In the eyes of the playwright Sir Ralph Incledon, as in the eyes of the
early Spaniards, the Americans were savages with unlimited gold to
exchange for glass beads. He had a noble contempt for all of us except
our dollars, and he was almost ashamed to take those; their very
nomenclature was vulgar and the decimal system was French.
The London success of his piece following upon his arrival at knighthood
had completely spoiled him. Other great writers and actors who had
received the accolade had been rendered a little meeker and more
knightly as knights, but Incledon became almost unendurably offensive,
even to his fellows in London. The decent English in New York who had to
meet him abominated him as civilized Americans abroad abominate the
noisy specimens of Yankee insolence who go twanging their illiterate
contempt through the palaces and galleries and restaurants of Europe.
Sir Ralph was greatly distressed with the company Reben had proudly
mustered for him. Tom Brereton was English born and bred, but Sir Ralph
accused him of “an extraord’n’r’ly atrowcious Amayric’n acs’nt.”
Americans who had seen the London performance had been amazed not only
at the success of Miss Berkshire, but at her very tolerance on the
stage; they said she looked like a giraffe and talked like a cow. But
she pleased her own public somehow. When Sir Ralph saw Sheila he was not
impressed; he said that she was “even wahss” than Brereton and under
“absolutely neigh-o sec’mst’nces could he permit hah to deviate from the
p’fawm’nce of d’yah aold Bahkshah.”
Sheila had flattered herself that she knew something of England and
English; she had visited the island enough, and some of its stateliest
homes; and she had had some of the worst young peers making love to her.
But Sir Ralph, she wrote her aunt, evidently regarded her “as something
between a squaw and a pork-packer’s daughter.”
Sir Ralph threw her into such a bog of humiliation that she floundered
at every step. How could she give an intelligent reading to a line when
he wanted every word sung according to the idiom of another woman of
another race? How could she embody a rôle in its entirety when every
utterance and motion was to be patterned on Sir Ralph’s wretched
imitations of a woman she had never seen?
Sir Ralph not only threw his company into a panic, but he revealed a
positive genius for offending the reporters, the critics, the public.
Before the first curtain rose there was a feeling of hostility, against
which the disaffected and disorganized players struggled in vain.
His play was a beautiful structure, full of beautiful thoughts expertly
wrought into form. But Sir Ralph, like so many authors, seemed to
contradict in his person everything worth while in his work.
His wife, Lady Incledon, knew him to be earnest, hard-working,
emotional, timorous. His anxiety and modesty when at bay before the
public gave the impression of conceit, contempt, and insolence. If he
had been more cocksure of his play he would not have been so critical of
its interpreters. If he had not been so afraid of the Americans he would
not have tried to make them afraid of him. No tenderer-hearted novelist
ever wrote than Dickens, yet he had the knack of infuriating mobs of
people into a warm desire to lynch him. No sweeter-souled poet ever sang
than Keats, yet Byron said he never saw him but he wanted to kick him.
Sir Ralph Incledon had the misfortune to belong to this class. He was
not popular at home and he was maddening abroad. He made Americans
remember Bunker Hill and long to avenge Nathan Hale. The critics felt it
their patriotic duty to make reprisals for all the Americans who had
failed in London and to send this Piccadillian back with his coat-tails
between his legs.
The opening performance in New York was a first-class disaster. The
audience did not follow the London custom of calling the author out and
booing him. It left him in the wings, excruciated with ingrowing speech.
He had drawn up one of the most tactless orations ever prepared in
advance by a well-meaning author. He was not permitted to deliver it. He
had a cablegram written out to send his anxious wife overseas. He did
not send it. When he read the next morning’s papers he was simply dazed.
He had come as a missionary direct from the capital to a benighted
province and he was received with jeers—or “jahs,” as his dialect would
be spelled in our dialect.
He wept privately and then put on an armor of contempt. He sailed
shortly after, leaving the Americans marooned on their desert continent.
The actors were treated with little mercy by most of the critics, except
to be used as bludgeons to whack the author with. Sheila’s notices were
of the “however” sort. “Miss Sheila Kemble is a promising young actress;
the part she played, however, was so irritating—” or, “In spite of all
the cleverness of—” or, “Sheila Kemble exhausted her resources in vain
to give a semblance of life to—”
Sheila sent the clippings to Mrs. Vining, and added: “Every bouquet had
a brickbat in it. We are not long for this world, I fear.”
Reben fought valiantly for the play. He squandered money on extra spaces
in the papers and on the bill-boards. He quoted from the critics who
praise everything and he emphasized lines about the scenery. The play
simply did not endure the sea change. People who came would not enjoy
it, and would not recommend it. It was hard even to give away
complimentary seats, and the result was one that would have been more
amazing if it were less common; a successful play by a famous author
produced with a famous cast at a leading theater in the largest city of
the New World was played to a theater that could not be filled at any or
no price. The receipts fell to forty dollars one night.
