CHAPTER XLIII

A honeymoon is like a blue lagoon divinely beautiful, with a mimicry of

all heaven in its deeps; blinding sweet in the sun, and almost

intolerably comfortable in the moon.

But by and by the atoll that circles it like a wedding-ring proves to be

a bit narrow and interferes with the view of the big sea pounding at its

outer edges. The calm becomes monotonous, and at the least puff of wind

the boat is on the reefs. They are coral reefs, but they cut like knives

and hurt the worse for being jewelry.

To Bret and Sheila the newspaper storm over her departure from the

theater, her elopement from success, was like the surf on the shut-out

sea.

The Winfield influence had suppressed most of the newspaper comment in

the home papers, but the people of Blithevale read the metropolitan

journals, and Sheila’s name flared through those for many days.

When the news element had been exhausted there were crumbs enough left

for several symposiums on the subject of “Stage Marriages,” “Actresses

as Wives,” “Actresses as Mothers,” “The Home _vs._ the Theater,” and all

the twists an ingenious press can give to a whimsy of public interest.

Bret and Sheila suffered woefully from the appalling pandemonium their

secret wedding had raised, and Winfield began to be convinced that the

policy of the mailed fist, the blow and the word, had not brought him

dignity. But it had brought him his wife, and she was at home; and when

they could not escape the articles on “Why Actresses Go Back to the

Stage,” she laughed at the prophecies that she would return, as so many

others had done.

“They haven’t all gone back,” she smiled. “And I am one of those who

never will, for I’ve found peace and bliss and contentment. I’ve found

my home.”

They were relieved of all that had been unusual in their marriage, and

they shared and inspired the usual raptures, which were no less poignant

for being immemorially usual. This year’s June was the most beautiful

June that ever was, while it was the newest June.

Their honeymoon was usual in being sublime. It was also usual in running

into frequent shoals and reefs.

The first reef was Bret’s mother. Bret had always been amazed at the

professional jealousy of actors and their contests for the largest type

and the center of the stage. Suddenly he was himself the center of the

stage and his attention was the large type. He was dismayed to behold

with what immediate instinct his mother and his wife proceeded to take

mutual umbrage at each other’s interest in him, and to take astonishing

pain from his efforts to divide his heart into equal portions.

Sheila recognized that poor Mrs. Winfield had a right to her son’s

support in a time of such grief, but she felt that she herself had a

right to some sort of honeymoon. And being a stranger in the town and

all, she had especial claim to consideration.

Sheila told Bret one day: “Of course, honey, your mother is a perfect

dear and I don’t wonder you love her, but she’d like to poison me— Now

wait, dearie. Of course I don’t mean just that, but—well, she’s like an

understudy. An understudy doesn’t exactly want the star to break her

neck or anything, but if a train ran over her she’d bear up bravely.”

Another reef was the factory. Of course Sheila expected her husband to

pay the proper attention to his business and she wanted him to be

ambitious, but she had not anticipated how little time was left in a day

after the necessary office hours, meal hours, and sleep hours were

deducted.

She wrote her mother:

Bret is an ideal husband and I’m ideally happy, of course, but

women off the stage are terrible loafers. They just sit in the

window and watch the procession go by.

When I chucked Reben I said, “Thank Heaven, I don’t have to go

on playing that same old part for two or three years night after

night, matinée after matinée.” But that’s nothing to the record

of the household drama. This is the scene plot of my daily

performance:

SCENE: Home of the Winfields. TIME: Yesterday, to-day, and

forever.

ACT I. SCENE: Dining-room. Time: 8 A.M. Husband and wife at

breakfast. Soliloquy by wife while hubby reads paper and eats

eggs and says, “Yes, honey,” at intervals.

Exit husband. CURTAIN.

Five hours elapse.

ACT II. SCENE: Same as ACT I. Luncheon on table. Husband enters

hurriedly, apologizes for coming home late and dashing away

early. Tells of trouble at factory.

Exit hastily. CURTAIN.

Five hours elapse.

ACT III. SCENE: Same as ACT II. Dinner on table. Husband

discusses trouble at factory. Wife tells of troubles with

servants. Neither understands the other. CURTAIN. Two hours

elapse.

ACT IV. SCENE: Living-room. Husband reads evening papers; wife

reads stupid magazines. Business of making love. Return to

reading-matter. Husband falls asleep in chair. CURTAIN.

That’s the scenario, and the play has settled down for an

indefinite run at this house.

Roger and Polly read the letter and shook their heads over it. Roger

sighed.

“How long do you think it’s really booked for, Polly?”

“Knowing Sheila—” Polly began, then shook her head. “Well, really I

don’t know. There are so many Sheilas, and I haven’t met the last three

or four of them.”

For many months Sheila was royally entertained by what she called “the

merry villagers.” She was the audience and they the spectacle. She took

a childish delight in mimicking odd types, to Bret’s amusement and his

mother’s distress. She took a daughter-in-law’s delight in shocking her

mother-in-law by pretending to be shocked at the Blithevale vices.

Hitherto Sheila had gone to church regularly next Sunday, but seldom

this. In Blithevale Mrs. Winfield compelled her to attend constantly.

Sheila took revenge by quoting all the preacher said about the

wickedness of his parishioners.

When she heard of a divorce or a family wreck she would exclaim, “Why, I

thought that only actors and actresses were tied loose!”

When she heard of one of those hideous scandals that all communities

endure now and then as a sort of measles she would make a face of

horror: “Why, I’ve always read that village life was ninety-nine and

forty-four one-hundredths pure.”

When Bret would fume at the petty practices of business rivals, the

necessity for crushing down competition and infringement, the importance

of keeping the name at the top of the list, Sheila would smile, “And do

manufacturers have professional jealousy, too?”

She soon realized, however, that her comedy was not getting across the

footlights as she meant it.

Seen through the eyes of one who had been used to hard work, far travel,

and high salary, the business of being a wife as the average woman

conducted it was a farce to Sheila.

That the average wife was truly a helpmeet appeared to her merely a

graceful gallantry of the husbands. As a matter of fact, as far as she

could see, the only help most of the men got from their wives was the

help of the spur and the lash. The women’s extravagances and discontent

compelled the husbands to double energy and increased achievement.

Thus, while the village was watching with impatient suspicion the

behavior of this curious actress-creature who had settled there, the

actress-creature was learning the uglier truths about that most

persistently flattered of institutions, the American village.

But after the failure of her first satires Sheila resolved to stop being

“catty,” and to dwell upon the sweeter and more wholesome elements of

life in Blithevale. She ceased to defend the theater by aspersing the

town.

She said never a word, however, of any longing for a return to the

stage. Now and then an exclamation of interest over a bit of theatrical

news escaped her when she read the New York paper that had been coming

to the Winfield home for years. It arrived after Bret left for the

office, and he usually glanced at it during his luncheon. One noon

Bret’s eye was caught by head-lines on an inner page devoted largely to

dramatic news. The “triumph” of “The Woman Pays” was announced; it had

been produced in New York the night before. In spite of the handicap of

its Chicago success it had conquered Broadway. As sometimes happens, it

found the Manhattanites even more enthusiastic than the Westerners.

Bret noted with a kind of resentment that Sheila was not mentioned as

the creator of the leading rôle. He hated to see that Dulcie Ormerod was

taken seriously by the big critics. He winced to read that Floyd Eldon

was a great find, a future star of the first magnitude.

Winfield had once been wretched for fear that his kidnapping of Sheila

had ruined the chances of the play. Yet it was not entirely comfortable

to see that the play prospered so hugely without her. He had not been

entirely glad that Reben had returned his “I O U”; and he was not

entirely glad that Reben stood to make a greater profit than he had

estimated at first in spite of Sheila. It was a peculiarly galling

humiliation.

Bret would have concealed the paper from Sheila, but he knew that she

had read it before he came home to luncheon. He had wondered what made

her so distraught. Now that he knew, he said nothing, but he could see

the torment in the back of her smiling eyes, the labored effort to be

casual and inconsequential. That Mona Lisa enigma haunted him at his

office, and he resolved to take her for a spin in the car. She would be

having a hard day, for ambitious fevers have their crises and relapses,

too. Bret wanted to help his wife over this bitter hour.

When he came in unexpectedly he found her lying asleep on the big divan

in the living-room. The crumpled newspaper lay on the floor at her side.

She had been reading it again. Her lashes were wet with recent tears,

yet she was smiling in her sleep. As he bent to her lips moved. He

paused, an eavesdropper on her very dreams. And he made out the muffled,

disjointed words:

“What can I say but, thank you—on behalf of the company—your

applause—I thank you.”

She was taking a curtain call!

Bret tiptoed away, wounded by her and for her. He struggled for

self-control a moment, telling himself that he was a fool to blame her

for her dreams. He knocked loudly on the door and called to her. She

woke with a start, stared, realized where she was and who he was, and

smiled upon him lovingly. She explained that she had been asleep and

“dreaming foolish dreams.”

But when he asked what they were she shrugged her shoulders and laughed,

“I forget.”

