Winfield had said, “I ought to!” It is strange that we always say “I
ought to” with skepticism, wondering both “Shall I?” and “Will I?” If
our selves are our real gods, we are all agnostics.
The next morning Sheila woke with less than her yester joy. Leisure was
not so much a luxury and more of a bore. Not that she felt regret for
the lack of rehearsals. She was not interested in plays, but in the raw
material of plays, and she was not so proud of her noble renunciation of
Bret Winfield as she had been.
To fight off her new loneliness she decided to go shopping. When men are
restless they go to clubs or billiard-parlors or saloons. Women go
prowling through the shops. The Clinton shops were as unpromising to
Sheila as a man’s club in summer. But there was no other way to kill
time.
As she set out she saw Bret Winfield’s car loafing in front of her
hotel. He was sitting in it. The faces of both showed a somewhat dim
surprise. Sheila quickened her steps to the curb, where he hastened to
alight.
“You didn’t go,” she said, brilliantly.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I—I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Well, I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and—”
“I didn’t close my eyes, either.”
It was a perfectly sincere statement on both sides and perfectly untrue
in both cases. Both had slept enviably most of the time they thought
they were awake. Sheila tried to make conversation:
“What was on your mind?”
“You!”
His words filled her with delicious fright. On the lofty hill under the
low-hanging moon he had scared love off by attempted caresses. With one
word he brought love back in a rose-clouded mantle that gave their
communion a solitude there on the noisy street with the cars brawling by
and the crowds passing and peering, people nudging and whispering:
“That’s her! That’s Sheila Kemble! Ain’t she pretty? She’s just grand in
the new show! Saw it yet?”
They stood in gawky speechlessness till he said, “Which way you going?”
“I have some shopping to do.”
“Oh! Too bad. I was going to ask you to take a little spin.”
They span.
* * * * *
Winfield did not leave Clinton till the week was gone and Sheila with
it. They were together constantly, making little efforts at concealment
that attracted all manner of attention in the whole jealous town.
Vickery and Eldon were not the least alive to Winfield’s incursion into
Sheila’s thoughts. Both regarded it as nothing less than a barbaric
danger. Both felt that Winfield, for all his good qualities, was a
Philistine. They knew that he had little interest in the stage as an
institution, and no reverence for it. It was to him an amusement at
best, and a scandal at worst.
But to Vickery the theater was the loftiest form of literary
publication, and to Eldon it was the noblest forum of human debate. To
both of them Sheila was as a high priestess at an altar. They felt that
Winfield wanted to lure her or drag her away from the temple to an
old-fashioned home where her individuality would be merged in her
husband’s manufacturing interests, and her histrionism would be confined
to an audience of one, or to the entertainment of her own children.
This feeling was entirely apart from the love that both of them felt for
Sheila the woman. Each was sure in his heart that his own love for
Sheila was far the greatest of the three loves.
Vickery forgot even his own vain struggles to make the heroine of his
play behave, in his eagerness to save Sheila from ruining the dramatic
unity of her life by interpolating a commercial marriage as the third
act. He found a chance to speak to her one afternoon just before the
second curtain rose. He was as excited as if he had been making a
curtain speech and nearly as awkward:
“Sheila,” he hemmed and hawed, “I want to speak to you very frankly
about Bret. Of course, he’s a splendid fellow and a friend I’m very fond
of, but if he goes and makes you fall in love with him I’ll break his
head.”
“He’s bigger than you are,” Sheila laughed.
“Yes,” Vickery admitted, “but there are clubs that are harder than even
his hard head. If he takes you off the stage I’ll never forgive myself
for introducing him to you. I’ll never forgive him, either—or you. In
Heaven’s name, Sheila, don’t let him take you off the stage. I’ve heard
of hitching your wagon to a star, but this would be hitching a star to a
wagon. I can’t ask you to marry me for the Lord knows how long; even
assuming that you would consider me if I had a million instead of being
a penniless playwright; but I at least would try to help you on in your
career. I’d rather you wouldn’t marry either of us than marry him.”
Sheila chuckled luxuriously: “Don’t you lose any sleep over me, Vick. In
the first place, Mr. Winfield has never even suggested that I should
marry him.”
Which was fact.
“In the second place, if he did I should decline him with thanks.”
Which was prophecy.
Vickery was so relieved that he returned to the discussion of his play.
He promised to have it ready for fall rehearsals. Sheila assured him
that she would be ready whenever the play was. Then her cue came and she
walked into her laboratory, while Vickery hastened out front to study
the effect of his new lines on the audience.
When Sheila issued from her dressing-room for the third act, in which
she did not appear for some time after the curtain was up, she found
Eldon waiting for her. He was suffering as from stage-fright, and he
delivered the lines he had been rehearsing in his dressing-room nearly
as badly as the lines he had forgotten the night he played the farmer
with the dark lantern. The substance of what he jumbled was this:
“Sheila, I want to speak very frankly to you. Don’t take it for mere
jealousy, though you have hardly looked at me since Mr. Vickery and the
Winfield fellow struck town. I don’t Suppose you care for me any more,
but I beg you not to let anybody take you off the stage. You belong. You
have the God-given gifts. Your success proves where your duty to
yourself lies.
“If you can’t marry me and you must marry some one, marry our author. It
would break my heart, but I’d rather he’d have you than anybody but me,
for he’d keep you where you belong, anyway. I suppose this Winfield has
some extraordinary charms for you. He seems a nice enough fellow and
he’ll come into a heap of money. But if I thought there was any danger
of his carrying you off, I’d knock him so far out of the theater that
he’d never—”
Sheila was bristling up to say that two could play at the same game, but
Eldon had heard his signal for entrance, and, leaving his gloomy
earnestness in the wings, he breezed on to the stage with all imaginable
flippancy. He came off just as gaily a little later, only to resume his
sobriety and his speech the moment he passed the side-line:
“As I was saying, Sheila, I implore you not to ruin your life by
marrying that man.”
Sheila had many things to say, but her actress self had heard the
approach of her cue, and she spoke hastily: “You are worrying yourself
needlessly, Floyd. In the first place, Mr. Winfield has never even
suggested that I should marry him; in the second place, if he did, I’d
decline with—”
And then she slipped into the scene and became the creature of Vickery’s
fancy.
On Saturday night the house-manager gave a farewell supper to Sheila on
the stage and naturally failed to include Winfield in the invitations.
He sulked about the somnolent town in a dreadful fit of loneliness, but
he could not get a word with Sheila. Sheila, now that she was leaving
the company, felt a mingling of fondness for the shabby old stage and
the workaday troupe and of happiness at being pardoned out of the
penitentiary.
On the morrow Winfield asked her by telephone if he might take her to
the train in his car. She consented. She was late getting ready, and he
had to go at high speed, with no chance for farewell conversation. As
they reached the station his agony at leaving her wrenched from him a
desperate plea:
“Won’t you kiss me Good-by?”
In the daylight, among the unromantic hacks, she laughed at the thought:
“Kiss you _Good-by_? Why, I haven’t kissed you _How-d’-do?_ yet!”