Sheila was passing through the meanest phase of play production when the
first enthusiasms are gone and the nagging mechanics of position,
intonation, and speed are wearing away the nerves: when those wrenches
and inconsistencies of plot and character that are inevitably present in
so artificial a structure as a play begin to stick out like broken
bones; when scenery and property and costumes are turning up late and
wrong; and when the first audience begins to loom nearer and nearer as a
tidal wave toward which a ship is hurried all unready and aquiver to its
safety or to disaster.
At such a time Sheila found the presence of Winfield a cool shelter in
Sahara sands. He was an outsider; he was real; he loved her; he didn’t
want her to be an actress; he didn’t want her to work; he wanted her to
rest in his arms. His very angers and misunderstandings all sprang from
his love of herself.
Yet only a few days and she must leave him. The most hateful part of the
play was still to come—the process of “trying it on the dog”—on a
series of “dog-towns,” where the play would be produced before small and
timid audiences afraid to commit themselves either to amusement or
emotion before the piece had a metropolitan verdict passed upon it.
It was a commonplace that the test was uncertain, yet what other test
was possible? There was too much danger in throwing the piece on “cold”
before the New York death-watch of the first night. That would be to
hazard a great investment on the toss of a coin.
Sheila was cowering before the terrors that faced her. The difficulties
came rushing at her one after another. She was only a young girl, after
all, and she had swum out too far. Winfield was her sole rescuer from
the world. The others kept driving her farther and farther out to sea.
He would bring her to land.
The thought of separating from him for a whole theatrical season grew
intolerable. Fatigue and discouragement preyed on her reserve of
strength. Fear of the public swept her with flashes of cold sweat. She
could not sleep; herds of nightmares stampeded across her lonely bed.
She saw herself stricken with forgetfulness, with aphasia; she saw the
audiences hooting at her; she read the most venomous criticism; she saw
herself in train wrecks and theater fires. She saw the toppling scenery
crushing her, or weight-bags dropping on her from the flies.
The production was heavy and complicated and Reben believed in many
scenery rehearsals. There were endless periods of waiting for stage
carpenters to repair mistakes, for property-men to provide important
articles omitted from the property plot. The big set came in with the
stairway on the wrong side. Almost the whole business of the act had to
be reversed and learned over again. The last-act scene arrived in a
color that made Sheila’s prettiest costume hideous. She must have a new
gown or the scene must be repainted. A new gown was decided on; this
detail meant hours more of fittings at the dressmaker’s.
The final rehearsals were merciless. Sheila left Bret at the stage door
at ten o’clock one morning and did not put her head out of the theater
till three o’clock the next morning. And five hours later she must stand
for costume photographs in a broiling gallery.
Reben, utterly discouraged by the look of the play in its setting,
feared to bring it into New York even after the two weeks of trial
performances he had scheduled. An opportunity to get into Chicago turned
up, and he canceled his other bookings. Sheila was liked in Chicago and
he determined to make for there. The first performance was shifted from
Red Bank, New Jersey, to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Sheila was in dismay and Bret grew unmanageable. The only excuse for the
excitement of both was the fact that lovers have always been the same.
Romeo and Juliet would not wait for Romeo to come back from banishment.
They had to be married secretly at once. The world has always had its
Gretna Greens for frantic couples.
So this frantic couple—not content with all its other torments—must
inflict mutual torment. Bret loved Sheila so bitterly that he could not
endure the ordeal she was undergoing. The wearier and more harried she
grew, the more he wearied and harrowed her with his doubts, his demands,
his fears of losing her. He was so jealous of her ambition that he made
a crime of it.
He looked at her with farewell in his eyes and shook his head as over
her grave and groaned: “I’m going to lose you, Sheila. You’re not for
me.”
This frightened her. She was even less willing to lose him than he her.
When she demanded why he should say such things he explained that if she
left him now he would never catch up with her again. Her career was too
much for him, and her loss was more than he could bear.
She mothered him with eyes of such devoted pity that he said: “Don’t
stare at me like that. You look a hundred and fifty years old.”
She felt so. She was his nurse and his medicine, and she was at that
epoch of her soul when her function was to make a gift of herself.
When he sighed, “I wanted you to be my wife” it was the “my” that
thrilled her by its very selfishness; it was the past tense of the verb
that alarmed her.
“You wanted me to be!” she gasped. “Don’t you want me any more?”
“God knows there’s nothing else I want in the world. But I can’t have
you. My mother said that I couldn’t get you; she said that your ambition
and the big money ahead of you would keep you from giving yourself to
me.”