* * * * *

Afterward Bret read that “The Woman Pays” had settled down for a long

run on Broadway. Sheila settled down also and attended to her knitting.

And knitting became a more and more important office. She was more and

more content to sit in an easy-chair and wait.

Bret paused one day to pick up some of the curious doll-clothes.

“I knat ’em myself,” said Sheila, with boundless pride.

Bret, the business man, pondered the manufacturing cost.

“You could buy the whole lot for ten dollars,” he said. “And they’ve

taken you a month to finish them. You’re not charging as much for your

time as you did.”

“No,” she said, “I could buy ’em for less, and it would be still less

trouble to adopt a child to wear ’em; but it wouldn’t be quite the same,

would it?”

He agreed that it would not.

CHAPTER XLIV

The most thrilling first night of Sheila’s life was her debut as a

mother. The doctor and the stork had a nip-and-tuck race. The young

gentleman weighed more than ten pounds.

According to all the formulas of tradition, this epochal event should

have made a different woman of Sheila. The child should have filled her

life. According to actual history, Sheila was still Sheila, and her son,

while he brought great joys and great anxieties, rather added new

ambitions than satisfied the old.

Bret senior did not change his business interests or give up his office

hours because of the child. Indeed, he was spurred on to greater effort

that he might leave his heir a larger fortune.

The trained nurse, who received twenty-five dollars a week, and the

regular nurse, who received twenty-five dollars a month, knew infinitely

more about babies than Sheila.

The elder Mrs. Winfield, with the best intention and the worst tact,

thought to make Sheila happy by telling her how happy she ought to be.

This is an ancient practice that has never been discarded, though it has

never yet succeeded.

The elder Mrs. Winfield said, “It’s a splendid thing for baby that

you’ve given up the stage.”

Sheila felt an implied attack on her own family, and she bristled

gently: “It’s fine for me, but I don’t think the baby would notice the

difference if I acted every night. My mother didn’t leave the stage, and

her mother and my father’s mother were hard-working actresses. And their

children certainly prospered. Besides, if I were out of the way, the

baby would have the advantage of its grandmother uninterrupted.”

The new grandmother accepted the last statement as an obvious truth and

attacked the first. “You’re still thinking of going back, then?”

“Not at all,” said Sheila. “I’ll never act again. I was just saying that

it wouldn’t harm the baby if I did. And,” she added, meekly, “it might

be the making of him to have me out of the way.”

She said this with honest deprecation. She was troubled to find that she

had not become one of those mere mothers that are so universal in books.

She was horrified to discover that at times the baby lost its novelty,

that its tantrums tried her nerves. She did not know enough to know that

this was true of all mothers. She felt ashamed and afraid of herself.

She did not return to her normal glow of health so soon as she should

have done. She kept thin and wan. Cheerfulness was not in her, save when

she played it like a rôle.

At length the doctor recommended a change of scene. Since it was not

quiet that she needed, he suggested diversion, a trip to the city. The

three Winfields made the journey—father, mother, and baby, not to

mention the nurse.

* * * * *

The quick pulse and exultant life of New York reacted upon Sheila. She

found the theaters a swift tonic, and, since “The Woman Pays” was now on

the road after a long season on Broadway, there was no danger of

choosing the wrong theater. She and Bret reveled in the plays with the

ingenuous gaiety of farmers in town.

At this time, also, a monster “all-star” benefit was being extensively

advertised. A great fire had destroyed a large part of one of our highly

inflammable American cities, leaving thousands of people in such

distress that public charity was invoked. The actors, as usual the most

prompt of all classes to respond to any call upon their generosity,

organized a huge performance to be given at the Metropolitan Opera

House.

Players, managers, scene-painters, and scene-shifters were emulous in

the service. Stars offered to scintillate in insignificant rôles. A

program lasting from one o’clock to six was speedily concocted. The

Opera House was not large enough for the demand. Boxes were sold by

eminent auctioneers at astonishing premiums.

Bret took it into his head to assist. He paid two hundred dollars for a

box.

Sheila left the baby with the nurse, put on a brand-new Paris frock, and

gulped an early luncheon that she might not miss a line. Bret saw with

mingled relief and dismay that she was as eager as a child going to her

first party.

They read with awe the name-plate on the door of the box they had

rented; it was that of one of the war lords of American finance.

The Opera House was seething with people. Bret and Sheila wedged their

way through a dense skirmish-line of prominent actresses selling

programs printed free with illustrations designed free. Bret had bought

five for ten dollars before Sheila restrained him.

The bill was a reckless hash; everything was in it from a morsel of

tragedy to a bit of juggling and repartee. The vast planes of the

auditorium were crowded with people. The dean of the dramatists

announced from the stage that the receipts were over fifteen thousand

dollars and that a program autographed by every participant would be

auctioned later.

Bret, in a mood of extravagance, determined to buy it for Sheila. It

would show that he was not ashamed of her past or afraid of her future.

During an intermission they promenaded the corridors thronged with

notables. Sheila bowed her head almost off and was greeted with an

effusiveness usually reserved for long-lost children.

At length Sheila heard her name called, felt a hand plucking at her

elbow. She turned and faced Dulcie Ormerod, who gushed like a faucet:

“How are you, Sheila dear? I haven’t seen you for ages. How well you

look! Isn’t this wonderful? Our play is in Trenton this week, so Mr.

Eldon and I just ran over to take in this show. And is this your

husband? Mayn’t I meet him?”

Sheila made the presentation helplessly, and Dulcie gushed on:

“I’ve been dying to see you. You remember Mr. Eldon, don’t you? Where is

that man? Oh, Floydie dear, here’s an old friend of yours.”

To Sheila’s horror and Bret’s she turned and seized the elbow of a man

whose back was turned and whose existence they had not noted in the

thick crowd. Dulcie dragged Eldon about and swung him into his place at

her side. He confronted Sheila and Bret as by miracle.

CHAPTER XLV

Dulcie had plotted it all for her own personal entertainment. Like a mad

King of Bavaria she commanded the actors before her. She had caught

sight of Sheila, and she knew who Bret was from the descriptions of him.

She had a grudge against Sheila on general principles and another

against Eldon for not going mad over her.

Eldon had received no answer to the note he sent Sheila denying his part

in the newspaper notoriety. This had rankled in his heart. Bret still

believed that the note was a lie and an effort to keep a hook on Sheila.

He loved Eldon less than ever.

There was a longing for battle in both the big hearts, and each would

have been glad to beat the other down before the whole crowd; yet,

because of the crowd, neither could strike.

Sheila guessed at once that Dulcie had planned it; the cat was

overacting her rôle of surprise and regret, as her little heart thrilled

to see the two men braced in scarlet confusion and Sheila fluttering

between them.

Bret endured a year of compressed agony. The foolishness of resuming the

fight, the foolishness of not resuming it, the inextricable tangle of

contradictory duties and impulses, shattered him. Eldon was undergoing

the same return to chaos.

Yet the crowd shoving past observed nothing and did not pause. Bret felt

Sheila’s hand clasp his arm both to protect and to be protected, and she

urged him on. Then he managed to bow with formality to Eldon and to

Dulcie. And so the great rencounter ended. Dulcie alone was made happy.

Sheila could not let her get away with that baby stare. She smiled with

pretended amusement and said, “Thank you ever so much, Miss Ormerod.”

“Thank me for what?” gasped Dulcie. But Sheila just twinkled her eyes

and smiled as she walked on.

Her muscles were tired for half an hour with the effort that smile cost

them.

She led Bret to the box, and he was shivering with the unsatisfied

emotions of a fighter for the battle missed. Sheila sank into a chair

exhausted. She looked about anxiously. The one thing needed to complete

the situation was for Eldon to walk into the next box and spend the rest

of the afternoon. They were spared this coincidence.

Bret was in no mood to remain, but she kept him there. There would be

some distraction at least in the spectacle. If they went back to their

hotel they would have only their bitterness to chew upon.

The auction of the autographed program began. There was excited bidding

from all parts of the house. But Bret kept silent. The program brought

five hundred dollars. Bret sneered at the price of the trash.

A musical number came next. The orchestra struck up a tune that would

have set gravestones to jigging. A platoon of young men and women in

fantastic bravery was flung across the stage, singing and caracoling. A

famous buffoon waddled to the footlights and beamed like a new red moon

with its chin on the horizon. He was a master of the noble art of

tomfoolery and the high-school of horse-play. He probed into the

childhood core of every heart, and no grief could resist him.

Sheila forgot to be dismal and tried to look solemn for Bret’s sake till

she saw that he was overpowered, too. He began to grin, to sniff, to

snort, to shake, to roll, to guffaw. He laughed till tears poured down

his cheeks. Sheila laughed in a dual joy. Everything solemn, ugly,

hateful, dignified, had become foolish and childish; and foolishness had

become the one great wisdom of the world.

The jester always wins in a contest with the doldrums because philosophy

and honor present riddles that cannot be solved. The mystery of fun is

just as insoluble, but you laugh while you wait.

Sheila watched the thousands of people rocking and roaring in a surf of

delight, and she watched her husband’s soul washed clean as a child’s

heart. It was a noble profession, this clownery; comedy was a

priesthood.

