Eventually Vickery’s play was ready for production. At least Reben told
him, with Job’s comfort:
“We’ve all worked at it till we don’t know what it’s about. We’ve
changed everything in it, so let’s put it on and get rid of it.”
The weather of the rehearsal week for the Vickery play was barbarously
hot. The theater at night was a sea of rippling fans. The house was none
the less packed; the crowd was almost always the same. People had their
theater nights as they had their church nights. The prices were very low
and a seat could be had for the price of an ice-cream soda. People were
no hotter in the theater than on their own porches, and the play took
their minds off their thermometers.
Reben had come down for the rehearsals. There were to be few of
them—five mornings and Sunday. There was no chance to put in or take
out. The actors could do no more than tack their lines to their
positions.
Still Reben found so much fault with everything that Vickery was ready
for the asylum. Sheila simply had to comfort him through the crisis.
Eldon proceeded to complicate matters by developing into a fiend of
jealousy. Fatigue and strain and the weather were all he could bear. The
extra courtesies to Vickery were the final back-breaking straws.
He told Sheila he had a mind to throw the play. The distracted girl,
realizing his irresponsible and perilous state, tried to tide him over
the ordeal by adopting him and mothering him with melting looks and
rapturous compliments. This course brought her into further difficulties
with the peevish author.
While they were rehearsing Vickery’s play they were of course performing
another.
By some unconscious irony the manager had chosen to revive a melodrama
of arctic adventure, thinking perhaps to cool the audience with the
journey to boreal regions. The actors were forced to dress in polar-bear
pelts, and each costume was an ambulant Turkish bath. The men wore long
wigs and false beards. The spirit gum that held the false hair in place
frequently washed away from the raining pores and there were
astonishingly sudden shaves that sent the audience into peals of
laughter.
Eldon congratulated himself that his face at least was free, for he was
a faithful Eskimo. But in one scene, which had been rehearsed without
the properties, it was his duty to lose his life in saving his master’s
life. On the first night of the performance the hero and the villain
struggled on two big wabbly blocks of blue papier-maché supposed to
represent icebergs. Eldon, the Eskimo, was slain and fell dead to
magnificent applause. But his perspiratory glands refused to die and his
diaphragm continued to pant.
And then his grateful master delivered a farewell eulogy over him. And
as a last tribute spread across his face a great suffocating polar-bear
skin! There were fifteen minutes more of the act, and Sheila in the
wings wondered if Eldon would be alive or completely Desdemonatized when
the curtain fell.
He lived, but for years after he felt smothered whenever he remembered
that night.
During the rest of the week his master’s farewell tribute was omitted at
Eldon’s request. But it was impossible to change the scene to Florida
and the arctic costumes had to be endured. Sheila’s own costumes were
almost fatal to her.
And that was the play they played afternoons and evenings while they
devoted their mornings to whipping Vickery’s drama into shape.
And now Reben, goaded by the heat as by innumerable gnats, and fuming at
the time he was wasting in the dull, hot town where there was nothing to
do of evenings but walk the stupid streets or visit a moving-picture
shed or see another performance of that detestable arctic play—Reben
proceeded to resent Sheila’s graciousness to both actor and author and
to demand a little homage for the lonely manager.
Sheila said to Pennock: “I’m going to run away to some nice quiet
madhouse and ask for a padded cell and iron bars. I want to go before
they take me. If I don’t I’ll commit murder or suicide. These men! these
men! these infernal men! Why don’t they let me alone?”
All Pennock could say was: “There, there, there, you poor child! Let me
put a cold cloth on your head.”
“If you could pour cold water on the men I’d be all right,” Sheila would
groan. She had hysterics regularly every night when she got to her room.
She would scream and pull her hair and stamp her feet and wail: “I vow
I’ll never act again. Or if I do, I’ll never marry; or if I marry, I’ll
marry somebody that never heard of the stage. I’ll marry a Methodist
preacher. They don’t believe in the theater, and neither do I!”
Thus Sheila stormed against the men. But her very excitement showed that
love was becoming an imperious need. She was growing up to her
mating-time. Just now she was like a bird surrounded by suitors, and
they were putting on their Sunday feathers for her, trilling their best,
and fighting each other for her possession. She was the mistress of the
selection, coy, unconvinced, and in a runaway humor.
Three men had made ardent love to her, and her heart had slain them each
in turn. She was a veritable Countess of Monte Cristo. She had scored
off “One!” “Two!” and “Three!”
This left her with nothing to wed but her career. And she was disgusted
with that.
* * * * *
Only her long training and her tremendous resources of endurance could
have carried her through that multiplex exhaustion of every emotion.
Numbers of soldiers desert the firing-line in almost every battle.
Occasional firemen refrain from dashing into burning and collapsing
buildings. Policemen sometimes feel themselves outnumbered beyond
resistance. But actors do not abstain from first-night performances.
Even a death-certificate is hardly excuse enough for that treachery.
So on the appointed night Sheila played the part that Vickery wrote for
her, and played it brilliantly. She stepped on the stage as from a
bandbox and she flitted from scene to scene with the volatility of a
humming-bird.
Eldon covered himself with glory and lent her every support. The
kiln-dried company danced through the other rôles with vivacity and the
freshness of débutancy. They had had the unusual privilege of a Monday
afternoon off.
The big face of the audience that night glistened with joy and
perspiration, and found the energy somewhere to demand a speech from the
author and another from Sheila.
Vickery was in the seventh heaven. If there were an eighth it would
belong to playwrights who see the chaos of their manuscripts changed
into men and women applauded by a multitude. Vickery could not believe
the first howl of laughter from the many-headed, one-mooded beast. The
second long roll of delight rendered him to the clouds. He went up
higher on the next, and when a meek little witticism of his was received
with an earthquake of joy, followed by a salvo of applause, he hardly
recognized the moon as he shot past it.
Later, there were moments of tautness and hush when the audience sat on
the edge of its seats and held its breath with excitement. That was
heroic bliss. But when from his coign of espionage in the back of a box
he saw tears glistening on the eyes of pretty girls, and old women with
handkerchiefs at their wet cheeks, and hard-faced business men sneaking
their thumbs past their dripping lashes, the ecstasy was divine. When
the tension was relaxed and the audience blew its great nose he thought
he heard the music of the spheres.
The play was almost an hour too long, but the audience risked the last
street-cars and stuck to its post till the delightful end. Then it
lingered to applaud the curtain up three times. As the amiable mob
squeezed out, Vickery wound his way among it, eavesdropping like a spy,
and hearing nothing but good of his work and of its performers.
As soon as he could he worked his way free and darted back to the stage.
There he found Sheila standing and crying her heart out with laughter,
while Eldon held one hand and Reben the other.
Vickery thrust in between them, caught her hands away from theirs, and
gathered her into his arms. And kissed her. Both were laughing and both
were crying. It was a very salty kiss, but he found it wonderful.