It must be a strangely thrilling thing to be a woman and meet a man who
has been so impressed by oneself in childhood that he has never
forgotten—a man who has indeed devoted his gifts and ambitions to the
perfection of a drama to exploit one’s charms and one’s gifts, and comes
back years after with the extraordinary tribute.
The idol needs the idolater or it is no idol, and it doubtless watches
the worshiper with as much respect and trepidation as the worshiper it.
That is why gods, like other artists, have always been jealous. Their
trade lies in their power to attract crowds and hold them. Rivals for
glory are rivals for business.
Vickery was Sheila’s first playwright. She could not fail to regard him
as a rescuer from mediocrity, and see a glamour about him.
She had planned to go to a late dance that night with some people of
social altitude. But she would have snubbed the abbess of all
aristocracy for a playwright who came offering her transportation to the
clouds.
She had taken her best bib and tucker to her dressing-room and she put
it on for Vickery. But she could not dredge up the faintest memory of
him, and he found her almost utterly strange as he stared at her between
the shaded candles on the restaurant table. She was different even from
the girl he had seen on the stage recoiling from Bret Winfield’s unlucky
chivalry. The few months of intermission had altered her with theatrical
speed. She had had her sentiments awakened by Eldon and her authority
enlarged by two important rôles. Her own character was a whole
repertoire.
When Vickery had last seen her she was playing the second young woman
under her aunt’s protection; now she was a metropolitan favorite at
whose side the big manager of the country sat as a sort of prime
minister serving her royalty.
First came the necessary business of ordering a supper. Sheila’s
appetite amazed Vickery, who did not realize that this was her dinner,
or how hard she had worked for it.
When the waiter had hurried off with a speed which he would not
duplicate in returning, Sheila must hear about her first acquaintance
with Vickery. He spoke with enthusiasm of the little witch she had been,
and described with homage her fiery interpretation of Ophelia and her
maniac shrieks. He could still hear them, he said, on quiet nights. He
pictured her so vividly as she had sat on his mother’s knee and defended
her family name and profession that Sheila’s eyes filled with tears and
she turned to Reben for confirmation of her emotions. There are few
children for whom we feel kindlier than for our early selves.
Her eyes glistened as Vickery recounted his own boyish ambitions to
write her a play; the depths of woe he had felt when he found her gone.
Then he described his retrieval of her during the riot at Leroy. He told
how his friend Bret Winfield had been knocked galley-west by some actor
in her troupe. He had forgotten the man’s name, but his words brought
Eldon back in the room and seated him like a forlorn and forgotten
Banquo at the table. Sheila blushed to remember that she had owed the
poor fellow a letter for a long time.
Then Vickery explained that Winfield had gone to her defense and not to
her offense, and she felt a pang of remorse at her injustice to him,
also. A pretty girl has to be unjust to so many men.
She had a queer thrill, too, from Vickery’s statement that Winfield had
vowed to meet her some day and square himself with her; also to meet
“that actor” some day and square himself with him.
This strange man Winfield began to loom across her horizon like an
approaching Goliath. She tried to remember how he had looked, but
recalled only that he was very big and that she was very much afraid of
him.
This confusion of retrospect and prospect was dissipated, however, when
Vickery began to talk of the play he had written for her. Then Sheila
could see nothing but her opportunity, and that strange self an actor
visualizes in a new rôle. The rest of us think of Hamlet as a certain
personage. The actor thinks of “Hamlet as Myself” or “Myself as Hamlet.”
Vickery’s play, as Reben’s play-reader had told him, contained an idea.
But an idea is as dangerous to a playwright as a loaded gun is to a
child. The problem is, What will he do with it?
When Vickery told Sheila the central character and theme of his play she
was enraptured with the possibilities. When he began to describe in
detail what he had done with them she was tormented with disappointments
and resentments. She gave way to little gasps of, “Oh, would she do
that?” “Oh, do you think you ought to have her say that?”
Vickery was young and opinionated and had never seen one of his plays
after the critics and the public had made tatters of it. He could only
realize that he had spent months of intense thought upon every word. He
was shocked at Sheila’s glib objections.
How could one who simply heard his story for the first time know what
ought to be done with it? He forgot that a play’s prosperity, like a
joke’s, lies in the ear of those who hear it for the first time.
He responded to Sheila’s skepticisms with all the fanatic eloquence of
faith. He convinced her against her will for the moment. She liked him
for his ardor. She liked the reasons he gave. She could not help
feeling: “What a decent fellow he is! What a kind, wholesome view of
life he takes!”
Woman-like, as she listened to his ideas she fell to studying his
character and the features that published it. She was contrasting him
with Eldon—Eldon so powerful, so handsome, so rich-voiced, so magnetic,
and so obstinate; Vickery so homely, so lean, so shambling of gait and
awkward of gesture, his voice so inadequate to the big emotions he had
concocted. And yet Eldon only wanted to join her in the interpretation
of other people’s creations. This spindle-shanks was himself a creator;
he had idealized and dramatized a play from and for Sheila’s very own
personality.
She began to think that there was something a trifle more exhilarating
about an alliance with a creative genius than with just another actor.
In her youth and ignorance she used the words “creative” and “genius”
with reverence. She had never known a “creative genius” before—except
Sir Ralph Incledon, and she loathed him. Vickery was different.
Suddenly in the midst of Vickery’s description of the complexest tangle
of his best situation Sheila dumfounded him by saying, “You have gray
eyes, haven’t you?”
