Sheila saw the anguish of dread cover his face like a sudden fling of
ashes. He handed the telegram to her, and she put her arms about his
shoulders to uphold him and shelter him from the sledge of fate.
“Poor old dad!” he groaned. “And mother! I must take the first train.”
She nodded her head dismally.
He read the telegram again in a stupor, and mumbled, “I wish you could
come with me.”
“If I only could!”
“You ought to,” he urged.
“Oh, I know it—but I can’t.”
“You may never see my father again.”
“Don’t say that! He’ll get well, honey; you mustn’t think anything else.
Oh, it’s too bad! it’s just too bad!”
He felt lonely and afraid of what was ahead of him. He was afraid of his
father’s death, and of a funeral. He was terrified at the thought of his
mother’s woe. He could feel her clutching at him helplessly,
frantically, and telling him that he was all she had left. His eyes
filled with tears at the vision and they blinded him to everything but
the vision. He put his hands out through the mist and caught Sheila’s
arms and pleaded:
“You ought to come with me, now of all times.”
She could only repeat and repeat: “I know it, but I can’t, I can’t. You
see that I can’t, don’t you, honey?”
His voice was harsh when he answered: “No, I don’t see why you can’t.
Your place is there.”
She cast her eyes up and beat her palms together hopelessly over the
complete misunderstanding that thwarted the union of their souls. She
took his hands again and squeezed them passionately.
Reben came upon them, swinging his cane. Seeing the two holding hands,
he essayed a frivolity. “Honeymoon not on the wane yet?”
Sheila told him the truth. He was all sympathy at once. His race made
him especially tender to filial love, and his grief brought tears to his
eyes. He crushed Bret’s hands in his own and poured out sorrow like an
ointment. His deep voice trembled with fellowship:
“If I could only do anything to help you!”
Winfield caught at the proffer. “You can! Let Sheila go home with me.”
Reben gasped. “My boy, my boy! It’s impossible! The matinée begins in
half an hour. She should be making up now.”
“Let somebody else play her part.”
“There is no understudy ready. We never select the understudy for the
try-out performances. Sheila, you must understand.”
“I do, of course; but poor Bret—he can’t seem to.”
“Oh, all right, I understand,” Winfield sighed with a resignation that
terrified Sheila. “What train can I get? Do you know?”
Reben knew the trains. He would get the company-manager to secure the
tickets. Bret must go by way of Detroit. He could not leave till after
five. He would reach Buffalo early Sunday morning and be home in the
late afternoon.
The big fellow’s frame shook with anxiety. So much could happen in
twenty-four hours. It would seem a year to his poor mother. He hurried
away to send her a telegram. Sheila paused at the stage door, staring
after his forlorn figure; then she darted in to her task.
Bret came back shortly and dropped into a chair in Sheila’s
dressing-room. His eyes, dulled with grief, watched her as she plastered
on her face the various layers of color, spreading the carmine on cheek
and ear with savage brilliance, penciling her eyelashes till thick beads
of black hung from them, painting her eyelids blue above and below, and
smearing her lips with scarlet.
He turned from her, sick with disgust.
Sheila felt his aversion, and it choked her when she tried to comfort
him. She painted her arms and shoulders white and powdered them till
clouds of dust rose from the puff. Pennock made the last hooks fast and
Sheila rose for the final primpings of coquetry.
Pennock opened the door of the dressing-room to listen for the cue. When
the time came Sheila sighed, ran to Bret, clasped him in a tight
embrace, and kissed his wet forehead. Her arms left white streaks across
his coat, and her lips red marks on his face.
He followed to watch her make her entrance. She stood a moment between
the flats, turned and stared her adoration at him through her viciously
leaded eyelashes, and wafted him a sad kiss. Then she caught up her
train and began to laugh softly as from a distance. She ran out into the
glow of artificial noon, laughing. A faint applause greeted her, the
muffled applause of a matinée audience’s gloved hands.
Bret watched her, heard her voice sparkle, heard it greeted with waves
of hilarity. He could not realize how broken-hearted she was for him. He
could not understand how separate a thing her stage emotions were from
her personal feelings.
Good news would not have helped her comedy; bad news could hardly alter
it. She went through her well-learned lines and intonations as a
first-class soldier does the manual of arms without reference to his
love or grief.
All Bret knew was that his wife was out there, laughing and causing
laughter, while far away his mother was sobbing—sobbing perhaps above
the chill clay of his father.