The primeval feud between a man’s mother and his wife surged up in her.
She said, less in irony than she realized: “Oh, she said that, did she?
Well, then, I’ll marry you just for spite.”
“If you only would, then I’d feel sure of you. I’d have no more fears.”
“All right. I’ll marry you.”
“When?”
“Whenever you say.”
“Now?”
“This minute.”
It was more like a bet than a proposal. He seized it.
“I’ll take you.”
They had snapped their wager at each other almost with hostility. They
glared defiantly together; then their eyes softened. Laughter gurgled in
their throats. His hands shot across the table; she put hers in them, in
spite of the waiters.
A fierce impulse to make certain of possession caught them to their
feet. He paid his bill standing up, and would not wait for change. They
found a jewelry-shop and bought the ring. They took the subway to City
Hall; a taxicab would be too slow.
There was no difficulty about the license. Every facility is offered to
those who take the first plunge into marriage. The ascent into Paradise
is as easy as the descent into Avernus. It is the getting back to earth
that is hard in both cases.
“Shall we be married here in the City Hall?” said the licentiate. “It’s
quicker.”
“I—I had rather hoped to be married in church,” Sheila pouted. “But
whatever you say—”
“It will make you late to rehearsal,” he said. He was very indulgent to
her career now that he was sure of her.
“Who cares?” she murmured. “Let’s go to the Little Church Around the
Corner.”
And so they did, and waited their turn at the busy altar.
Then there was a furious scurry back to the theater. Mrs. Winfield
kissed her husband good-by and dashed into the stage door to take her
scolding. But Mr. Winfield was laughing as he rode away to arrange for
their lodging for the remaining two days. Also his wife had made him
promise to break the news to Pennock. Her father and mother were
traveling now in the mid-West.
If Bret had known Pennock he might not have promised so glibly.
* * * * *
When Pennock finished with Winfield there was nothing further to say in
his offense. She told him he was a monstrous brute and Sheila was a
little fool to trust him. She declared that he had blighted the
happiness of the best girl in the world, and ruined her career just as
it was beginning. Then Pennock locked him out and went to packing
Sheila’s things. She wept all over the child’s clothes as if Sheila were
buried already. Then she took to her bed and cried her pillow soppy.
Sheila, all braced for a tirade from Batterson for her truancy, found
that she had not been missed. The carpenters had the scenery spread on
the floor of the stage like sails blown over, and the theater was a
boiler-factory of noise. Shortly after her appearance Batterson called
the company into the lobby for rehearsal. He took up the act at the
place where they had stopped in the forenoon—a point at which Eldon
caught Sheila’s hands in his and lifted them to his lips.
Now, as Eldon took those two beloved palms in his and bent his gaze on
her fingers it fell on Sheila’s shining new wedding-ring. The circlet
caught his eye; he studied it with vague surprise.
“A new ring?” he whispered, casually, not realizing its significance.
Sheila blushed so ruddily and snatched her hand away with such guilt
that he understood. He groaned, “My God, no!”
“I beg you!” she whispered.
“What’s that?” said Batterson, who had been speaking to Prior.
“I lost the line,” said Eldon, looking as if he had lost his life.
Batterson flung it to him angrily.
There was nothing for Sheila to do but throw herself on Eldon’s mercy at
the first moment when she could steal a word with him alone.
He did not say, “You had no mercy on me.”
She knew it. It was more eloquent unsaid. He was a gallant gentleman,
and sealed away his hopes of Sheila in a tomb.
At dinner Sheila told Bret about the incident, and he was secure enough
in the stronghold of her possession to recognize the chivalry of his
ex-rival.
“Mighty white of him,” he said. “Didn’t anybody else notice it?”
“I put my gloves on right afterward,” said Sheila, “but I—I don’t dare
wear it again.”
“Don’t dare wear your wedding-ring!” Winfield roared. “Say, what kind of
a marriage is this, anyway?”
“I hope it’s not dependent on a piece of metal round my finger,” Sheila
protested. “Your real wedding-ring is round my heart.”
This was not enough for Winfield. She explained to him patiently (and
gladly because of the importance he gave the emblem) that she played an
unmarried girl in the comedy. And the audience would be sure to spot the
wedding-ring.
It simply had to come off, and she begged him to understand and be an
angel and take it off himself.
He drew it away at last. But he did not like the omen. She put it on a
ribbon and he knotted it about her neck. Then she remembered that she
wore a dinner gown in the play, and it had to come off the ribbon. She
would have to carry it in her pocketbook.
The omens were hopelessly awry.