Suddenly she saw Bret’s eyes, roving the hilarious multitude, pause and

harden. She followed the line of his gaze across the space and saw Eldon

in a box. He was laughing like a huge boy, putting back his head and

baying the moon with yelps of delight.

She watched Bret anxiously and saw a kind of forgiveness softening his

glare. The contagion of laughter reinfected him and he laughed harder

than ever. If Eldon and he had met now they would have leaned on each

other to laugh. Music and buffoonery and grief are the universal

languages that everybody understands.

The excerpt from the comic opera was succeeded by a little play, and now

the audience, shaken from its trenches by the artillery of laughter, was

helpless before the pathos. The handkerchiefs fluttered like little

white flags everywhere. Sheila saw through her tears that Bret was

swallowing hard; a tear rolled out on his cheek, and he was ashamed to

brush it off. It splashed on his finger and startled him. He looked at

Sheila, and she smiled at him with ineffable tenderness. He reached out

and took her hand.

In that mood a swift understanding could have been reached with Eldon.

Sheila might almost have forgiven Dulcie. But they did not meet. As they

left the Opera House, pleasantly fatigued with the exercise of every

emotion, she felt immensely contented.

But the inevitable reaction followed. In this wonderful work of the

stage, why was she idle? Why was she skulking at a distance when her

training, her gifts, her ambitions, called her to do her share—to make

people glad and sad and wise in sympathy? Why? Why? Why?

* * * * *

Two years later there was another baby—a daughter, its mother’s

exquisite miniature. There was some bad luck for Sheila on this

occasion, and the physician warned her against further child-bearing for

several years. She was not up and about so soon as before, and a vague

haze of melancholy settled about her. She took less interest in life.

Her laughter was not half so frequent or so clear; her mischief of

satire was gone. She smiled on Bret more tenderly than ever, but it was

tenderness rather than amusement. She had nerve-storms and idled about

incessantly, and sometimes, with no apparent reason or warning, she

would sigh frantically, leap to her feet, and pace the floor or the

porch or the lawn aimlessly. When Bret anxiously asked her what was the

matter she would gaze at him with sorrowful eyes and that doleful effort

at a smile and say:

“Nothing, honey; nothing at all.”

“But you’re not happy?”

“Yes, I am, dear. Why shouldn’t I be? I have everything: my lover for my

husband, my children, the home—everything.”

“Everything,” he would groan, “except—”

Then she would put her hands over his lips.

CHAPTER XLVI

Eugene Vickery’s sister Dorothy lived in Blithevale. Having lost her

first choice, Bret Winfield, to the scintillating Sheila, she had

sensibly accepted the devotion of his rival, Jim Greeley, who was now a

junior partner in the big chemical works where his father manufactured

drug staples.

Dorothy had never forgotten the child Sheila, and the two women resumed

their acquaintance, their souls little changed, for all their bodily

evolution. They were still two little girls playing with dolls. They

were still utterly incomprehensible to each other, and the friendlier

for that fact. Dorothy found Sheila a trifle insane, but immensely

interesting, and Sheila found Dorothy stodgily Philistine, but

thoroughly reliable, as normal as a yardstick.

Sheila gave to her two children all the adoration of a Madonna. They

were fascinating toys to her; though at times she tired of them. She

entertained them with all her talents, wasting on the infantile private

audience graces and gifts that the public would have paid thousands of

dollars to see.

But the children tired of their expensive toy, too, and preferred a rag

doll or a little tin automobile that banged into chair legs and turned

over at the edge of a rug.

Sheila had nursed her babies with an ecstatic pride. That was more than

many of the village women did. She had been amazed to learn how many

bottle-fed infants there were in town. Dorothy herself strongly

recommended one or two foods prepared in other factories than the

mother’s veins.

Dorothy was not the mother one meets in romance, but very much like the

mothers next door and across the street—the ones the doctors know. Her

children drove her into storms of impatience and outbursts of temper.

Now and then she had to get away from them for half a day or for many

days. If she could not escape on a shopping prowl to some other city she

would send them off with the nurse under instructions to stay as long as

the light held out. She welcomed their visits to relatives, she

encouraged them to play in other people’s yards. Other mothers with

headaches urged their children to play in one another’s yards. Nobody

knew very well where they played or at what.

Dorothy was a violent anti-suffragist and the head of the local league,

whose motto was that woman’s place is in the home. She was kept away

from home a good deal in the furtherance of this creed.

Jim Greeley, the normal business man, spent his days at his desk, his

evenings at his club, and his free afternoons at baseball games.

Sometimes he added a little variety to the peace of his household by

rolling in late, lyrical and incoherent.

There was a general impression about town that he found his home so well

ordered that he sought a recreative disorder elsewhere. From the first

meeting with him Sheila disliked the way he looked at her. His eyes, as

it were, crossed swords with hers playfully and said, “Do you fence?”

She found the compliments he murmured to her whenever opportunities

arrived uncomfortably unctuous. But there was nothing that she could

openly resent.

In the summer all the wives of Blithevale whose husbands had the money

or could borrow it followed the national custom and went to the

seashore, the mountains, anywhere to get away from home and husband;

they took the children with them. The husbands stuck to their jobs and

made occasional dashes to their families. All signs fail in hot weather.

Even the churches close up. It is curious. It is even agreed that the

rule about woman’s place being the home does not hold in hot weather.

Dorothy and Sheila and their youngsters went together one summer to a

beach with nearly as much boardwalk as sand.

Sheila fretted about leaving Bret at his lonely grindstone. Dorothy

ridiculed her and told her she must get over her honeymoon. Dorothy

emphasized the importance of the sea air “for the children.” She

insisted that a mother’s first duty was to them. Dorothy paid little

enough heed to her own. She slept late, played cards, watched the

dancing, and changed her clothes with a chameleonic frequence.

Sheila found that her children, like the rest, preferred the company of

fellow-children and the sea to any other attractions. Their mothers

bored them, hampered them, disgraced them. The children were

self-sufficient, and better so. By the early evening they had played

themselves into a comatose condition and never knew who took off their

shoes or put them to bed. The long evenings remained to the mothers and

they formed porch-colonies, and rocked and gabbled and stared through

the windows at the dancers.

All over the country wives were enjoying their summer divorce.

Thousands, millions of wives deserted their husbands and loafed at great

cost, and it was all right. But for an actress to desert her husband and

work—that was all wrong!

Sheila felt that her husband needed her more than her children did. She

pictured him distraught with longing for her. And he was—so far as his

business worries gave him time for sentimental worries. Sheila left the

children in charge of the governess and fled back to Bret, who was

enraptured at the sight of her and had an enormous amount of factory

news to tell her.

The men-folk were working in spite of the summer, and glad to be

working. Bret was absorbed in his business and left Sheila all day to

sit in the darkened oven of the closed-up house, alone.

She contrasted her life this summer with the summer she had played in

the stock company and toiled so hard to furnish amusement to the people

who could not get away to seashores or mountains. She wondered wherein

her present indolence was an improvement over her period of toil.

Still she was glad to be where her husband could find her in the brief

_entr’actes_ of his commercial drama. She had learned enough of the

village to know that some of the men whose wives left them for the

summer found substitutes among the village belles who could not or would

not leave the old town.

Sheila had heard a vast amount of gossip concerning Jim Greeley. She had

not repeated any of it to Dorothy, of course. It is not according to the

rules of the game and only very unpleasant persons do it.

Bret knew of Jim’s repute, but did not forbid Jim his house. The village

was full of such scandals and it was dangerous to begin cutting and

snubbing. When the gossips whispered they made a terrifying picture of

village life, yet whenever the theater was mentioned they assumed an air

of Pharisaic superiority.

As soon as Sheila hurried back to Blithevale Jim Greeley began to spoil

her evening communions with her husband by “just dropping round.” He

talked till Bret yawned him home.

Still, Sheila was glad to keep Jim interested in respectable

conversation, for Dorothy’s sake. Sometimes when Bret had to go back to

his office, after dinner, and Jim was free, he just dropped round just

the same.

On these occasions he seemed to be laboring under some excitement, full

of audacious impulses restrained by timidity. Sheila felt a nausea at

her suspicions; she was ashamed of them.

One cruelly hot evening when Bret was at the factory and the only stir

of air eddied in a vine-covered corner of the big piazza she heard Jim

come up the walk. She did not speak, hoping that he would go away. But

he called her twice, and she had to answer.

He invited himself to sit down, and after violently casual chatter began

to talk of his loneliness and her kindliness. She was his one salvation,

he said.

In the dusk he was only a voice, a voice of longing and appeal, like a

disembodied Satan in a mood of desire. In the gloom she felt his hand

brush hers, then cling. She drew hers away. His followed. It was very

strange that two beings should conflict so tangibly, audibly, without

any other evidence of existence.

Suddenly she knew that he was standing close to her, bending over her.

She pushed her chair back and rose. Unseen arms caught her to a ghost as

invisible and ineluctable as the wrestler with Jacob.

