spite of that, and made a desperate effort not to wink.
Sheila noted the stoicism and thought to herself, “A hero, on and off.”
Later in the afternoon when she had read such morning papers as were
brought aboard the train, and found them deadly dull since there was
nothing about her in them, and when she had read into her novel till she
discovered the familiar framework of it, and when from sheer boredom she
was wishing that it were a matinée day so that she might be at her work,
she saw Floyd Eldon coming down the aisle of the car.
He had sat in the smoking-room until he had wearied of the amusing
reminiscences of old Jaffer, who was always reminiscent, and of the grim
silence of Crumb, who was always taciturn, and of the half-smothered
groans of Tuell, who was always aching somewhere. At length Eldon had
resolved to be alone, that he might ride herd about the drove of his own
thoughts. He made his face ready for a restrained smile that should not
betray to Sheila in one passing glance all that she meant to him.
To his ecstatic horror she stopped him with a gesture and overwhelmed
him by the delightful observation that it was a beautiful day. He freely
admitted that it was and would have moved on, but she checked him again
to present him to Mrs. Vining.
Mrs. Vining was pleased with the distinguished bow he gave her. It was a
sort of old-comedy bow. She studied him freely as he turned in response
to Sheila’s next confusing words:
“I want to thank you again for coming to my rescue from that horrible
brute.”
Eldon looked as guilty as if she had accused him of being himself the
brute he had saved her from. He threw off his disgusting embarrassment
with an effort at a careless shrug:
“It was nothing—nothing at all, I am sure.”
“It was wonderful,” Sheila insisted. “How powerful you must be to have
lifted that monster clear over the apron of the stage into the lap of
the orchestra!”
A man never likes to deny his infinite strength, but Eldon was honest
enough to protest: “I caught him off his balance, I am afraid. And,
besides, it comes rather natural to me to slug a man from Leroy.”
“Yes? Why?”
“I am a Grantham man myself. I was on our ’varsity eleven a couple of
years.”
“Oh!” said Sheila. “Sit down, won’t you?”
* * * * *
She felt that she had managed this rather crassly. It would have been
more delicate to express less surprise and to delay the invitation to a
later point. But it was too late now. He had already dropped into the
place beside her, not noticing until too late that he sat upon a novel
and a magazine or two and an embroidery hoop on which she had intended
to work. But he was on so many pins and needles that he hardly heeded
one more.
College men are increasingly frequent on the stage, but not yet frequent
enough to escape a little prestige or a little prejudice, according to
the point of view. In Sheila’s case Eldon gained prestige and a touch of
majesty that put her wits to some embarrassment for conversation. It was
one thing to be gracious to a starveling actor with a two-line rôle; it
was quite another to be gracious to a football hero full of fame and
learning.
Mrs. Vining, however, had played _grandes dames_ too long to look up to
anybody. She felt at ease even in the presence of this big
third-baseman, or coxswain, or whatever he had been on his football
nine. She said, “Been on the stage long, Mr. Eldon?”
Eldon grinned meekly, looked up and down the aisle with mock anxiety,
and answered: “The stage-manager isn’t listening? This is my first
engagement.”
“Really?” was the only comment Sheila could think of.
After his long silence in the company, and under the warming influence
of Sheila’s presence, the snows of pent-up reminiscence came down in a
flood of confession:
“I don’t really belong on the stage, you know. I haven’t a big enough
part to show how bad an actor I really could be if I had the chance. But
I set my mind on going on the stage, and go I went.”
“Did you find it hard to get a position?”
“Well, when I left college and the question of my profession came up,
dad and I had several hot-and-heavies. Finally he swore that if I didn’t
accept a job in his office I need never darken his door again. Business
of turning out of house. Father shaking fist. Son exit center, swearing
he will never come back again. Sound of door slamming heard off.”
Sheila still loved life in theatrical terms. “But what did your poor
mother do?” she said.
A film seemed to veil Eldon’s eyes as he mumbled: “She wasn’t there. She
was spared that.” Then he gulped down his private grief and went on with
his more congenial self-derision: “I left home, feeling like Columbus
going to discover America. I didn’t expect to star the first year, but I
thought I could get some kind of a job. I went to New York and called on
all the managers. I was such an ignoramus that I hadn’t heard of the
agencies. I got to know several office-boys very well before one of them
told me about the employment bureaus. Well, you know all about that
agency game.”
Sheila had been spared the passage through this Inferno on her way to
the Purgatory of apprenticeship. But she had heard enough about it to
feel sad for him, and she spared him any allusions to her superior luck.
Still, she encouraged him to describe his own adventures.
He told of the hardships he encountered and the siege he laid to the
theater before he found a breach in its walls to crawl through.
