The last days of Sheila’s presence with the company were full of
annoyances. There was little opportunity for communion with Floyd. Mrs.
Vining was invincibly tenacious. All day long, too, Floyd was rehearsing
his new rôle. This proved intensely difficult to him. With a heart full
of devotion to Sheila, it was worse than awkward to be making love to
the parvenue who took her place, mimicked her intonations, made the same
steps and gestures, said the same words, and yet was so radically
different.
She was a forward thing—Miss Dulcie Ormerod. She patronized Eldon and
tried to flirt with him at the same time. She forced conversation on him
when he was morose. She happened to meet him with extraordinary
coincidence when he was outside the theater. And almost every time the
two of them happened to be together they happened to meet Sheila.
Dulcie was one of those women who seem unable to address one without
pawing or clinging—as if the arms were telephone cables, and there were
no communicating without contact.
Sheila was of the wireless type. A touch from her was as important as a
caress. To put a hand familiarly or carelessly on her arm was not to be
thought of, at least by Eldon. Others who attempted it found that she
flinched aside or moved to a distance almost unconsciously. She kept
herself precious in every way.
Eldon loathed the touch of Dulcie’s claws, especially as he could not
seem to convince Sheila that he did not enjoy her incessant contiguity.
And the prehensive Dulcie was calling him “Floyd” before the third
rehearsal.
Batterson was calling him all sorts of names of the familiarity that
implies contempt, for Eldon was not rehearsing well. He realized the
confusing inconveniences that love can weave into the actor’s trade. If
it had not been for Sheila he could have made a straight matter of art
or business out of the love-scenes with Dulcie, or he could have thrown
the hungry thing an occasional kind word to keep her quiet, or have
fallen temporarily in love with her, for Dulcie was one of those
actresses who insist that they “must feel a part to play it.” She was
forever alluding to one of her rôles in which “she knew she was great
because she wept real tears in it.”
Sheila belonged to the other school. Her father would say of a scene, “I
knew I was great in that because I could guy it.” For then he was like
the juggler who can chat with the audience without dropping a prop—a
Cyrano who can fight for his life and compose a poem at the same time.
Sheila felt the emotions of her rôle when she first took it up, but she
conquered them as soon as she could by studying and registering their
manifestations, so that her resources were like an instrument to play
on. Thereafter her emotions were those of the concert violinist who
plays upon his audience as well as his instrument.
Sheila watched a few rehearsals. She hated the exaggerated
sentimentalisms of Dulcie and her splay-footed comedy. Dulcie
underscored every important word like a school-girl writing a letter.
Sheila credited the audience with a sense of humor and kept its
intelligence alert. Sheila made no bones of criticizing her successor.
But when Eldon agreed with her, she was not convinced. She was far more
jealous of him than she was of her rôle. But Eldon was not wise enough
to take comfort from these proofs of her affection. They narrowly
escaped quarreling during their last few meetings.
When Sheila went away Eldon could not even go to the train with her.
Batterson held him to rehearsal.
Sheila said, “Don’t worry; Mr. Folwell will take care of me.” She could
hardly have been ignorant of the torment this meant to Eldon, but her
heart was aching, too, because he permitted a little thing like his
business to keep him from paying the last tributes of tenderness.
Folwell was one of those affable leading men who always proffer their
leading women as much gallantry as they care to accept. He had been a
devoted suitor to Zelma Griffen and had graciously pretended to suffer
agonies of jealousy over her humming-bird flirtations. He had done the
same with the women stars of his last three engagements. He was Scotch,
and had a gift of sad-eyed sincerity for the moment, and a vocabulary of
irresistible little pet names, and a grim earnestness about whatever
interested him at the time. His real name was, curiously, Robert Burns.
He had changed it lest he be suspected of stealing it, or of advertising
a much-advertised tobacco.
Eldon imagined that Folwell would begin to languish over Sheila the
moment the train started, and was tempted to bash in his head so that he
would be incapable of making love at all. He had won into Sheila’s good
graces by knocking an anonymous student over the footlights. If he sent
a pseudonymous actor the same way he might clinch his success with her.
He little knew that the blow he had struck Bret Winfield had not yet
ceased to sting that youth, and that Winfield was still repeating his
vow to square himself with Eldon and with Sheila—in very different
ways.
But Eldon let Folwell escape without planting his fists on him. And he
let Sheila escape without imprinting the seal of his kiss upon her. He
had never laid lip to her cheek. And now they were divorced, without
being betrothed.
If he had known how tenderly Sheila’s thoughts flew back to him, if he
had known that she locked herself in her state-room and wept and never
once saw Folwell on the train, he would have been happier and sadder
both, with the incurable perversity of a forlorn lover. If he could have
seen her very soul of souls he would have seen what she dared not admit
to herself, that she was a little disappointed in him because he let her
go. She doubted the greatness of his love of her because he loved the
artist she was so well. Sheila was more jealous of her actress self than
of Dulcie Ormerod.
It was not many days before Eldon, too, turned his back on Chicago, but
facing westerly. The city was dear to him: he had passed through a whole
lifetime of stages there, from crushing failure to success in a leading
rôle, and from loneliness to reciprocated love and widowerhood.
Mrs. Vining tried to console him when he turned to her as at least a
relative of Sheila’s. She made as much as she could of his performance
as Folwell’s successor. It was a creditable and a promising beginning,
though it offended her experienced standards in countless ways. But she
flattered him with honeyed words, and she tried to wear away his love
for Sheila.
She had seen so many nice young fellows and dear, sweet girls stretched
on the rack of these situations—wrenched by the wheels of separation
and all the suspicions that jealousy can imagine from opportunity. In
all mercy she wished this couple well cured of the inflammation. She did
her part to allay it with counter-irritants and caustics. She wrote
Sheila that Eldon was getting along famously with his rôle—and with
Dulcie, who was “a dear little thing and winning excellent press
notices.” She told Eldon that Sheila was in love with her new play, and
that Tom Brereton was turning her head with his compliments. Folwell,
who had the second male rôle in the new play, was also very attentive,
she said. And Sheila was going out a good deal in New York—dancing her
feet off nearly every night. The author of the play was a third rival
for her favor, in Mrs. Vining’s chronicles.
Everything collaborated to Eldon’s torture. The “Friend in Need” company
was moving West in long jumps. Sheila’s letters had farther and farther
to go. A sudden change of booking threw them off the track and two weeks
passed without a line. He sent her day letters and night letters as
affectionate in tone as he had the face to submit to the telegraph
operators. Her answers did not satisfy him. They were never so prompt as
his calculations and he did not credit her with restraint before the
cold-eyed telegraphers.
She was far busier, too, than he imagined. Costumes were to be ordered
and fitted; the new lines to be learned; photographs to be posed for;
interviews to be given. Reben was grooming her for a star already,
without giving her an inkling of his schemes. As for flirting with
Brereton or Folwell, she was as far as possible from the thought of such
a leisurely occupation. She was having battles with them, and still
bitterer conflicts with the author.