Sheila was horrified. She blamed herself more than Jim. She hated

herself and humanity. “Don’t! please!” she pleaded in a whisper. She

dreaded to have the servants overhear such an encounter. Jim

misinterpreted her motive, clenched her tighter, and tried to find her

lips with his.

“I thought you were Bret’s friend,” she protested as she hid her face

from him.

“I like Bret,” Jim whispered in a frenzy, “but I love you. And I want

you to love me. You do! You must! Kiss me!”

She tried to release the proved weapon of her elbow, but he held her by

the wrists till she wrenched her hand loose with great pain and gave him

her knuckles for a kiss.

The shock to his self-esteem was more than to his mouth, and he let her

go. She rebuked him in guttural disgust:

“I suppose you think that because I’m an actress you’ve got to be a

cad.”

“No, no,” he mumbled. “It’s just because you are you, and because you

are so wonderful. Forgive me, won’t you?”

Even as he asked for forgiveness his hand sought her arm again. She

slipped away and went into the starlight and sat on the steps.

“You’d better go now,” she said, “and you’d better not come back.”

“All right,” he sighed.

In the silence she heard Bret’s car far away. “Sit down,” she said, “and

stay awhile. And smoke!”

She had foreseen Bret arriving as Jim hurried away. She did not like the

way it would appear. If Bret’s suspicions were aroused he could not but

look uneasily on her, and once he suspected her she felt that she would

never forgive him. And it was altogether odious, too, to be included in

the list of women whose names were remembered when Jim Greeley’s was

mentioned.

And so she conspired with a knave by lies and concealments to keep peace

in her husband’s home. Jim lighted a cigar and dropped down on the

steps, puffing with ostentation.

Sheila looked out on the innocent seeming of the village and the gentle

benignity of the stars, and hated to think how much evil could cloak

itself and prosper in these deep shadows and soft lights and peaceful

hours.

The car bustled to the curb, stopped while Bret got out. Then the

chauffeur shot away with it to the garage. Bret came drowsily up the

walk, kissed his wife, gripped the hand of his friend, and sat down.

Jim asked how business was, and they talked shop with zest while Sheila

sat in utter solitude, watching the village Lothario play the rôle of

honest Horatio.

Her husband had spent the day and half the evening at his business, and

yet it interested him more than Sheila did. He showed no impatience to

be rid of this man, no eagerness to be alone with his wife who had given

up all her own industry to be his companion.

No instinct warned him that his absorption in his business was

imperiling his home, nor that his crony was a sneaking conspirator

against his happiness.

Sheila was wildly excited, but she pretended to be sleepy and yawningly

begged to be excused. It was an hour later before Bret finished talking

and she heard him exchange cheery good nights with Jim Greeley. When

Bret arrived up-stairs she pretended to be asleep. Before long he was

asleep, worn out with honest toil, while she lay battling for the

slumber she had not earned. She was sleeping little and ill nowadays,

and she rose unrefreshed from unhappy nights to uninteresting days. The

effect on her health was growing manifest.

CHAPTER XLVII

The morning after the Jim Greeley adventure Sheila went back to her

children and the seaside. She had no energy and everything bored her.

The shock of the surf did not thrill her with new energy; it chilled and

weakened her. She found Dorothy all aflutter over the attentions of a

rich old widower who complimented her brutally.

Dorothy called him her “conquest” and spoke of her “flirtation.” Sheila

knew that she used the words rather childishly than with any

significance, but her face betrayed a certain dismay.

Dorothy bristled at the shadow of reproof. “Don’t look at me like that!

I guess if Jim can butterfly around the way he does I’m not going to

insult everybody that’s nice to me.”

Sheila disclaimed any criticism, but the incident alarmed her. And she

thought of what Satan provided for idle hands.

Civilization keeps robbing women of their ancient housework. Spinning,

weaving, grinding corn, making clothes, and twisting lamp-lighters are

gone. Their husbands do not want them to cook or sweep or wait upon

their own children. With the loss of their back-breaking,

heart-withering old tasks has come a longer life of beauty and desire

and a greater leisure for curiosity. They were unhappy and discontented

in their former servitude. They are unhappy and discontented in their

useless freedom.

Sheila saw everywhere evidences that grown-ups, like children, must

either become sloths of indolence, or find occupation, or take up

mischief for a business. She wondered and dreaded what the future might

hold for herself.

The summers were not quite so hard to get through, for they had usually

been periods of vacation for her. Sometimes she spent a month or two

with her father and mother, or they with her. Sometimes old Mrs. Vining

visited her and shamed her with the activity that kept the veteran

actress alert at seventy years.

Sheila found a cynical amusement in pitting Mrs. Vining and Bret’s

mother against each other. They began always with great mutual

deference, but soon the vinegar of age began to render their comments

acidulous. Mrs. Winfield had grown old in the domestic world and the

church. Mrs. Vining had grown old in the wicked theater. Of course

Sheila was prejudiced, but to save her she could not discover wherein

Mrs. Winfield was the better of the two. She was certainly narrower,

crueler, more somber. Moreover, she was also less industrious, for to

Sheila the hallowed duties of the household were not industry at all, or

at best were the proper toil for servants. Mrs. Winfield seemed to her

to be a Penelope eternally reweaving each day the same dull pattern she

had woven the day before.

When the autumn came her father and mother and Mrs. Vining and the other

theater folk emerged from their estivation and made ready for the year’s

work, while Sheila must return to the idleness of the village, or its

more insipid dissipations.

Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law began to get on each other’s nerves.

Sheila could not forget the glory of the theater. Mrs. Winfield could

not outgrow her horror of it, and she could not refrain from nagging

allusions to its baleful influences. To Sheila it was a case of the

sooty pot eternally railing at the simmering kettle.

One day Sheila was wrought to such a pitch of resentment that she

blurted out the whole story of her encounter with Jim Greeley.

“He was no actor,” said Sheila, triumphantly, “but he tried to win his

friend’s wife away.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Winfield, “but his friend’s wife was an actress.”

Against such logic Sheila saw that she would beat her head in vain. She

suppressed an inclination to tear her hair out and dance on it. And she

gave Mrs. Winfield up as hopeless. Mrs. Winfield had long before given

Sheila up as beyond redemption, and eventually she moved away from

Blithevale to live with a widowed sister in the Middle West.

Sheila asked herself, bitterly, “What am I getting out of life? When one

trouble goes another bobs into its place.” By the time the mother-in-law

retired the children had grown up to a noisy, uncontrollable

restlessness that drove the office-weary Bret frantic.

It was he, and not Sheila, that insisted on their occasional flights to

New York, where they made the rounds of the theaters. Sometimes Sheila

ran back on the stage to embrace her old friends and tell them how happy

she was. And they said they envied her, knowing they lied.

They always asked her, “When are you coming back?” and when she always

answered, “Never,” they did not believe her. Yet they saw that

discontent was aging her. Discontent was never yet a fountain of youth.

* * * * *

Sheila returned to Blithevale like a caught convict. Plays came there

occasionally, and Bret liked to see them as an escape from the worries

he found at home or the worries that followed him from the office. He

enjoyed particularly the entertainments concocted with the much-abused

mission of furnishing relaxation for the tired business man. As if the

tired business man were not an important and pathetic figure, and his

refreshment one of the noblest and most needful acts of charity.

At these times when Sheila sat and watched other people playing, and

often playing atrociously, the rôles that she should have played or

would have enjoyed, her homesickness for the boards swept over her in

waves of anguish. Sometimes the yearning to act goaded her so cruelly

that she almost swooned. She felt like a canary full of song with her

tongue cut out.

* * * * *

Now and then Eugene Vickery came to visit his sister Dorothy. He usually

spent a deal of time with Bret and Sheila.

He was a different Eugene so far as success and failure can alter a man.

That play of his which Sheila had tried in stock and Reben had allowed

to lapse Eugene had patched up and sold to another manager who had a

star in tow.

Play and star had been flayed with jubilant enthusiasm by the New York

critics, but had drawn enough of the public to keep them on Broadway

awhile, and then had succeeded substantially on the road in the cheaper

theaters known as the “dollar houses.”

Vickery the scholar was both irritated and amused by the irony of his

success. Almost illiterate journalists called his wisdom trash and only

the less sophisticated people would accept it. His feelings were only

partly soothed by the dollar anodyne and the solace of regular

royalties.

His manager ordered another play, and Vickery tried to write down to his

public. The result was a dismal fiasco, critically and box-officially.

The lesson was worth the price. He went back to writing for himself in

the belief that if he could succeed in the private theater of his own

heart he would be sure at least of one sympathetic auditor. That was one

more than the insincere writer could count on.

His bookish tastes and training led him to a bookish ideal. He felt that

the highest dramatic art was in the blank-verse form, and he felt that

there was something nobler in the good old times of costumes and

rhetoric. In fact, blank verse demanded heroic garb, for when the words

strut the speakers must. His Americanism was revealed only in the fact

that he chose for his chief character a man struggling for liberty, for

the right of being himself.

He selected the epic argosy of the Puritans and their battle for freedom

of worship. His central figure was a granite and velvet soul of the type

of Roger Williams.

