Bret telegraphed Sheila that he was coming to New York to see her. She
telegraphed back:
Awfully love see you but hideously busy rehearsals souls
devotion.
These poor telegraph operators! The honey they have to transmit must
fairly stick to the wires and gum up the keys.
Winfield determined to go, anyway—and to surprise her. He set out
without warning and flew to the theater as soon as he reached New York.
The tip-loving doorman declined so fiercely to take his card in that he
frightened the poor swain out of the proffer of a bribe.
While Winfield loitered irresolutely near the stage entrance an actor
strolled out to snatch a few puffs of a cigarette while he was not
needed. Winfield was about to ask him to tell Miss Kemble that Mr.
Winfield was waiting for her. He saw that the actor was Eldon.
He dodged behind the screen of a fire-escape from the gallery and slunk
away unobserved. There was no fire-escape in his soul from the
conflagration of jealousy that shot up at the sight of his rival, and
the thought that Eldon was spending his days in Sheila’s company, while
her affianced lover gnashed his teeth outside.
He hung about like Mary’s lamb for meekness and like Red Riding-Hood’s
wolf for wrath. He would wait for Sheila to come out for lunch. Hours
passed. He saw Eldon dash across the street to a little restaurant and
return with a cup of coffee and a bundle of sandwiches. Ye gods, he was
feeding her!
With all a lover’s fiendish ingenuity in devising tortures for himself,
Winfield transported his soul from the vat of boiling oil to the rack
and the cell of Little Ease and back again. He imagined the most
ridiculous scenes in the theater and suspected Sheila of such
treacheries that if he had really believed them he would surely have
been cured of his love.
He saw that a policeman was regarding him with suspicion, and since he
was faint with torture on an empty stomach, he went to a restaurant to
kill time. When he returned he waited an hour before he ventured to
steal upon the stage-door keeper again. Then he learned that the
rehearsal had been dismissed two hours before. Aching with rage, he
taxicabbed to Sheila’s hotel. She had not returned. Out riding with
Eldon somewhere no doubt!
He went to the railroad station. He would escape from the hateful town
where there was nothing but perfidy and vice. He called up the hotel to
bid Sheila a bitter farewell. Pennock answered and informed him that
Sheila had been at the dressmaker’s all afternoon and was just returned,
so dead that Pennock had made her take a nap. She shouldn’t be disturbed
till she woke, no, not for a dozen Winfields, especially as she had an
evening rehearsal.
Winfield returned to her hotel and hung about like a process-server. He
waited in the lobby, reading the evening papers, one after another, from
“ears” to tail. He telephoned up to Pennock till she forbade the
operator to ring the bell again.
The big fellow was almost hysterical when a hall-boy called him to the
telephone-booth. He heard Sheila’s voice. She was fairly squealing with
delight at his presence. Instantly chaos became a fresh young world, all
Eden.
Sheila had just learned of Winfield’s arrival. She promised to be down
as soon as she had scrubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She invited him
to take her to dinner at Claremont before she went back to “the morgue,”
as she called the theater—and meant it, for she was fagged out.
Everything was wrong with the play, the cast, and, worst of all, with
her costumes.
There was further tantalism for Bret in the greeting in the hotel lobby.
A formal hand-clasp and a more ardent eye-clasp were all they dared
venture. The long bright summer evening made it impossible to steal
kisses in the taxicab, except a few snapshots caught as they ran under
the elevated road. But they held hands and wrung fingers and talked
rapturous nonsense.
The view of the Hudson was supremely beautiful from the restaurant
piazza, until Reben arrived with his old Diana Rhys and the two of them
filled the landscape like another Storm King and Dunderberg.
Mrs. Rhys had for some time resented Reben’s interest in Sheila and had
made life infernal for him. She began on him at the table. He was
furious with humiliation and swarthier with jealousy of the unknown
occupant of the chair opposite Sheila.
Sheila explained to Winfield in hasty asides that she was in hot water.
Reben did not like to have her appear in public places at all, and then
only with the strictest chaperonage.
Winfield sniffed at such Puritanism from him.
“It isn’t that, honey,” Sheila said, “it’s business. He says that
actresses, of all people, should lead secluded lives because—who wants
to pay two dollars to see a woman who can be seen all over town for
nothing? He’s planning a regular convent life for me, and he’s shutting
down on all the personal publicity. I’m glad of it—for I really belong
to you.
“Reben wants me to be especially strict because I’ve got to play
innocent young girls, and he says that many a promising actress has
killed herself commercially with the nice people, by thinking that it
was none of the public’s business what she did outside the theater. Of
course it isn’t really their business in a way, but the public make it
so.