He hurried from the stage door to pack his trunk. He went cursing the
theater, and himself for lingering in its infamous shadow. He did not
come back till the play was over and Sheila in her street clothes. In
her haste she had overlooked traces of her make-up—that odious blue
about the eyes, the pink edging of the ears, the lead on the eyelashes.
Once more Sheila went to the train with her husband. They clung together
in fierce farewells, repeated and repeated till the train was moving and
the porter must run alongside to help Bret aboard.
When he looked back he could not see Sheila’s pathetic figure and her
sad face. When he thought of her he thought of her laughing in her
motley. All the next day he thought of her in the theater rehearsing.
He loved her perhaps the more for that unattainable soul of hers. He had
won her, wed her, possessed her, made her his in body and name; but her
soul was still uncaptured. He vowed and vowed again that he would make
her altogether his. She was his wife; she should be like other wives.
* * * * *
When he reached home his father was dead. His mother was too weak with
grief to rebuke him for being on a butterfly-hunt at such a time.
He knelt by her bed and held her in his arms while she told him of his
father’s long fight to keep alive till his boy came back. She begged him
not to leave her again, and he promised her that he would make her home
his.
The days that ensued were filled with tasks of every solemn kind. There
was the funeral to prepare for and endure, and after that the assumption
of all his father’s wealth. This came to him, not as a mighty treasure
to squander, but as a delicate invalid to nurture and protect.
Sheila’s telegrams and letters were incessant and so full of devotion
for him that they had room for little about herself.
She told him she was working hard and missing him terribly, and what her
next address would be. She tried vainly to mask her increasing terror of
the dreadful opening in Chicago.
He wished that he might be with her, yet knew that he had no real help
to give her. He prayed for her success, but with a mental reservation
that if the play were the direst failure he would not be sorry, for it
would bring them to peace the sooner.
He tried to school his undisciplined mind to the Herculean task of
learning in a few days what his father had acquired by a life of toil.
The factory ran on smoothly under the control of its superintendents,
but big problems concerning the marketing of the output, consolidation
with the trust, and enlargement of the plant, were rising every hour.
These matters he must decide like an infant king whose ministers
disagree.
To his shame and dismay, he could not give his whole heart to the work;
his heart was with Sheila. He thought of her without rancor now. He
recognized the bravery and honor that had kept her with the company. As
she had told him once before, treachery to Reben would be a poor
beginning of her loyalty to Bret. The very things he cherished bitterly
against her turned sweet in his thoughts. He decided that he could not
live without her, and might as well recognize it.
He found himself clenching his hands at his desk and whispering prayers
that the play should be a complete failure. How else could they be
reunited? He could not shirk his own responsibilities. It was not a
man’s place to give up his career. There was only one hope—the failure
of the play.
But “The Woman Pays” was a success. The Grand Rapids oracle guessed
wrong. As sometimes happens, the city critics were kinder than the
rural. Sheila sent Bret a double night-telegram. She said that she was
sorry to say that the play had “gone over big.” She had an enormous
ovation; there had been thirty curtain calls; the audience had made her
make a speech. Reben had said the play would earn a mint of money. And
then she added that she missed Bret “terribly,” and loved him “madly and
nothing else mattered.”
The next day she telegraphed him that the critics were “wonderful.” She
quoted some of their eulogies and announced that she was mailing the
clippings to him. But she said that she would rather hear him speak one
word of praise than have them print a million. He did not believe it,
but he liked to read it.
He did not wait to receive the clippings. He gave up opposing his
ravenous heart, and took train for Chicago. He could not bear to have
everybody except himself acclaiming his wife in superlatives.
He decided to surprise her. He did not even telegraph a warning. Indeed,
when he reached Chicago in the early evening, he resolved to see the
performance before he let her know he was in town.
He could not get by Mr. McNish, who was “on the door,” without being
recognized, but he asked McNish not to let “Miss Kemble” know that he
was in the house. McNish agreed readily; he did not care to agitate
Sheila during the performance. After the last curtain fell her emotions
would be her own.
McNish was glowing as he watched the crowd file past the ticket-taker.
He chuckled: “It’s a sell-out to-night I bet. This afternoon we had the
biggest first matinée this theater has known for years. I told Reben two
years ago that the little lady was star material. He said he’d never
thought of it. She’s got personality and she gets it across. She plays
herself, and that’s the hardest kind of acting there is. I discover her,
and Reben cops the credit and the coin. Ain’t that life all over?”
