Now that the cat was out of the bag, and the husband out of the closet,
Sheila decided to produce Bret at the train the next morning. He was
about to get a taste of the gipsying life known as “trouping” and he was
to learn the significance of the one-night stand.
He had felt so shamefaced for his part in the deception of Reben that
when he visited the play during the evening performance, and saw the
much-discussed embrace restored, he had no heart to make a vigorous
protest. And Sheila was too weary after the two performances to be
hectored. It was heartbreaking to him to see her so exhausted.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked, helplessly.
“Petoskey,” she yawned.
“Petoskey!” he gasped. “That’s in Russia. In Heaven’s name, do we—”
He was ready to believe in almost anything imbecile. But she explained
that their Petoskey was in Michigan. He did not approve of Michigan.
His hatred of his wife’s profession began to take deeper root. It
flourished exceedingly when they had to get up for the train the next
morning at six. It was hard enough for him to begin the new day.
Sheila’s struggles to fight off sleep were desperate. Sleep was like an
octopus whose many arms took new hold as fast as they were torn loose.
Bret was so sorry for her that he begged her to let the company go
without her. She could take a later train. But even her sad face was
crinkled with a smile at the impossibility of this suggestion.
Breakfast was the sort of meal usually flung together by servants
alarm-clocked earlier than their wont. For all their gulping and hurry,
Bret and Sheila nearly missed the train. It was moving as they clambered
aboard.
“Which is the parlor-car?” Bret asked the brakeman.
“Ain’t none.”
“Do you mean to say that we’ve got to ride all day in a day coach?”
“That’s about it, Cap.”
Bret was furious. Worse yet, the train was so crowded that it was
impossible for them even to have a double space. Their suit-cases had to
be distributed at odd points in racks, under seats, and at the end of
the car.
Bret remembered that he had forgotten to get his ticket, but the
business-manager, Mr. McNish, passed by and offered his congratulations
and a free transportation, with Mr. Reben’s compliments. Bret did not
want to be beholden to Mr. Reben, but Sheila prevailed on him not to be
ungracious.
When the conductor came along the aisle she said, “Company.”
“Both?” said the conductor, and she smiled, “Yes,” and giggled, adding
to Bret, “You’re one of the troupe now.”
Bret did not seem to be flattered.
Reben came down the aisle to meet the bridegroom. He was doing his best
to take his defeat gracefully. Bret could not even take his triumph so.
Other members of the company drifted forward and offered their
felicitations. They made themselves at home in the coach, sitting about
on the arms of seats and exchanging family jokes.
The rest of the passengers craned their necks to stare at the
bridegroom, crimson with shame and anger. Bret loathed being stared at.
Sheila did not like it, but she was used to it. Both writhed at the
well-meant humor and the good wishes of the actors and actresses. Their
effusiveness offended Bret mortally. He could have proclaimed himself
the luckiest man on earth, but he objected to being called so by these
actors. If he had been similarly heckled by people of any sort—college
friends, club friends, doctors, lawyers, merchants—he would have
resented their manner, for everybody hazes bridal couples. But since he
had fallen among actors, he blamed actors for his distress.
Eldon alone failed to come forward with good wishes, and Bret was
unreasonable enough to take umbrage at that. Why did Eldon remain aloof?
Was he jealous? What right had he to be jealous?
Altogether, the bridegroom was doing his best to make rough weather of
his halcyon sea. Sheila was at her wits’ end to cheer him who should
have been cheering her.
At noon a few sandwiches of the railroad sort were obtained by a dash to
a station lunch-counter. Bret apologized to Sheila, but she assured him
that he was not to blame and was not to mind such little troubles; they
were part of the business. He minded them none the less and he hated the
business.
The town of Petoskey, when they reached it, did not please him in any
respect. The hotel pleased him less. When he asked for two rooms with
bath the clerk snickered and gave him one without. He explained with
contempt, “They’s a bath-room right handy down the hall and baths are a
quarter extry.”
It was a riddle whether it were cleanlier to keep the grime one had or
fly to a bath-room one knew not of. When Bret and Sheila appeared at the
screen door which kept the flies in the dining-room they were beckoned
down the line by an Amazonian head waitress. She planted them among a
group of grangers who stared at Sheila and picked their teeth snappily.
The dinner was a small-hotel dinner—a little bit of a lot of things in
a flotilla of small dishes.
The audience at the theater was sparse and indifferent. The play had
begun to bore Winfield. It irritated him to see Sheila repeating the
same love-scenes night after night—especially with that man Eldon.