“And you can’t wonder at it. I know I’m not prudish or narrow, but when
I see a play where a character is supposed to be terribly ignorant and
pathetic and trusting, it sort of hurts the illusion when I know that
the actress is really a hateful cat who has broken up a dozen homes.
“So you see Reben’s right. He’d come over here now and send me home if
old Rhys would let him. He’s dying to know who you are. But of course I
won’t tell him.”
This did not comfort Winfield in the least. It angered him, too, to
think of Reben as right about anything; and he felt no thanks to him for
his counsels of prudence. When it is insisted too strenuously that
honesty is good policy, even honesty becomes suspect.
The tête-à-tête and the dinner were ruined and it was not yet dark
enough on the way back to permit any of the embraces and kisses that
Winfield was famished for. He took no pleasure even in the spectacular
sunset along the Hudson—miles of assorted crimsons in the sky, with the
cool green Palisades as a barrier between the radiant heavens and the
long panel of the mirror-river that told the sky how beautiful it was.
Winfield was completely dissatisfied with life. It was peculiarly
distressing to be so deeply in love with so dear a girl so deeply in
love in turn, and to have her profession and its necessities brandished
like a flaming sword between them.
This experience is likely to play an increasing part in the romances of
the future as more and more women claim a larger and larger share of
life outside the home. Existence has always been a process of
readjustments, but certainly at no time in history has there been such a
revolution as this in the relations of man and woman. From now on
numbers of husbands will learn what wives have endured for ages in
waiting for the spouse to come home from the shop.
The usual pattern of emotion was almost ludicrously reversed when
Winfield took his sweetheart to her factory and left her at the door to
resume her overtime night-work, while he idled about in the odious
leisure of a housekeeper.
Winfield hated the situation with all the ferocity of a lover denied,
and all the indignation of an old-fashioned youth who believed in taking
the woman of his choice under his wing to protect her from the world.
But he had chosen a girl who proposed to conquer the world and who would
find the shadow under his wing too close. He felt himself as feeble and
misallied as a ring-dove mated with a falcon. She was an artist, a
public idol, while he at best was as obscure as a vice-president; he was
only the indolent heir of a self-made man.
He dawdled about, revolting against his dependency, till Sheila finished
her rehearsal. Then she met him and they rode through the moonlit Park.
She loved him immensely, but she was so exhausted that she fell asleep
in his arm. He kissed the wan little moon of her face as it lay back on
his shoulder. He loved her with all his might. He loved her enough to
take her home to her hotel and surrender her to herself while he moped
away to his own hotel.
The next day it was the same story except that she promised to ask for a
respite at the luncheon hour and meet him at a restaurant near the
theater. The appointment was for one o’clock. He waited until two-thirty
before she appeared. And then she had only time to tell him that Reben
had given her a merciless scolding for her escapade of the evening
before.
Winfield expressed his desire to punch Reben’s head, and Sheila rejoiced
at having a champion, even though (or perhaps because) the champion
claimed her more exclusively than Reben did.
Bret had to endure another dismal wait until dinner, and then there was
again an evening rehearsal. The time of production was approaching and
Batterson was growing demoniac. After the rehearsal Bret from across the
street watched all the other members of the company leave the theater.
Even Eldon came forth, but not Sheila.
Another hour Bret spent of watchful waiting, and then she appeared with
Reben and Prior. They had been having a consultation and a quarrel, and
they continued it to the hotel, Sheila not daring to shake them off.
Winfield shadowed them along the street, and waited outside till they
left the hotel; then he made haste to find Sheila.
She was distraught between the demands of her play and her lover.
Revisions had been made and she had a new scene to learn and a new
interpretation of the character to achieve before morning. The only
crumb of good news was the fact that Reben was to be out of town the
next day and she could sneak Winfield in to watch a rehearsal, if he
wanted to come.
He wanted to exceedingly. It was one way of borrowing trouble.
He stole in at the front of the house and sat in the empty dark,
unobserved, but not unobserving. He had the wretched privilege of
watching Eldon make love to Sheila and take her in his arms. A dozen
embraces were tried before Batterson could find just the attitude to
suit him. And that did not suit Sheila.
Partly because it is almost impossible for a man to show a woman how she
would act, and partly because Sheila could almost see Bret’s gaze
blazing from the dark like a wolf’s eyes, she was incapable of achieving
the effect Batterson wanted.
The stage-manager was reaching his ugly phase, and after leaving Sheila
in Eldon’s clasp for ten minutes while he tried her arms in various
poses, all of them awkward, he walked to the table where Prior sat and
muttered:
“Her mother would have grasped it in a minute. Isn’t it funny that the
children of great actors are always damned fools?”