Bret agreed that it was, and hurried to his seat. It was in the exact
center of a long row. He was completely surrounded by garrulous women
trying to outchatter even the strenuous coda of the band.
A fat woman on his right bulged over into his domain and filled the arm
of his chair with her thick elbow. A lean woman on his left had an arm
some inches too long for her space, and her elbow projected like a spur
into Bret’s ribs. He could have endured their contiguity if they had
omitted their conversation. The overweening woman was chewing gum and
language with the same grinding motions, giving her words a kind of
stringy quality.
“Jevver see this Sheilar Kemble?” she munched. “I seen her here some
time ago. She didn’t have a very big part, but she played it perfect.
She was simpully gurrand. I says at the time to the gempmum was with me,
I says, ‘Somebody ought to star that girl.’ I guess I must ’a’ been
overheard, for here she is.
“A lady frien’ o’ mine went last night, and told me I mustn’t miss it.
She says they got the handsomest actor playin’ the lover—feller name of
Weldon or Weldrum or something like that—but anyway she says he makes
love something elegant, and so does Sheilar. This frien’ o’ mine says
they must be in love with each other, for nobody could look at one
another that way without they meant it. Well, we’ll soon see.”
To hear his wife’s name and Eldon’s chewed up together in the gum of a
strange plebeian was disgusting.
The sharp-elbowed woman was talking all the while in a voice of affected
accents:
“She’s almost a lady, this Kemble gull. Really, she was received in the
veribest homes hyah lahst wintuh. Yes, I met hah everywhah. She was
really quite refined—for an actress, of cawse. Several of the nicest
young men made quite fools of themselves—quite. Fawtunately their
people saved them from doing anything rahsh. I suppose she’ll upset them
all again this season. There ought to be some fawm of inoculation to
protect young men against actresses. Don’t you think so? It’s fah more
dangerous than typhoid fevah, don’t you think so?”
All about him Bret heard Sheila’s name tossed carelessly as a public
property.
The curtain rose at last and the play began. Sheila made a conspicuously
inconspicuous entrance without preparation, without even the laughter
she had formerly employed. She was just there. The audience did not
recognize her till she spoke, then came a volley of applause.
Bret’s eyes filled with tears. She was beautiful. She seemed to be sad.
Was she thinking of him? He wanted to clamber across the seats and over
the footlights to protect her once more from the mob, not from its
ridicule as at that first sight of her, but from its more odious
familiarity and possession.
He hardly recognized the revised play. The character she played—and
played in her very selfhood—was emotional now, and involved in a
harrowing situation with a mystery as to her origin, and hints of a
past, a scandal into which an older woman, an adventuress, had decoyed
her.
Then Eldon came on the scene and they fell in love at once; but she was
afraid of her past, and evaded him for his own sake. He misunderstood
her and accused her of despising him because he was poor; and she let
him think so, because she wanted him to hate her.
The audience wept with luxurious misery over her saintly double-dealing.
The gum-chewer’s tears salted her pepsin and she commented: “Ain’t it
awful what beasts you men are to us trusting girrls! Think of the demon
that loored that girrl to her roon!”
The sharp-elbowed woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and said
that it was “really quite affecting—quite. I’ve made myself
ridiculous.” Then she blew her nose as elegantly as that proletarian
feat can be accomplished.
Winfield was astounded at the changes in the play. A few new scenes
altered the whole meaning of it. Everything pink before was purple now.
The rôles of Sheila and Eldon had been rendered melodramatic. Sheila’s
comedy was accomplished now in a serious way. With a quaint little pout,
or two steps to the side and a turn of the head, she threw the audience
into convulsions.
Suddenly Sheila would quench the hilarity with a word, and the hush
would be enormous and strangely anxious; then the handkerchiefs would
come out.
Bret would have felt with the mob had the actress been any woman on
earth but his own. That made all the difference in the world. He told
himself that she was the victim of her art. But his ire burned against
Eldon, since Eldon made love to her for nearly three hours. And he said
and did noble things that made her love him more and more. And there was
no lack of caresses now.
In the second act Eldon overtook the fugitive Sheila and claimed her for
his own. She broke loose and ran from him, weeping, because she felt
“unworthy of a good man’s love.” But she followed him with eyes of
doglike adoration. Her hands quivered toward him and she held them back
“for his dear sake.” Then he caught her again and would not let her
escape. He held her by both hands.