He told Sheila and Bret a little about his scheme and they thought it

wonderful. Bret found any literary creation incredibly ingenious, though

more brilliant mental processes applied to mechanical problems seemed

simple enough.

Sheila thought Vickery’s plan wonderful because her heart swelled at the

lofty program of the plot. Blank verse had been her first religion and

Shakespeare her first Scripture. It was one of her bitterest regrets

that she had never paid the master the tribute of a performance of any

of his works since she adapted his “Hamlet” to the needs of her own

children’s theater.

“Who’s going to play your hero?” Bret asked, idly.

Vickery answered, “Well, I haven’t read it to him yet, but there’s only

one man in the country with the brains and the skill and the good

looks.”

“And who might all that be?” Sheila asked, with a laugh.

“Floyd Eldon.”

The name seemed to drop into a well of silence.

Vickery had forgotten for the moment the feud of the two men. The

silence recalled it to him. He spoke with vexation:

“Good Lord, people! haven’t you got over that ancient trouble yet? When

a grudge gets more than so old the board of health ought to cart it

away. Eldon’s got over it, I know. A year or two ago he was telling me

how kindly he felt toward Sheila and how he didn’t really blame Bret.”

Bret was not at all obliged for Eldon’s magnanimity, but Vickery went on

singing Eldon’s praises till he noticed the profound silence of his

auditors. He suddenly felt as if he had been speaking in an empty room.

He saw that Bret was sullen and Sheila uneasy. Vickery spread the praise

a little thicker in sheer vexation.

“Reben is going to star Eldon the minute he finds his play. I’m hoping I

can fit him with this. He’s on the way up and I want to ride up on his

coat-tails. He’s a gentleman, a scholar, an athlete—”

“But, after all, he’s an actor,” sniffed Bret.

“So was Shakespeare, the noblest mind in English literature.”

“I don’t care for the type,” said Bret. “Always posing, always talking

about themselves.”

“Thanks, dear,” said Sheila, flushing.

“Oh, I don’t mean you, honey,” Bret expostulated. “That’s why I loved

you—you almost never talk about yourself. You’re everything that’s

fine.”

Vickery tried to restore the conversation to safer generalities. “Actors

talk about their personality sometimes because that is what they are

putting on the market. But did you ever hear traveling-men talk about

their line of goods? or clergymen about the church? or manufacturers

about what they are making? Do you ever talk shop yourself?”

“Oh no!” Sheila laughed ironically, and now Bret flushed.

“Shop talk is merely a question of manners,” said Vickery. “Some people

know enough not to talk about themselves, and some don’t. There are lots

of old women that will talk you to death about their cooks and their

aches. I’m one of those who jaw about themselves all the time. It’s not

because I’m conceited, for the Lord knows I have too much reason for

modesty. It’s just a habit. Eldon hasn’t got it. He’ll talk about a

rôle, or about an audience, but you’ll never hear him praise himself.

And there are plenty of actors like him.”

Bret grunted his disbelief.

“You don’t know enough of them to be a judge,” Vickery insisted.

“No, and I don’t want to,” Bret growled. “I prefer good, honest,

wholesome, normal, real men—men like Jim Greeley and other friends of

mine.”

A little shiver passed through Sheila. Bret felt it, and assumed that

she was distressed at hearing Eldon’s name taken in vain. Vickery was

not impressed with the choice of his brother-in-law as an ideal. Dorothy

had told him too much about Jim. He did not suspect, however, that

Sheila had cause to loathe him. He continued to talk his own shop, and

to praise Eldon, to celebrate his progress, his increasing science in

the dynamics of theatricism.

“He’s becoming a great comedian,” he said. “And comedy requires brains.

Pathos and tragedy are more or less matters of emotion and temperament,

but comedy is a science.”

As Vickery chanted Eldon up, Sheila’s eyes began to glow again. Bret

fumed with jealousy, imputing that glow of hers to enthusiasm for Eldon.

The fact was that she was thinking of Eldon without a trace of

affection. She was thinking of him as a successful competitor, as a

beginner who was forging ahead and growing expert, growing famous while

she had fallen out of the race.

She was more jealous of Eldon than Bret was.

CHAPTER XLVIII

Sheila suffered the very same feeling to a more sickening degree, a

little later, when “The Woman Pays” company, now in its fourth year,

reached Blithevale in cleaning up the lesser one-night stands. The play

that Sheila had rejected had become the corner-stone of Reben’s

fortunes. It was as inartistic and plebeian and reminiscent as apple

pie. But the public loves apple pie and consumes tons of it, to the

great neglect of _marrons glacés_.

That play was a commodity for which there is always a market. A great

artist could adorn it, but it was almost actor-proof against

destruction.

Even Dulcie Ormerod could not spoil it for its public. When she played

it Batterson gnashed his teeth and Reben held his aching head, but there

were enough injudicious persons left to make up eight good audiences a

week.

Dulcie “killed her laughs” by fidgeting or by reading humorously or by

laughing herself. She lost the audience’s tears by the copiousness of

her own. But she loved the play and still “knew she was great because

she wept herself.” When she laughed she showed teeth that speedily

earned a place in the advertisement of dentifrice, and when she wept, a

certain sort of audience was overawed by the sight of a genuine tear.

Real water has always been impressive on the stage.

By sheer force of longevity the play slid her up among the prominent

women of the day. She stuck to the rôle for four years, and was

beginning to hope to rival the records of Joseph Jefferson, Denman

Thompson, Maggie Mitchell, and Lotta.

The night the company played in Blithevale Bret and Eugene, Sheila,

Dorothy and her Jim, made up a box-party.

Jim proclaimed that Dulcie was a “peach,” but he alluded less to the art

she did not possess than to the charms she had. She was pretty, there

was no question of that—as shapely and characterless as a Bouguereau

painting, as coarsely sweet as granulated sugar. Dorothy credited her

with all the winsome qualities of the character she assumed, and took a

keen dislike to the actress who played the adventuress, an estimable

woman and a genuine artist whose oxfords Dulcie was not fit to untie.

Eugene and Sheila suffered from Dulcie’s utter falsehood of

impersonation. Even Bret felt some mysterious gulf between Dulcie’s

interpretation and Sheila’s as he remembered it.

Sheila was afraid to speak her opinion of Dulcie lest it seem mere

jealousy. Eugene voiced it for her.

“To think that such a heifer is a star! Getting rich and getting

admiration,” he growled, “while a genius like Sheila rusts in idleness.

It’s a crime.”

“It’s all my fault,” said Bret. “I cut her out of it.”

“Don’t you believe it, honey,” Sheila cooed. “I’d rather be starring in

your home than earning a million dollars before the public.”

But somehow there was a clank of false rhetoric in the speech. It was

lover’s extravagance, and even Bret felt that it could not quite be

true, or that, if it were true, somehow it ought not to be.

He felt himself a dog in the manger, yet he was glad that Sheila was not

up there with some actor’s arms about her.

* * * * *

After the third act Dulcie sent the company-manager—still Mr.

McNish—to invite Mrs. Winfield to come back at the end of the play.

Sheila had hoped to escape this test of her nerves, but there was no

escape. She felt that if Dulcie were haughty over her success she would

hate her, and if she were not haughty and tried to be gracious she would

hate her more.

Dulcie assumed the latter rôle and played it badly. She condescended as

from a great height, patronized like a society patroness. Worse yet, she

pawed Sheila and called her “Sheila” and “dearie” and congratulated her

on having such a nice quiet life in such a dear little village, while

“poor me” had to play forty weeks a year. Sheila wanted to scratch her

big doll-eyes out.

On the way home Bret confessed that it rather hurt him to see a “dub

like Dulcie rattling round in Sheila’s shoes.” The metaphor was meant

better than it came out, but Sheila was not thinking of that when she

groaned: “Don’t speak of it.”

Bret invited Vickery to stop in for a bit of supper and Vickery

accepted, to Bret’s regret. Sheila excused herself from lingering and

left Bret to smoke out Vickery, who was in a midnight mood of garrulity.

The playwright watched Sheila trudge wearily up the staircase, worn out

with lack of work. He turned on Bret and growled:

“Bret, there goes the pitifulest case of frustrated genius I ever saw.

It’s a sin to chain a great artist like that to a baby-carriage.”

Bret turned scarlet at the insolence of this, but Vickery was too feeble

to be knocked down. He was leaner than ever, and his eyes were like wet

buckeyes. His speech was punctuated with coughs. As he put it, he

“coughed commas.” Also he coughed cigarette-smoke usually. His friends

blamed his cough to his cigarettes, but they knew better, and so did he.

He was in a hurry to do some big work before he was coughed out. It

infuriated him to feel genius within himself and have so little strength

or time for its expression. It enraged him to see another genius with

health and every advantage kept from publication by a husband’s

selfishness.

He was in one of his irascible spells to-night and he had no mercy on

Bret. He spoke with the fretful tyranny of an invalid.