A newspaper wit wrote, “Last night the crowds on Broadway were so dense
that a man was accidentally pushed into the Odeon Theater.” On another
day he said, “Last night during a performance of Sir Ralph Incledon’s
masterpiece some miscreant entered the Odeon Theater and stole all the
orchestra chairs.”
The slow death of a play is a miserable process. The actors began to see
the nobilities of the work once the author was removed from in front of
it. They regretted its passing, but plays cannot live in a vacuum.
Novels and paintings can wait patiently and calmly in suspended
animation till their understanders grow up, but plays, like infants,
must be nourished at once or they die and stay dead.
* * * * *
Sheila and all the company had fought valiantly for the drama. Once Sir
Ralph’s back was turned, they fell to playing their rôles their own way,
and they at least enjoyed their work more. But the audiences never came.
Sheila was plunged into deeps of gloom. She felt that she must suffer
part of the blame or at least the punishment of the play’s non-success.
She wished she had stayed with “A Friend in Need.”
But Reben had always been known as a good sport, a plucky taker of
whatever medicine the public gave him. After a bastinado from the
critics he had waited to see what the people would do. There was never
any telling. Sometimes the critics would write pæans of rapture and the
lobby would be as deserted as a graveyard, leaving the box-office man
nothing to do but manicure his nails. Sometimes the critics would
unanimously condemn, and there would be a queue at the door the next
morning. Sometimes the critics would praise and the mob would storm the
window. Sometimes they would blame and audiences would stay away as if
by conspiracy. In any case, “the box-office tells the story.”
Cassard, the manager, once said that he could tell if a play were a
success by merely passing the theater an hour after the performance was
over. A more certain test at the Odeon Theater was the manner of Mr.
Chittick, the box-office man. If he laid aside his nail-file without a
sigh and proved patient and gracious with the autobiographical woman who
loitered over a choice of seats and their date, the play was a failure.
If Mr. Chittick insulted the brisk business man who pushed the exact sum
of money over the ledge and weakly requested “the two best, please” the
play was a triumph. Mr. Chittick was a very model of affability while
Incledon’s play occupied the stage of the unoccupied theater.
Reben’s motto was “The critics can make or break the first three weeks
of a play and no more. After that they are forgotten.” If he saw the
business growing by so much as five dollars a night he hung on. But the
Incledon play sagged steadily. At the end of a week Reben had the
company rehearsing another play called “Your Uncle Dudley,” an old
manuscript he had bought years ago to please a star he quarreled with
later.
Reben talked big for a while about forcing the run; then he talked
smaller and smaller with the receipts. Finally he announced that “owing
to previous bookings it will be necessary,” etc. “Mr. Reben is looking
for another theater to which to transfer this masterwork of Sir Ralph
Incledon. He may take it to Boston, then to Chicago for an all-summer
run.”
Eventually he took it to Mr. Cain’s storage warehouse.
“Your Uncle Dudley,” appealed to Reben as a stop-gap. It would cost
little. The cast was small; only one set was required. The title rôle
fitted Brereton to a nicety. He offered Sheila the heroine, who was a
“straight.” She cannily chose a smaller part that had “character.” The
play was flung on “cold”—that is, without an out-of-town try-out.
It caught the public at “the psychological moment,” to use a denatured
French expression. The morning after the first night the telephone drove
Mr. Chittick frantic. He almost snapped the head off a dear old lady who
wanted to buy two boxes. It was a hopeless success.
The only sour face about the place except his was the star’s. The
critics accused Tom Brereton of giving “a creditable performance.” All
the raptures were for Sheila. She was lauded as the discovery of the
year.
The critics are always “discovering” people, as Columbus discovered the
Indians, who had been there a long while before. Two critics told Reben
in the lobby between the acts that there was star-stuff in Sheila. He
thanked them both for giving him a novel idea: “I never thought of that,
old man.” And the old men walked away like praised children. Like
children, they were very, very innocent when they were good and very,
very incorrigible when they were horrid.
Tom Brereton behaved badly, to Sheila’s thinking. To his thinking she
was the evil spirit. He gave one of those examples of good business
policy which is called “professional jealousy” in the theater. He did
what any manufacturer does who resists the substitution of a “just as
good” for his own widely advertised ware. Tom Brereton was the star of
the piece according to his contracts and his prestige. He had toiled
lifelong to attain his height and he was old enough and wise enough to
realize that he must maintain himself stubbornly or new ambitions would
crowd him from his private peak.
Sheila had youth, femininity, and beauty, none of which qualities were
Brereton’s. The critics and the public acclaimed the comet and neglected
the planet. Reben’s press agent, Starr Coleman, flooded the press with
Sheila’s photographs and omitted Brereton’s, partly because the papers
will always give more space to a pretty woman than a plain man, and
would rather publish the likeness of a rear-row chorus girl than of the
eccentric comedian who heads the cast.
Coleman arranged interviews with Sheila, wrote them and gave them to
dramatic editors and the gush-girls of the press. Coleman compiled what
he called the “Sheila Kemble cocktail” and demanded it at the bars to
which he led the arid newspaper men. He did not object to the recipe
being mentioned.