Constantly he paused to apologize for his garrulity, but Sheila urged
him on. She had been born within the walls and she knew almost nothing
of the struggles that others met except from hearsay. And she had never
heard say from just such a man with just such a determination. So she
coaxed him on and on with his history, as Desdemona persuaded Othello to
talk. With a greedy ear she devoured up his discourse and made him
dilate all his pilgrimage. Only, Eldon was not a Blackmoor, and it was
of his defeats and not his victories that he told. Which made him
perhaps all the more attractive, seeing that he was well born and well
made.
He laughed at his own ignorance, and felt none of the pity for himself
that Sheila felt for him. When she praised his determination, he sneered
at himself:
“It was just bull-headed stubbornness. I was ashamed to go back to my
dad and eat veal, and so I didn’t eat much of anything for a long while.
The only jobs I could get were off the stage, and I held them just long
enough to save up for another try. How these actors keep alive I can’t
imagine. I nearly starved to death. It wouldn’t have been much of a loss
to the stage if I had, but it wasn’t much fun for me. I wore out my
clothes and wore out my shoes and my overcoat and my hat. I wore out
everything but my common sense. If I’d had any of that I’d have given
up.”
Mrs. Vining moved uneasily. “If you’d had common sense you wouldn’t have
tried to get on the stage.”
“Auntie!” Sheila gasped. But she put up her old hand like a decayed
czarina:
“And if you have common sense you’ll never succeed, now that you’re
here.”
When this bewildered Eldon, she added, with the dignity of a priestess:
“Acting is an art, not a business; and people come to see artists, not
business men. Half of the actors are just drummers traveling about; but
the real successes are made by geniuses who have charm and individuality
and insight and uncommon sense. I think you’re probably just fool enough
to succeed. But go on.”
Eldon felt both flattered and dismayed by this pronouncement. He began
to talk to hide his confusion.
“I’m a fool, all right. Whether I’m just the right sort of a fool—Well,
anyway—my money didn’t last long, and I owed everybody that would trust
me for a meal or a room. The office-boys gave me impudence until I wore
that out too, and then they treated me like any old bench-warmer in the
park. The agents grew sick of the sight of me. They sent me to the
managers until they had instructions not to send me again. But still I
stuck at it, the Lord knows why.
“One day I went the rounds of the agencies as usual. When I came to the
last one I was so nauseated with the idiocy of asking the same old
grocery-boy’s question, ‘Anything to-day?’ I just put my head in at the
door, gave one hungry look around, and started away again. The
agent—Mrs. Sanchez, it was—beckoned to me, but I didn’t see; she
called after me, but I didn’t hear; she sent an office-boy to bring me
back.
“When I squeezed through the crowd in the office it was like being
called out of my place in the bread-line to get the last loaf of the
day. I felt ashamed of my success and I was afraid that I was going to
be asked to take the place of some Broadway star who had suddenly fallen
ill.
“Mrs. Sanchez swung open the gate in the rail and said: ‘Young man, can
you sing?’
“My heart fell to the floor and I stepped on it. I heard myself saying,
‘Is Caruso sick?’
“Mrs. Sanchez explained: ‘It’s not so bad as all that. But can you carry
a tune?’
“I told her that I used to growl as loud a bass as the rest of them when
we sang on the college fence.
“‘That’s enough,’ said Mrs. Sanchez. ‘They’re putting on a Civil War
play and they want a man to be one of a crowd of soldiers who sing at
the camp-fire in one of the acts. The part isn’t big enough to pay a
singer and there is nothing else to do but get shot and play dead in the
battle scene.’
“I told her I thought I could play dead to the satisfaction of any
reasonable manager and she gave me a card to the producer.
“Then she said, ‘You’ve never been on the stage, have you?’
“I shook my head. She told me to tell the producer that I had just come
in from the road with a play that had closed after a six months’ run. I
took the card and dashed out of the office so fast I nearly knocked over
a poor old thing with a head of hair like a bushel of excelsior. It took
me two days to get to the producer, and then he told me that it had been
decided not to send the play out, since the theatrical conditions were
so bad.”
Mrs. Vining interpolated, “Theatrical conditions are like the
weather—always dangerous for people with poor circulation.”
“I went back to the office,” said Eldon, “and told Mrs. Sanchez the
situation. The other members of the company had beaten me there. The
poor old soul was broken-hearted, and I don’t believe she regretted her
lost commissions as much as the disappointment of the actors.
“A lot of people have told me she was heartless. She was always good to
me, and if she was a little hard in her manner it was because she would
have died if she hadn’t been. Agents are like doctors, they’ve got to
grow callous or quit. Her office was a shop where she bought and sold
hopes and heartbreaks, and if she had squandered her sympathy on
everybody she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But for some reason or other
she made a kind of pet of me.”
Mrs. Vining murmured, “I rather fancy that she was not the first, and
won’t be the last, woman to do that.”
* * * * *
Eldon flushed like a young boy who has been told that he is pretty. He
realized also that he had been talking about himself to a most unusual
extent with most unusual frankness, and he relapsed into silence until
Sheila urged him on.