After the play supper was to be had nowhere except at a cheap and
ill-conditioned little all-night restaurant where there was nothing to
eat but egg sandwiches and pie, the pastry thicker and hardly more
digestible than the resounding stone china it was served on.
The bedroom at the hotel was ill ventilated, the plush furniture greasy,
the linen coarse, and the towels few and new. Bret declared it
outrageous that his beautiful, his exquisite bride should be so shabbily
housed, fed like a beggar, and bedded like a poor relation. Almost all
of his ill temper was on her account, and she could not but love him for
it.
After a dolefully realistic night came again the poignant tragedy of
early rising, another gulped breakfast, another dash for the train. The
driver of the hack never came. Bret and Sheila waited for him till it
was necessary to run all the way to the station. The station was handier
to the railroad than to the hotel. Since red-caps were an institution
unknown to Petoskey, they carried their own baggage.
The itinerary of the day included a change of trains and an eventual
arrival at no less—and no more—a place than Sheboygan.
There they found a county fair in progress and the hotels packed. Decent
rooms were not to be had at any price. It took much beseeching even to
secure a shelter in a sample-room filled with long tables for drummers
to display their wares on. They waited like mendicants for luncheon in
an overcrowded dining-room where over-driven waitresses cowed the
timorous guests. Sheila had not time to finish her luncheon before she
must hurry away to a rehearsal. Bret left his and went with her, racing
along the streets and growling:
“Why is Reben such a fool as to play in towns like this?”
“He has to play somewhere, honey, to whip the play into shape,” Sheila
panted.
“Well, he’s whipping you out of shape.”
“I don’t mind, dearest. It’s fun to me. It’s all part of the business.”
“Well, I want you to get out of the business. It’s unfit for a decent
woman.”
“Oh—honey!”
It was a feeble little wail from a great hurt. Plainly Bret would never
comprehend the majestic qualities of her art, or realize that its
inconveniences were no more than the minor hardships of an army on a
great campaign.
* * * * *
At the rehearsal the first of Prior’s new scenes was gone over. It
emphasized the “heart-interest” with a vengeance. Sheila trembled to
think what her husband would do when he saw it played. She was glad that
it was not to be tried until the following week. Every moment of
postponement for the inevitable storm was so much respite.
They rehearsed all afternoon. The struggle for dinner was more trying
than for the luncheon. The performance was early and hasty, as it was
necessary to catch a train immediately after the last curtain, in order
to reach Bay City for the Saturday matinée. Worse yet, they had to leave
the car at four o’clock in the morning.
This time it was Bret who was hard to waken. His big body was so
famished for sleep that Sheila was afraid she would have to leave him on
the train. She was wiry, and her enthusiasm for the battle gave her a
courage that her disgusted husband lacked. There was no carriage at the
station and Bret stumbled and swore drowsily at the dark streets and the
intolerable conditions.
He had nothing to interest him except the infinite annoyances and
exactions of his wife’s career. There was nothing to reward him for his
privations except to lumber along in her wake like a coal-barge hauled
by a tug.
His pride was mutinous, and it seemed a degradation to permit his bride
to run from place to place as if she were a fugitive from justice. He
had wealth and the habit of luxury, and his idea of a honeymoon was the
ultimate opposite of this frenzied gipsying.
He had always understood that actors were a lazy folk whose life was one
of easy vagabondage, with all the vices that indolence fosters. Three
days of trouping had wrecked his strength; yet he had done none of the
work but the travel.
When he protested the next morning at early breakfast that the tour
would be the death of them both Sheila looked up from the part she was
studying and laughed:
“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. We haven’t made any long jumps yet.
The route-sheet says we leave Bay City at one o’clock to-night and get
to Ishpeming at half past four to-morrow afternoon. We rehearse Sunday
night and all day Monday, play that night, and take a train at midnight
back to Menominee. From there we rush back to Calumet, and then on to
Duluth.”
Bret set his coffee-cup down hard and growled, “Well, this is where I
leave you.”
He spoke truer than he knew. He had kept his family informed of his
whereabouts by night-letters, in which he alluded to the blissful time
he ought to have been having. When he took Sheila to the theater for the
matinée he found a telegram for him.
He winced at the address: “Bret Winfield, Esq., care of Miss Sheila
Kemble, Opera House, Bay City.” He forgot the pinch of pride when he
read the message:
Please come home at once your father dangerously ill and asking
for you.
MOTHER.