“It’s none of my business, I suppose, Bret, but I tell you it makes me

sick—sick! to see Sheila cooped up in this little town. New York would

go wild over her—yes, and London, too. There’s an awful dearth on the

stage of young women with beauty and training. She could have everything

her own way. She’s a peculiarly brilliant artist who never had her

chance. If she had reached her height and quit—fine! But she was

snuffed out just as she was beginning to glow. It was like lighting a

lamp and blowing it out the minute the flame begins to climb on the

wick.

“Dulcie Ormerod and hundreds of her sort are buzzing away like cheap

gas-jets while a Sheila Kemble is here. She could be making thousands of

people happy, softening their hearts, teaching them sympathy and charm

and breadth of outlook; and she’s teaching children not to rub their

porridge-plates in their hair!

“Thousands used to listen to every syllable of hers and forget their

troubles. Now she listens to your factory troubles. She listens to the

squabbles of a couple of nice little kids who would rather be outdoors

playing with other kids all day, as they ought to be.

“It’s like taking a lighthouse and turning the lens away from the sea

into the cabbage-patch of the keeper.”

“Go right on,” Bret said, with labored restraint. “Don’t mind me. I’m

old-fashioned. I believe that a good home with a loving husband and some

nice kids is good enough for a good woman. I believe that such a life is

a success. Where should a wife be but at home?”

“That depends on the wife, Bret. Most wives belong at home, yes. Most

men belong at home, too. They are born farmers and shoemakers and

school-teachers and chemists and inventors, and all glory to them for

staying there. But where did Christopher Columbus belong? Where would

you be if he had stayed at home?”

“But Sheila isn’t a man!”

“Well, then, did Florence Nightingale belong at home? or Joan of Arc?”

“Oh, well, nurses and patriots and people like that!”

“What about Jenny Lind and Patti?”

“They were singers.”

“And Sheila is a singer, only in unaccompanied recitative. Actors are

nurses and doctors, too; they take people who are sick of their hard

day’s work and they cure ’em up, give ’em a change of climate.”

“Home was good enough for our mothers,” Bret grumbled, sinking back

obstinately in his chair.

“Oh no, it wasn’t.”

“They were contented.”

“Contented! hah! that’s a word we use for other people’s patience.

Old-fashioned women were not contented. We say they were because other

people’s sorrows don’t bother us, especially when they are dead. But

they mattered then to them. If you ever read the newspapers of those

days, or the letters, or the novels, or the plays, you’ll find that

people were not contented in the past at any time.

“People used to say that laborers were contented to be treated like

cattle. But they weren’t, and since they learned how to lift their heads

they’ve demanded more and more.”

Bret had been having a prolonged wrestle with a labor-union. He snarled:

“Don’t you quote the laboring-men to me. There’s no satisfying them!”

“And it’s for the good of the world that they should demand more. It’s

for the good of the world that everybody should be doing his best, and

getting all there is in it and out of it and wanting more.”

“Is nobody to stay at home?”

“Of course! There’s my sister Dorothy—nicest girl in the world, but not

temperamental enough to make a flea wink. She’s got sense enough to know

it. You couldn’t drive her on the stage. Why the devil didn’t you marry

her? Then you both could have stayed at home. You belong at home because

you’re a manufacturer. I should stay at home because I’m a writer. But a

postman oughtn’t to stay at home, or a ship-captain, or a fireman.”

Bret attempted a mild sarcasm: “So all the women ought to leave home and

go on the stage, eh?”

Vickery threw up his hands. “God forbid! I think that nine-tenths of the

actresses ought to leave the stage and go home. Too many of them are

there because there was nowhere else to go or they drifted in by

accident. Nice, stupid, fatheads who would be the makings of a farm or

an orphan-asylum are trying to interpret complicated rôles. Dulcie

Ormerod ought to be waiting on a lunch-counter, sassing brakemen and

brightening the lot of the traveling-men. But women like Mrs. Siddons

and Ellen Terry, Bernhardt and Duse and Charlotte Cushman and Marlowe

and any number of others, including Mrs. Bret Winfield, ought to be

traveling the country like missionaries of art and culture and

morality.”

“Morality!” Bret roared. “The stage is no place for a good woman, and

you know it.”

“Oh, bosh! In the first place, what is a good woman?”

“A woman who is virtuous and honorable and industrious and—Well, you

know what ‘good’ means as well as I do.”

“I know a lot better than you do, you old mud-turtle. There are plenty

of good women on the stage. And there are plenty of bad ones off. There

are more Commandments than one, and more than one way for a woman to be

bad. There are plenty of wives here in Blithevale whose physical

fidelity you could never question, though they’re simply wallowing in

other sins. You know lots of wives that you can’t say a word against

except that they are loafers, money-wasters, naggers of children,

torturers of husbands, scourges of neighbors, enemies of everything

worth while—otherwise they are all right.

“They neglect their little ones’ minds; never teach them a lofty ideal;

just teach them hatred and lying and selfishness and snobbery and spite

and conceit. They make religion a cloak for backbiting and false

witness. And they’re called good women. I tell you it’s an outrage on

the word ‘good.’ ‘Good’ is a great word. It ought to be used for

something besides ‘the opposite of sensual’!”

“All right,” Bret agreed, “use it any way you want to. You’ll admit, I

suppose, that a good woman ought to perpetuate her goodness. A good

woman ought to have children.”

“Yes, if she can.”

“And take care of them and sacrifice herself for them.”

“Why sacrifice herself?”

“So that the race may progress.”

“How is it going to progress if you sacrifice the best fruits of it?

Suppose the mother is a genius of the highest type, a beautiful-bodied,

brilliant-minded, wholesome genius. Why should she be sacrificed to her

children? They can’t be any greater than she is. Since genius isn’t

inherited or taught, they’ll undoubtedly be inferior. And at that they

may die before they grow up. Why kill a sure thing for a doubtful one?”

“You don’t believe in the old-fashioned woman.”

“She’s still as much in fashion as she ever was. The old-fashionedest

woman on record was Eve. She meddled and got her husband fired out of

Paradise. And she never had any stage ambitions or asked for a vote or

wore Paris clothes, but she wasn’t much of a success as a wife; and as a

mother all we know of her home influence was that one of her sons killed

the other and got driven into the wilderness. You can’t do much worse

than that. Even if Eve had been an actress and gone on the road, her

record couldn’t have been much worse, could it?”

Bret was boxing heavily and sleepily with a contemptuous patience. “You

think women ought to be allowed to go gadding about wherever they

please?”

“Of course I do! What’s the good of virtue that is due to being in jail?

We know that men are more honest, more decent, more idealistic, more

romantic, than women. Why? Because we have liberty. Because we have

ourselves to blame for our rottenness. Because we’ve got nobody to hide

behind. The reason so many women are such liars and gossips and so

merciless to one another is because they are so penned in, because all

the different kinds of women are expected to live just the same way

after they are married. But some of them are bad mothers because they

have no outlet for their genius. Some of them would be better wives if

they had more liberty.”

Bret was entirely unconvinced. “You’re not trying to tell me that the

stage is better than the average village?”

“No, but I think it’s as good. There will never be any lack of sin. But

the sin that goes on in harems and jails and hide-bound communities is

worse than the sin of free people busily at work in the splendid fields

of art and science and literature and drama and commerce.

“I think Sheila belongs to the public. I don’t see why she couldn’t be a

better wife and a better mother for being an eminent artist. And I like

you, Bret, so much. You’re as decent a fellow at heart as anybody I

know. I hate to have it you, of all men, that’s crushing Sheila’s soul

out of her. I hate to think that I introduced you to her. And I let you

cut me out.

“She wouldn’t have loved me if she’d married me, but, by the Lord Harry!

her name would be a household word in all the homes in the country

instead of just one.”

Vickery dropped to a divan and lay outstretched, exhausted with his

oration. Bret sat with his lips pursed and his fingers gabled in long

meditation. At length he spoke:

“I’m not such a brute as you think, ’Gene. I don’t want to sacrifice

anybody to myself, least of all the woman I idolize. If Sheila wants to

leave me and go back, I’ll not hinder her. I couldn’t if I wanted to.

There’s no law that enables a man to get out an injunction against his

wife going on the stage. If she wants to go, why doesn’t she?”

Vickery sat up on the couch and snapped: “Because she loves you, damn

it! I’m madder at her than I am at you.” Then he fell back again,

puffing his cigarette spitefully.

Bret smoked slowly at a long cigar. He was thinking long thoughts.

A little later Vickery spoke again: “Besides, Sheila won’t say she wants

to go back, for fear it would hurt your feelings.”

Bret took this very seriously. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

Bret smoked his cigar to ash, then he rose with effort and solemnity,

went to the door, and called, “Oh, Sheila!”?

From somewhere in the clouds came her voice—the beautiful Sheila voice,

“Yes, dear.”

“Come to the stairs a minute, will you?”

“Yes, dear.”

Vickery had risen wonderingly. He could not see Sheila’s nightcapped

head as she looked over the balustrade. He did not know that Sheila had

been listening to his eulogy of her and agreeing passionately with his

regrets at her idleness.