It was a stupid Sunday afternoon in the train and he was like a traveler
telling of strange lands, under the insatiable expectancy of a fair
listener. There are few industries easier to persuade a human being
toward than the industry of autobiography. Eldon described the dreary
Sahara of idleness that he crossed before his next opportunity appeared.
As a castaway sits in the cabin of a ship that has rescued him and
smiles while he recounts the straits he has escaped from, and never
dreams of the storms that are gathering in his future skies, so Eldon in
the Pullman car chuckled over the history of his past and fretted not a
whit over the miseries he was hurrying to.
The only thing that could have completed his luxury was added to him
when he saw that Sheila, instead of laughing with him, was staring at
him through half-closed eyelids on whose lashes there was more than a
suspicion of dew. There was pity in her eyes, but in her words only
admiration:
“And you didn’t give up even then!”
“No,” said Eldon; “it is mighty hard knocking intelligence into as thick
a skull as mine. I went back to the garage where I had worked as a
helper. I had learned something about automobiles when I ran the one my
father bought me. But I kept nagging the agencies. Awful idiot, eh?”
To his great surprise the cynical Mrs. Vining put in a word of implied
approval:
“We are always reading about the splendid perseverance of men who become
leading dry-goods merchants of their towns or prominent politicians or
great painters, but the actors know as well as anybody what real
perseverance is. And nobody gives them credit for being anything but a
lot of dissipated loafers.”
Sheila was not interested in generalizations. She wanted to know about
the immediate young man before her. She was still child enough to feel
tremendous suspense over a situation, however well she knew that it must
have a happy ending. When she had been littler the story of Jack the
Giant-killer had enjoyed an unbroken run of forty nights in the bedtime
repertoire of her mother. And never once had she failed to shiver with
delicious fright and suffer anguishes of anxiety for poor Jack whenever
she heard the ogre’s voice. At the first sound of his _leit motiv_,
“Fee, fi, fo, fum—” her little hands would clutch her mother’s arm and
her eyes would pop with terror. Yet, without losing at all the thrill of
the drama, she would correct the least deviation from the sacred text
and rebuke the least effort at interpolation.
It was this weird combination of childish credulity, fierce imagination,
and exact intelligence that made up her gift of pretending. So long as
she could keep that without outgrowing it, as the vast majority do, she
would be set apart from the herd as one who could dream with the eyes
wide open.
When she looked at Eldon she saw him as the ragged, hungry beggar at the
stage door. She saw him turned away and she feared that he might die,
though she knew that he still lived. There was genuine anxiety in her
voice when she demanded, “How on earth did you ever manage to succeed?”
“I haven’t succeeded yet,” said Eldon, “or even begun to, but I am still
alive. It’s hard to get food and employment in New York, but somehow
it’s harder still to starve there. One way or another I kept at work and
hounded the managers. And one day I happened in at a manager’s office
just as he was firing an actor who thought he had some rights in the
world. He snapped me up with an offer of twenty-five dollars a week. If
he had offered me a million it wouldn’t have seemed any bigger.”
Mrs. Vining had listened with unwonted interest and with some
difficulty, for sleep had been tugging at her heavy old eyelids. As soon
as she heard that Eldon had arrived in haven at last she felt no further
necessity of attention and fell asleep on the instant.
Sheila sighed with relief, too. And the train had purred along
contentedly for half a mile before she realized that after all Eldon was
not with that company, but with this. Seeing that her aunt was no longer
with them in spirit, she lowered her voice to comment:
“But if you went with the other troupe, what are you doing here?”
“Well, you see, I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Sanchez the good news. I
thought she would be glad to hear it, and I was going to offer her the
commission for all the work she had done and all the time she had spent
on me. She looked disappointed when I told her, and she warned me that
the manager was unreliable and the play a gamble. She had just found me
a position with a company taking an assured success to the road. It was
this play of yours. The part was small and the pay was smaller still,
but it was good for forty weeks.
“But I was ambitious, and I told her I would take the other. I wanted to
create—that was the big word I used—I wanted to ‘create’ a new part.
She told me that the first thing for an actor to do was to connect with
a steady job, but I wouldn’t listen to her till finally she happened to
mention something that changed my mind.”
He flushed with an excitement that roused Sheila’s curiosity. When he
did not go on, she said:
“But what was it that changed your mind?”
Eldon smiled comfortably, and, emboldened by the long attention of his
audience, ventured to murmur the truth: “I had seen you act—in New
York—in this play, and I—I thought that you were a wonderful actress,
and more than that—the most—the most—Well, anyway, Mrs. Sanchez
happened to mention that you would be with this company, so I took the
part of the taxicab-driver. But I found I was farther away from you than
ever—till—till last night.”
And then Eldon was as startled at the sound of his words and their
immense import as Sheila was. The little word “you” resounded softly
like warning torpedoes on a railroad track signaling: “Down brakes!
Danger ahead!”