“Mary!”—that was her name in the play. “Mary,” he cried, “I love you.
The sight of you fills my eyes with longing. The touch of your hand sets
my very soul on fire. I love you. I can’t live without you!”
He seized her in his arms, crushed her fiercely. She struggled a moment,
then began to yield, to melt toward him. She lifted her eyes to
his—then turned them away again. The audience could read in them
passion fighting against renunciation. She murmured:
“Oh, Jack! Jack! I—”
He pressed his conquest. “You do love me! You must! You can’t scorn a
love like mine. I have seen you weeping. I can read in your eyes that
you love me. Your eyes belong to me. Your lips are mine. Give them to
me! Kiss me! Kiss me—Ma-ry!”
She quivered with surrender. The audience burned with excitement. The
lover urged his cause with select language.
It was the sort of thing the women in the audience did not get from
their own lovers or husbands; the sort of thing the men in the audience
wanted to be able to say in a crisis and could not. Therefore, for all
its banality, it thrilled them. They ate it up. It was a sentimental
banquet served at this emotion restaurant every evening.
At length, as Eldon repeated his demand in tones that swept the
sympathetic strings in every bosom to response, Mary began to yield; her
hands climbed Eldon’s arms slowly, paused on his shoulders. In a moment
they would plunge forward and clasp him about the neck.
Her lips were lifted, pursed to meet his. And then—as the audience was
about to scream with suspense—she thrust herself away from him, broke
loose, moaning:
“No, I am unworthy—no, no—I can’t, I don’t love you—no—no!”
The curtain fell on another flight.
Bret wanted to push through the crowd and go back to the stage to forbid
the play from going on. But he would have had to squeeze past the fat
woman’s form or stride across the lean woman’s protrusive knees. And fat
women and men, and lean, were wedged in the seats on both sides of him.
He was imprisoned in his wrath.
As if his own doubts and certainties were not torture enough, he had to
hear them voiced in the dialects of others.
The gumstress was saying: “Well, I guess that frien’ o’ mine got it
right when she says those two actors must be in love with each other. I
tell you no girrl can look at a feller with those kind of looks without
there bein’ somethin’ doin’, you take it from me. No feller like Mr.
Eldon is goin’ to hold no beauty like Sheila in his arms every evening
and not fall in love with her.”
Her escort was encouraged by her enthusiasm to rhapsodize over Sheila on
his own account. It seemed to change the atmosphere. He had paid for
both seats, but he had not bought free speech. He said—with as little
tact as one might expect from a man who would pay court to that woman:
“Well, all I gotter say is, if that guy gets wore out huggin’ Sheila
I’ll take his place and not charge him a cent. Some snap, he has,
spendin’ his evenin’s huggin’ and kissin’ an A1 beaut like her and
gettin’ paid for it.” He seemed to realize a sudden fall in the
temperature. Perhaps he noted that the gum-crunching jaw had paused and
the elastic sweetmeat hung idle in the mill. He tried to retreat with a
weak:
“But o’ course she gets paid for huggin’ him, too.”
The anxious escort bent forward to look into his companion’s face. He
caught a glimpse of Bret’s eyes and wondered how that maniac came there.
He sank back alarmed just as Bret realized that, however unendurable
such comment was, he could not resent it while his wife belonged to the
public; he could only resolve to take her out of the pillory.
But his Gehenna was not ended yet, for he must hear more from the woman.
“Well, o’ course, Mr. Jeggle, if you’re goin’ to fall for an actress as
easy as that, you’re not the man I should of thought you was. But that’s
men all over. An actress gets ’em every time.
“I could of went on the stage myself. Ma always said I got temper’munt
to beat the band. But she said if I ever disgraced her so far as to show
my face before the footlights I need never come home. I’d find the door
closed against me.
“And my gempmum friend at that time says if I done so he’d beat me with
a rollin’-pin. The way he come to use such words was he was travelin’
for a bakery-supply house—he was kind of rough in his talk—nice,
though—and eyes!—umm! Well, him and I quarreled. I found he had two
other wives on his route and I refused to see him again—that’s his ring
there now. He was a wicked devil, but he did draw the line at actresses.
He married often, but he drew the line: and he says no actress should
ever be a wife of his.