“’Gene here,” said Bret, “has been roasting me for keeping you off the

stage. I want him to hear me tell you that I’m not keeping you off the

stage. Do you want to go on the stage, Sheila?”

Sheila’s voice was housewifely and matter-of-fact. “Of course not. I

want to go to bed. And it’s time ’Gene was in his. Send him home.”

She heard Bret cry, “You see!” and heard his triumphant laughter as he

clapped Vickery on the shoulder. Then she went to her room and locked

herself in. The click of the bolt had the sound of a jailer’s key. She

was a prisoner in a cell, in a solitary confinement, since her husband’s

soul was leagues away from any sympathy with hers. She paced the floor

like a caged panther, and when the sobs came she fell on her knees and

silenced them in her pillow lest Bret hear her. She had made her

renunciation and plighted her troth. She would keep faith with her lover

though she felt that it was killing her. Her soul was dying of

starvation.

CHAPTER XLIX

Vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his

play for Eldon. For months he toiled and moiled upon it. Sometimes he

would write all day and all night upon a scene, and work himself up into

a state of what he called soul-sweat.

He would go to bed patting himself on the shoulder and talking to

himself as if he were a draught-horse and a Pegasus combined: “Good boy,

’Gene! Good work, old Genius!”

In the morning he would wake feeling all the after-effects of a

prolonged carouse. He would reach for a cigarette and review with

contempt all he had previously done. No critic could have reviled his

work with less sympathy.

“By night I write plays and by day I write criticisms,” he would say.

Lazily he would cough himself out of bed, cough through his tub and into

his clothes, and go to his table like a surly butcher to carve his play

with long slashes of the blue pencil.

At length he had it as nearly finished as any play is likely to be

before it has been read. He went to New York, where Eldon was playing,

and easily persuaded him to listen to the drama. Vickery would not

explain the story of the play beforehand.

“I want you to get it the way the audience does.”

He marched his buskined blank verse with the elocution of a poet and all

the sonority his raucous voice could lend him. He was shocked to note

that Eldon was not helping him along with enthusiasm. His voice wavered,

faltered, sank. He was hardly audible at the climax of his big third

act.

Here the Puritan hero, who had left the Old World for the New World and

liberty, discovered that the other Puritans wanted liberty only for

themselves, and so abhorred his principles of toleration that they

exiled him into the wilderness, mercilessly expecting him to perish in

the blizzards or at the hands of the Indians. The hero, like another

Roger Williams, turned and denounced them, then vowed to found a state

where a man could call his soul his own, and plunged into the storm.

Vickery closed the manuscript and gulped down a glass of water. He had

not looked at Eldon for two acts; he did not look at him now. He simply

growled, “Sorry it bored you so.”

“It doesn’t bore me!” Eldon protested. “It’s magnificent—”

“But—” Vickery prompted.

“But nothing. Only—well—you see you said it was a play for me, and

I—I’ve been trying to like it for myself. But—well, it’s too good for

me. I feel like a man who ordered a suit of overalls and finds that the

tailor has brought him an ermine robe and velvet breeches. It’s too

gorgeous for me.”

“Nonsense!” said Vickery. “You don’t have to softsoap me. Why don’t you

like it?”

“I do! As a work of art it is a masterpiece. The fault is mine. You see,

I admire the classic blank-verse plays so much that I wish people

wouldn’t try to write any more of them. They’re not in the spirit of our

age. In Shakespeare’s time men wore long curls and combed them in

public, and tied love-knots in them and wrote madigrals and picked their

teeth artistically with a golden picktooth. The best of them cried like

babies when their feelings were hurt.

“Nowadays we’d lynch a man that behaved as they did. Then they tried to

use the most eloquent words. Now we try to use the simplest or, better

yet, none at all. I think that our way is bigger than theirs, but,

anyway, it’s our way.

“And then the Puritans. I admire them in spots. My people came over in

one of the early boats. But plays about Puritans never succeed. Do you

know why? It’s because the Puritans preached the gospel of Don’t!

Everything was Don’t—don’t dance, don’t sing, don’t kiss, don’t have

fun, don’t wear bright colors, don’t go to plays, don’t have a good

time. But the theater is the place where people go to have a good time,

a good laugh, a good cry, or a good scare. The whole soul of the theater

is to reconcile people with life and with one another.

“The Puritans call the theater immoral. It is so blamed moral that it is

untrue to life half the time, for wickedness always has to be punished

in the theater, and we know it isn’t in real life.

“And another thing, Vick, why should the theater do anything for the

Puritans? They never did anything for us except to tear down the

playhouses and call the actors hard names. And what good came of it all?

“Here’s a book I picked up about the Puritans, because it has a lot

about my ancestors. They had a daughter named Remember and a son named

Wrastle. But look at this.” Eldon got up, found the volume, and hunted

for the page, as he raged: “Now the Puritans in our country had none of

the alleged causes of immorality—they had no novels, no plays, no grand

or comic operas, no nude art, no vaudeville, no tango, and no moving

pictures. They ought to have been pretty good, eh? Well, take a peek at

what their Governor William Bradford writes.”

He handed the book to Vickery, whose eyes roved along the page:

Anno Dom: 1642. Marvilous it may be to see and consider how some

kind of wickednes did grow breake forth here, in a land wher the

same was so much witnesed against, and so narrowly looked unto,

& severly punished when it was knowne; as in no place more, and

so much, that I have known or head of . . . . . espetially

drunkennes and unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene

persons unmaried, for which many both men & women have been

punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. . .

things fearful to name have broak forth in this land, oftener

then once . . . one reason may be, that ye Divell may carrie a

greater spite against the churches of Christ and ye gospell

hear, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holynes and

puritie amongst them . . . that he might cast a blemishe &

staine upon them in ye eyes of ye world, who use to be rashe in

judgmente.

Vickery smiled sheepishly, and Eldon relieved him of the book,

exclaiming:

“Think of it, those terribly protected people were so bad they could

only explain it by saying that Satan worked overtime! There is one of

the most hideous stories in here ever published and you can find facts

that make _The Scarlet Letter_ look innocent.”

Vickery protested, mildly: “Of course the Puritans were human and

intolerant. That’s the whole point of my play, the struggle of a man

against them.”

Eldon opposed him still. “But why should we worry over that? The

Puritans have been pretty well whipped out. Liberty is pretty well

secured for men in America. Why try to excite an audience about what

they all are as used to as the air they breathe? Let Russia write about

such things. Why not write a play about the exciting things of our own

days? If you want liberty for a theme, why don’t you write about the

fight the women are waging for freedom? Turn your hero into a heroine;

turn your Puritans into conservative men and women of the day who stand

just where they did. Show up the modern home as this book shows up the

old Puritans.”

Vickery was dazed. Of all the critical suggestions he had ever heard,

this was the most radical, to change the hero to a heroine, and _vice

versa_.

He stared at Eldon. “Are you in favor of woman suffrage, you, of all

men?”

Eldon laughed. “You might as well ask me if I am in favor of the coming

winter or the hot spell or the next earthquake. All I know is that my

opposition wouldn’t make the slightest difference to them and that I

might as well reconcile myself to them.

“There’s nothing on this earth except death and the taxes that’s surer

to come than the equality of women—in the sense of equality that men

mean. The first place where women had a chance was the stage; it’s the

only place now where they are put on the same footing with the men. They

have every advantage that men have, and earn as much money, or more, and

have just as many privileges, or more. The one question asked is, ‘Can

you deliver the goods?’ That’s the question they ask of a business man,

or painter, or sculptor, or architect, or soldier. Private morals are an

important question, but a separate question, just as they are with men.

“So the stage is the right place for freedom to be preached by women,

because that is the place where it is practised. The stage ought to lend

its hand to free others because it is free itself.”

Vickery was beginning to kindle with the new idea, though his kindling

meant the destruction of the building he had worked on so hard. He made

one further objection: “You’re not seriously urging me to write a

suffragette play, are you?”

“Lord help us, no!” Eldon snorted. “The suffragette is less entertaining

on the stage than the Puritan, or the abolitionist, or any fighter for a

doctrine. What the stage wants is the story of individuals, not of

parties, or sects, or creeds. Leave sermons to the pulpits and lectures

to the platform. The stage wants stories. If you can sneak in a bit of

doctrine, all right, but it must be smuggled. Why don’t you write a play

about the tragedy of a woman who has great gifts and can’t use them—a

throttled genius like—well, like Sheila Kemble, for instance?”

“Oh, Sheila!” Vickery sighed. But the theme became personal, concrete,

real at once. He made still a last weak objection: “But I wrote this

play for you. I wanted to see you star in it.”

Eldon thought a moment, then he said: “You write the play for the woman,

and let me play her husband. Give her all the fire you want, and make me

just an every-day man with a wife he loves and admires and wants to

keep, and doesn’t want to destroy. You do that and I’ll play the husband

and I’ll give the woman star the fight of her life to keep me from

running away with the piece. Don’t make the husband brilliant or heroic;

just a stupid, stubborn, every-day man, and give him the worst of it

everywhere. That all helps the actor. The woman will be divine, the man

will be human. And he’ll get the audience—the women as well as the

men.”