The whole company overheard and Winfield rose to his feet in a fury. But
he heard Sheila say to Eldon, for Batterson’s benefit:
“Why, I didn’t know that Mr. Batterson’s parents were great actors, did
you?”
Batterson caught this as Sheila intended, and he flew into one of the
passions that were to be expected about this time. He slammed the
manuscript on the table and made the usual bluff of walking out. Sheila
did not follow. She sank into a chair and made signals to the invisible
Bret not to interfere, as she knew he was about to do.
He understood her meaning and restrained his impulse to climb over the
footlights once more.
Batterson fought it out with himself, then came back, and with a sigh of
heavenly resignation resumed the rehearsal. The company was refreshed by
the divertisement and Sheila and Batterson were as amiable as two
warriors after a truce. The embrace was speedily agreed upon.
Sheila met Bret at luncheon, and now she had him on her hands. He was
ursine with clumsy wrath.
“To think that my wife-to-be must stand up there and let a mucker like
that stage-manager swear at her! Good Lord! I’ll break his head!”
Sheila wondered how long she would be able to endure these alternating
currents, but she put off despair and cooed:
“Now, honey, you can’t go around breaking all the heads in town. You
mustn’t think anything of it. Poor old Batty is excited, and so are we
all. It’s just a business dispute. It’s always this way when the
production is near.”
“And are you going to let that fellow Eldon fondle you like that?”
“Why, honey dear, it’s in the manuscript!”
“Then you can cut it out. I won’t have it, I tell you! What kind of a
dog do you think I am that I’m to let other men hug my wife?”
“But it’s only in public, dearest, that he hugs me.”
At the recurrence of this extraordinary logic Winfield simply opened his
mouth like a fish on land. He was suffocating with too much air.
Sheila and he kept silence a moment. They were remembering the somewhat
similar dispute in another moonlit scene, at Clinton. Only then he was
an audacious flirter; now he was a conservative fiancé. Her logic was
the same, but he had veered to the opposite side. She murmured,
dolefully:
“You don’t understand the stage very well, do you, dear?”
“No, I don’t!” he growled. “And I don’t want to. It’s no place for a
woman. You’ve got to give it up.”
“I’ve promised to, honey, as soon as I can.”
“Well, in the mean while, you’ve got to cut out that hugging business
with Eldon—or anybody else. I won’t have it, that’s all!”
To her intense amazement Sheila was flattered by this overweening
tyranny. She rejoiced at her lover’s wealth of jealousy, the one supreme
proof of true love in a woman’s mind, a proof that is weightier than any
tribute of praise or jewelry or toil or sacrifice.
She said she would see if the embrace could be omitted. The next day
Reben sat in the orchestra and she went down to sit at his side. She did
not mention Winfield’s part in the matter, of course, but craftily
insinuated:
“Do you know something? I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s a mistake to
have that embrace in the second act. It seems to me to—er—to
anticipate the climax.”
Reben, all unsuspecting, leaped into the snare:
“That’s so! I always say that once the hero and heroine clinch, the
play’s over. We’ll just cut it there, and save it to the end of the last
act.”
Sheila, flushed with her victory, pressed further:
“And that’s another point. Wouldn’t it be more—er—artistic if you
didn’t show the embrace even then—just have the lovers start toward
each other and ring down so that the curtain drops before they embrace?
It would be novel, and it would leave something to the audience’s
imagination.”
Reben was skeptical of this: “We might try it in one of the tank towns,
but I’m afraid the people will be sore if they don’t see the lovers
brought together for at least one good clutch. Nothing like trying
things out, though.”
Sheila was tempted to ask him not to tell Batterson that it was her
idea. The fear was unnecessary. Any advice that Reben accepted became at
once his own idea. He advanced to the orchestra rail and told Batterson
to “cut out both clutches.”
Batterson consented with ill grace and Eldon looked so crestfallen, so
humiliated, that Sheila hastened to reassure him that it was nothing
personal. But he was not convinced.
He was enduring bitter days. His love for Sheila would not expire. She
treated him with the greatest formality. She paid him the deference
belonging to a leading man. She was more gracious and more zealous for
his success than most stars are. But he read in her eyes no glimmer of
the old look.
He hoped that this was simply because she was too anxious and too busy
to consider him, and that once the play was prosperously launched she
would have time to love him.
This comfort sustained him through the loss of the two embraces. He
could not have imagined that Sheila had cut them out to please Winfield,
of whose presence in her environs he never dreamed.
At dinner that evening Sheila told Bret how she had brought about the
excision of the two embraces. He was as proud as Lucifer and she
rejoiced in having contrived his happiness. This was her chief ambition
now. She was thinking more of him and his peace than of her own success
or of that disturbance of the public peace which makes actors,
story-tellers, acrobats, and singers and other entertainers interesting.