He collapsed like a punctured balloon and a look of intense
discouragement dulled his expression. Misunderstanding the cause of his
collapse entirely, she hastened to add:
“Oh, but I like gray eyes! Really! Please go on!”
Vickery understood her misunderstanding, smiled laboriously, then with
an effort gathered together the wreckage of his plot for a fresh
ascension. Just as he was fairly well away from the ground again Sheila
turned to Reben and spoke very earnestly:
“He ought to write a good play. He has the hands of a creative
genius—those spatulate fingers, you know. See!”
Since she had known Vickery from childhood, she felt at liberty to stop
his hand in the midst of an ardent gesture and submit it to Reben’s
inspection. Vickery was hugely embarrassed. Reben was gruff:
“If he’s such a genius you’d better not hold his hand. Let him gene.”
She stared at Reben in amazement; there was a clang of anger in his
sarcasm. Abruptly she realized that she had quite ignored him. She had
lent Vickery her eyes and ears for half an hour. Reben’s anger was due
to hurt pride, the miff of a great manager neglected by a minor actress
and an unproduced author. But as she glanced up into the Oriental
blackness of his glare she saw something lurking there that frightened
her. Her instant intuition was, “Jealousy!” Slower-footed reason said,
“Absurd!”
Reben had been closely attached for years to the exaltation of the
famous actress, Mrs. Diana Rhys, who had floated to the stage on the
crest of a famous scandal from a city where she had been known as Diana
the Huntress. She had behaved rather better as an actress than as a
housewife, but none too well in either calling. For some years she had
been bound to Reben by ties that were supposed to be permanent.
Sheila reproached herself for imagining that Reben could be jealous of
herself. Yet she cherished a superstitious belief that when she
disregarded her intuition she went wrong. The superstition had fastened
itself on her, as superstitions do, from her habit of remembering the
occasional events that seemed to confirm it and forgetting the
numberless events that disproved it.
She restored her attention to Vickery’s plot, but the background of her
thoughts was full of ominous lightnings and rumblings like a summer sky
when a storm is far off but inevitable.
Now the plight of Vickery’s heroine seemed much less thrilling than her
own. Here she sat almost betrothed to the distant Eldon, almost
bewitched by the new-comer, Vickery, and threatened with the wrath of an
unexpected claimant who was her manager and held both her present and
her future in his hand.
She studied Reben out of the corner of her eye. This new, this utterly
unsuspected phase of his, made necessary a fresh appraisal of him. He
was now something more and something less than her manager. He was
something of a conquest of hers; but did he hope to be a conqueror, too?
It was strange to think of him as a suitor—an amorous manager! a
business man with a bouquet! In this guise he looked younger than she
had seen him, yet more crafty, more cruel than ever. The Orientalism
that had made him so shrewd a bargainer in the bazar was now in a harem
humor. His black hair was, after all, in curls; his big eyes were
shadowy, wet; his fat hands wore rings—a sanguine ruby twinned with a
gross diamond and a shifty opal, like the back of an iridescent and
venomous beetle.
Sheila thought of David and Solomon with their many loves, and she felt
that perhaps Mrs. Rhys was not sufficient for this man. If he should
claim her, too, what should she say to him? Must she sacrifice her
career at its very outset just because this man turned monster?
She became so involved in her own meditations that Vickery found her
almost deaf to his narrative. He lost the thread of his spinning and
tangled himself in it like another Lady of Shalott.
Finally Sheila confessed her bewilderment. She spoke with an assumption
of vast experience: “I never could tell anything from a scenario. The
play is written out, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” said Vickery. “May I send it to your hotel?”
“I’d rather you’d read it to me,” Sheila pleaded. “You could explain it,
you know. I’m so stupid.”
“That would be splendid!” said Vickery. “When? Where?”
Before Sheila could answer, Reben broke in, “At my office, at three
to-morrow, if that suits you, Miss Kemble.”
She demurred feebly that they would be interrupted all the time. Reben
promised absolute peace and said, with a grim finality: “That’s settled,
then, Mr. Vickery. To-morrow, my office, three o’clock.”
There was such a sharp dismissal in his tone that Vickery found himself
standing with his hand out in farewell before he quite realized what had
lifted him from his chair.
“You’re not going?” said Sheila. “You haven’t finished your coffee.”
“I’ve had more than is good for me,” said Vickery. “Good night, and
thank you a thousand times. Good night, Mr. Reben.”
As he shambled through the tables to the door Sheila said, “Nice boy.”
“So you seem to think,” Reben growled.
She stared at him again, troubled at his manner, confirmed in her
suspicion, afraid of it and of him. But she said nothing.
“Want a liqueur?” he snapped.
She shook her head.
He said to her, “I’ll take you home,” and to the waiter, “Check!”
“Just put me in a cab,” said Sheila.
He fumed with impatience over the waiter’s delay with the check and the
change, the time Sheila spent getting her wrap from the cloak-woman, and
her gloves and her hand-bag. He tapped his foot with impatience while
the starter whistled up a taxicab. Then he spoke to the driver and got
in with her.
He said nothing but, “May I smoke?” But she noted his fearsome mien as
the light of his match painted it with startling vividness against the
dark. The ruby of his ring was like an evil eye. His thick brows drew
down over the black fire of his own eyes, and his lips were red over the
big teeth that clenched the cigar. Then he puffed out the match and his
face vanished. He said nothing till they reached the apartment-hotel
where she lived. He helped her out and paid the driver. She put forth
her hand to bid him good night, but he said:
“I want a word with you, please.”