Vickery began to see the play forming on the interior sky of his skull,

vaguely yet vividly as clouds take shape and gleam. “If only Sheila

could play it,” he said.

Eldon tossed his hands in despair.

Vickery began to babble as the plot spilled down into his brain in a

cloudburst of ideas: “I might take Sheila for my theme. To disguise her

decently she could be—say—Let me see—I’ve got it!—a singer! Her

voice has thrilled Covent Garden and the Metropolitan and she marries a

nice man and has some children and sings ’em little cradle-songs. She

loves them and she loves her husband, but she is bursting with bigger

song—wild, glorious song. Shall she stick to the nursery or shall she

leave her babies every now and then and give the world a chance to hear

her? Her mother-in-law and the neighbors say, ‘The opera is immoral, the

singers are immoral, the librettos are immoral, the managers are

immoral; you stay in the nursery, except on Sundays, and then you may

sing in the choir.’

“But she remembers when she sang the death-love of Isolde in the

Metropolitan with an orchestra of a hundred trying in vain to drown her;

she remembers how she climbed and climbed till she was in heaven, and

how she took five thousand people there with her, and—Oh, you can see

it! It’s Trilby without Svengali; it’s Trilby as a mother and a wife.

It’s all womankind.”

His thoughts were stampeded with the new excitement. He picked up the

play he had loved so well and worked for so hard, and would have tossed

it into the fire if Eldon’s room had not been heated by a

steam-radiator. He flung it on the floor with contempt:

“That!” and he trampled it as the critics would have trampled it had it

been laid at their feet.

“What to call my play?” he pondered, aloud. “It’s always easier for me

to write the play than select the name.” As he screwed up his face in

thought a memory came to him. “My mother told me once that when she was

a little girl in the West her father wounded a wild swan and brought it

home. She cared for it till it got well, then he clipped one of its

wings so that it could not balance itself to fly. It grew tame and

stayed about the garden, but it was always trying to fly.

“One day my grandfather noticed that the clipped wing was growing out

and he sent a farm-hand to trim it down again. The fellow didn’t

understand how birds fly, and he clipped the long wing down to the

length of the short one. The bird walked about, trying its pinions. It

found that, short as they were, they balanced each other.

“She walked to a high place and suddenly leaped off into the air; my

mother saw her and thought she would fall. But her wings held her up.

They beat the air and she sailed away.”

“Did she ever come back?” Eldon asked.

“She never came back. But she was a bird and didn’t belong in a garden.

A woman would come back. We used to have pigeons at home. We clipped

their wings at first, too, till they learned the cote. Then we let them

free. You could see them circling about in the sky. Pigeons come back.

I’m going to call my play ‘Clipped Wings.’ How’s that for a

title?—‘Clipped Wings’!”

Eldon was growing incandescent, too, but he advised caution:

“Be easy on the allegory, boy, or you’ll have only allegorical

audiences. Stick to the real and the real people will come to see it. Go

on and write it, and don’t forget I play the husband; I saw him first.

Don’t write a lecture, now; promise me you won’t preach or generalize.

You stick to your story of those two people, and let the audience

generalize on the way home. And don’t let your dialogue sparkle too

much. Every-day people don’t talk epigrams. Give them every-day talk.

That’s as great and twice as difficult as blank verse.

“Don’t try to sweeten the husband. Let him roar like a bull, and

everybody will understand and forgive him. I tell you the new wife has

it all her own way. She’s venturing out into new fields. The new husband

is the one I’m sorry for.

“I hate Winfield for taking Sheila off the stage, and I hate him for

keeping her away. But if I were in his place I’d do the same. I’d hate

myself, but I’d keep her. The more you think of it, the harder the

husband job is.

“The new husband of the new woman is up against the biggest problem of

the present time and of the future: what are husbands going to do about

their wives’ ambitions? What are wives going to do about their husbands’

rights to a home? Where do the children come in? It doesn’t do the kids

much good to have ’em brought up in a home of discontent by a

broken-hearted mother raising her daughter to go through the same

tragedy. But they ought to have a chance.

“There’s a new triangle in the drama. It’s not a question of a lover

outside; the third member is the wife’s ambition. Go to it, my boy—and

give us the story.”

Vickery stumbled from the room like a sleep-walker. The whole play was

present in his brain, as a cathedral in the imagination of an architect.

When he came to drawing the details of the cathedral, and figuring out

the ground-plan, stresses, and strains, the roof supports, the flying

buttresses, the cost of material, and all the infernally irreconcilable

details—that was quite another thing yet.

But he plunged into it as into a brier-patch and floundered about with a

desperate enthusiasm. His health ebbed from him like ink from his pen.

His doctor ordered him to rest and to travel, and he sought the

mountains of New York for a while. But he would not stop work. His theme

dragged him along and he hoped only that his zest for writing would not

give out before the play was finished. If afterward his life also gave

out, he would not much care.

He had lost Sheila, and Sheila had lost herself. If he could find his

work, that would be something at least.

CHAPTER L

There was a certain birch-tree on the hill behind the old Winfield

homestead.

The house itself sat well back in its ample green lawn, left fenceless

after the manner of American village lawns. In the rear of the house

there were many acres of gardens and pasture where cattle stood about,

looking in the distance like toy cows out of a Noah’s Ark.

Beyond the pasture was the steep hill they flattered with the name of

“the mountain.” To the children it furnished an unfailing supply of

Indians, replenished as fast as they were slaughtered.

Every now and then Sheila had to be captured and tied to a tree and

danced around by little Polly and young Bret and their friends, bedecked

with feathers from dismantled dusters, brandishing “tommyhawks” and

shooting with “bonarrers.”

Just as the terrified pale-face squaw was about to be given over to the

torture the Indians would disappear, take off their feathers, rub the

war mud off their noses, and lay aside their barbarous weapons; then

arming themselves with wooden guns, they would charge to Sheila’s

rescue, fearlessly annihilating the wraiths of their late selves.

One day when Sheila was bound to the tree she saw Bret stealing up to

watch the game. He waved gaily to her and she nodded to him. Then the

whim came to her to cease burlesquing the familiar rôle and play it for

all it was worth. She imagined herself really one of those countless

women whom the Indians captured and subjected to torment. Perhaps some

woman, the wife of a pioneer, had once met her hideous doom in this same

forest. She fancied she saw her house in flames and Bret shot dead as he

fought toward her. She writhed and tugged at the imaginary and

unyielding thongs. She pleaded for mercy in babbling hysteria, and for a

climax sent forth one sincere scream of awful terror. If Dorothy’s

mother had heard it she would have remembered the shriek of the little

Ophelia.

Sheila noted that the redskins were silent. She looked about her through

eyes streaming with fictional tears. She saw that Bret was plunging

toward her, ashen with alarm. The neighbors’ children were aghast and

her own boy and girl petrified. Then Polly and young Bret flung

themselves on her in a frenzy of weeping sympathy.

Sheila began to laugh and Bret looked foolish. He explained:

“I thought a snake was coiled round you. Don’t do that again, in

Heaven’s name.” That night he dreamed of her cry.

It was a long while before Sheila could comfort her children and

convince them that it was all “pretend.”

After that, when they were incorrigible, she could always cow them by

threatening, “If you don’t I’ll scream.”

The children would have been glad to make little canoes from the bark of

the birch, but Sheila would not let them peel off the delicate

human-like skin. The tree meant much to her, for she and Bret had been

wont to climb up to it before there were any amateur Indians. Bret had

carved their names on it in two linked hearts.

On the lawn in front of the house there was another birch-tree. It

amused Bret to name the tree on the hill “Sheila” and the tree on the

lawn “Bret.” And the nearest approach he ever made to poetry was to

pretend that they were longing for each other. He probably absorbed that

idea from the dimly remembered lyric of the pine-tree and the palm.

Sheila suggested that the birch from the lawn should climb up and dwell

with the lonely tree on the heights. Bret objected that he and Sheila

would never see them then, for they made few such excursions nowadays.

It struck him as a better idea to bring “Sheila” down to “Bret.” He

decided to surprise his wife with the view of them together. He chose a

day when Sheila was to take the children to a Sunday-school picnic. On

his way to the office he spoke to the old German gardener he had

inherited from his father. When Bret told him of his inspiration the old

man (Gottlieb Hauf, his name was) shook his head and crinkled his thin

lips with the superiority of learning for ignorance. He drawled:

“You shouldn’t do so,” and, as if the matter were ended, bent to snip a

shrub he was manicuring.

“But I want it,” Bret insisted.

“You shouldn’t vant it,” and snipped again.

Opposition always hardened Bret. He took the shears from the old man and

stood him up. “You do as I tell you—for once.”

Gottlieb could be stubborn, too. “Und I tell you die Birke don’t vant

it. She don’t like it down here.”

“The other birch-tree is flourishing down here.”

“Dot makes nuttink out. Die Birke up dere she like vere she is. She like

plenty sun.”

“This one grows in the shade.”

“Diese Birke don’t know nuttink about sun. She alvays grows im

Schatten.”