“And he had it right. No sane man ain’t goin’ to leave his wife layin’
round loose in the arms of any handsome actor, not if he’s a real man.
If she’ll kiss him like that in public—well, I say no more. Not that I
blame a poor actress for goin’ wrong. I never believe in being merciless
to the fallen. It’s the fault of the stage. The stage is a nawful
immor’l place, Mr. Jeggle. The way I get it is this: if a girl’s not
ummotional she’s got no right on the stage. If she is ummotional she’s
got no chance to stay good on the stage. Do you see what I mean?”
Mr. Jeggle said he saw what she meant and he forbore to praise Sheila
further. He changed the perilous subject hastily and lowered his voice.
Bret, on a gridiron of intolerable humiliation, could hear now the dicta
of the elbow-woman.
“I fancy the young men in Chicago are quite safe from that Kemble gull
this season. She must be hopelessly infatuated with that actor. And no
wonder. If she doesn’t keep him close to hah, though, he’ll play havoc
with every gull in town. He’s quite too beautiful—quite!”
In the last act Sheila poured out the confession of her sins to Eldon.
This was a bit that Bret had not seen, and it poured vinegar into his
wounds to hear his own wife announcing to a thousand people how she had
been duped and deceived by a false marriage to a man who had never
understood her. That was bad enough, but to have Eldon play the saint
and forgive her—Bret gripped the chair arms in a frenzy.
Eldon offered her the shelter of his name and the haven of his love. And
she let him hold her in his arms while he poured across her shoulder his
divine sentiments. Now and then she would turn her head and gaze up at
him in worship and longing, and at last, with an irresistible passion,
she whirled and threw her arms around him and gave him her kisses, and
his arms tightened about her in a frenzy of rapture.
That could not be acting. Bret swore that it was real.
They clung together till several humorous characters appeared at doors
and windows and she broke away in confusion. There were explanations,
untying of knots and tying of others, and the play closed in a comedy
finish.
The curtain went down and up and down and up in a storm of applause, and
Sheila bowed and bowed, holding Eldon’s hand and generously recommending
him to the audience. He bowed to her and bowed himself off and left her
standing and nodding with quaint little ducks of the head and mock
efforts to escape, mock expressions of surprise at finding the curtain
up again and the audience still there.
Bret had to wait till the women got into their hats and wraps. They were
talking, laughing, and sopping up their tears. They had been well fed on
sorrow and joy and they were ready for supper and sleep.
Bret wanted to fight his way through in football manner, but he could
hardly move. The crowd ebbed out with the deliberation of a glacier, and
he could not escape either the people or their comments. The Chicago
papers had not heard of Sheila’s marriage to him. He was a nonentity.
The sensation of the town was the romance of Sheila Kemble and Floyd
Eldon.
When at last Bret was free of the press he dashed round to the stage
entrance. The old doorkeeper made no resistance, for the play was over
and visitors often came back to pay their compliments to the troupe.
Bret was the first to arrive.
In his furious haste he stumbled down the steps to the stage and almost
sprawled. He had to wait while a squad of “grips” went by with a huge
folded flat representing the whole side of a canvas house.
He stepped forward; a sandbag came down and struck him on the shoulder.
He tripped on the cables of the box lights and lost his glasses. While
he groped about for them he heard the orchestra, muffled by the curtain,
playing the audience out to a boisterous tune. His clutching fingers
were almost stepped on by two men carrying away a piece of solid
stairway.
Before he found his glasses he was demoniac with rage. He rubbed them on
his sleeve, set them in place, and again a departing wall obstructed his
view. An actress and an actor walked into him. At last he found the
clear stage ahead of him. He made out a group at the center of it.
McNish, Batterson, and Prior were in jovial conference, slapping each
other’s shoulders and chortling with the new wine of success.
He brushed by them and saw Sheila at last. Reben was holding her by one
arm; his other hand was on Eldon’s shoulder. He was telling them of the
big leap in the box-office receipts.
Sheila seemed rapturous with pride and contentment. Bret saw her murmur
something to Eldon. He could not hear what it was, but he heard Eldon
chuckle delightedly. Then he called:
“Eldon!”
Eldon looked forward just in time to see Bret coming on like a striding
giant, just in time to see the big arm swing up in a rigid drive,
shoulder and side and all.
The clenched fist caught Eldon under the chin and sent him backward
across a heavy table.