Sheila won the audiences, and if Brereton omitted her at a curtain call
the audience kept on applauding stubbornly till he was forced to lead
her out. She was always waiting. She was greedy for points, and kept
building her scenes, encroaching little by little.
Brereton sulked awhile, then protested formally to the stage-manager,
who gave him little sympathy. Eventually Brereton tried to repress
Sheila’s usurpations.
Little unpleasantnesses developed into open wrangles. It was purely a
business rivalry, and Sheila had no right to expect gallantry in a field
where she condescended to put herself on an equality with men. But she
expected it, none the less. The labor-unions show the same jealousy of
women when they trespass on their profits in the mills or the
coal-mines.
Sheila began to hate Brereton with a young woman’s vivacity and
frankness, and to torment him mischievously. In one scene he had to
embrace her with fervor. She used to fill her belt with pins and watch
him wince as he smiled. He retaliated with as much dignity as he could
muster. He could not always muster much. His heart was full of rage.
He visited Reben in his office and demanded his rights or his release.
Reben tried to appease him; business was too good to be tampered with.
Reben promised him complete relief—next season. Then he would put
somebody else in Sheila’s place.
He could afford to be gracious because he felt that the hour had come to
launch Sheila as a star. Her success in a character rôle of peculiarly
American traits led him to abandon hope of finding a foreign success to
float her in. Besides, he had lost so much money on Incledon’s London
triumph that he was an intense partisan for the native drama—till the
next American play should fail, and the next importation succeed.
* * * * *
One evening, during the second _entr’acte_, he led a tall and
scholarly-looking young man down the side aisle and back of a box to the
stage. He left the uneasy alien to dodge the sections of scenery that
went scudding about like sails without hulls. Then he went to
dressing-room “No. 2” and tapped.
Old Pennock’s glum face appeared at the door with a threatening,
“We-ell?”
The intruder spoke meekly. “It’s Mr. Reben.”
Pennock repeated, “We-ell?”
Reben shifted to his other foot and pleaded, “May I speak to Miss Kemble
a moment?”
Pennock closed the door. Later Sheila opened it a little and peered
through, clutching together a light wrapper she had slipped into.
“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. I’ve got a quick
change, you know.”
Even the manager must yield to such conditions and Reben spoke around
the casement. “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that since you are so
unhappy in this company you’d better have one of your own.”
“For Heaven’s sake!” Sheila gasped at this unexpected bouquet.
Reben went on: “Since we had such bad success with the masterpiece of
the foremost English dramatist, perhaps you might have good luck by
going to the other extreme. I’ve found the youngest playwright in
captivity. Nowadays these kindergarten college boys write a lot of
successes. Joking aside, the boy has a manuscript I’d like you to look
over. There is a germ of something in it, I think. Will you just say
Hello to him, please?”
Sheila consented with eagerness. Reben beckoned forward a long effigy of
youthful terror.
“Miss Kemble, let me present Mr. Eugene Vickery.”
“How do you do, Mr. Nickerson?” said Sheila, and thrust one bare arm
through the chink to give her hand to Vickery. The arm was all he could
see of her except a narrow longitudinal section of silhouette against
the light over her mirror.
Vickery was so hurt, and so unreasonably hurt, by her failure to recall
him who had cherished her remembrance all these years, that his surprise
escaped him: “I met you once before, but you don’t remember me.”
She lied politely, and squeezed the hand she felt around hers with a
prevaricating cordiality. “Indeed I do. Let me see, where was it we
met—in Chicago, wasn’t it, this fall?”
“No; it was in Braywood.”
“Braywood? But I’ve never been in Braywood, have I? Mr. Reben, have I
ever played Bray—Oh, that’s where my aunt and uncle live! But was I
ever there?”
“Very long ago.”
“Oh, don’t say that! Not before my manager!”
“As a very little girl.”
“Oh, that’s better. You see, I go to so many places. And that’s where I
met you? You’ve changed, haven’t you?”
She could see nothing of him except the large hand that still clung to
hers. She got it back as he laughed:
“Yes, I’ve grown some taller. I played Hamlet to your Ophelia. Then I
wrote a play for you, but you got away without hearing it. Now I’ve
written another for you. You can’t escape this time.”
“I won’t try to. I’m just dying to play it. What is it?”
A voice spoke in sternly: “Curtain’s going up. You ready, Miss Kemble?”
“Good Lord! Yes!” Then to Vickery. “I’ve got to fly. When can I see you,
Mr. Bickerton?”
Reben solved the problem: “Got an engagement to supper?”
“Yes, but I’ll break it.”
“We’ll call for you.”
“Fine! Good-by, Mr.—Mr. Braywood!”
The door closed and Vickery turned away in such a whirl of elation that
he almost walked into the scene where Tom Brereton was giving an
unusually creditable performance, since Sheila was off the stage.