it down here.”
The old man shook his head stubbornly and reached for the shears.
Bret was determined to have his own way. “Is it my tree or yours?”
“She is your tree—but she don’t like. You move her, she dies.”
“Bosh! You do as you’re told.”
“All right. I move her.”
“To-day?”
“Next vinter.”
“Now!”
“_Um Gotteswillen!_ She dies sure. Next vinter or early sprink, maybe
she has a chence, but to move her in summer—no!”
“Yes!”
“_Nein doch!_”
Bret choked with rage. “You move that tree to-day or you move yourself
out of here.”
Gottlieb hesitated for a long while, but he felt that he was too old to
be transplanted. Besides, that tree up there was none of his own
children. He consented with as bad grace as possible. He moved the tree,
grumbling, and doing his best for the poor thing. He took as large a
ball of earth with the roots as he could manage, but he had to sever
unnumbered tiny shoots, and the voyage down the mountain filled him with
misgivings.
When Bret came home that night the two trees stood close together like
Adam and Eve whitely saluting the sunset. Over them a great tulip-tree
towered a hundred feet in air, and all aglow with its flowers like a
titanic bridal bouquet. When the bedraggled Sheila came back with the
played-out children she was immeasurably pleased with the thoughtfulness
of the surprise.
The next morning Bret called her to the window to see how her namesake
laughed with all her leaves in the early light. The two trees seemed to
laugh together. “It’s their honeymoon,” he said. When he left the house
old Gottlieb was shaking his head over the spectacle. Bret triumphantly
cuffed him on the shoulder. “You see! I told you it would be all right.”
“Vait once,” said Gottlieb.
* * * * *
A few days before this Dorothy had called on Sheila to say that the
church was getting up an open-air festival, a farewell to the
congregation about to disperse for the summer. They wanted to borrow the
Winfield lawn.
Sheila consented freely. Also, they wanted to give a kind of masque.
Masques were coming back into fashion and Vickery had consented to toss
off a little fantasy, mainly about children and fairies, with one or two
grown-ups to hold them together.
Sheila thought it an excellent idea.
Also, they wanted Sheila to play the principal part, the mother of the
children.
Sheila declined with the greatest cordiality.
Dorothy pleaded. Sheila was adamant. She would work her head off and
direct the rehearsals, she said, but she was a reformed actress who
would not backslide even for the church.
Other members of the committee and even the old parson begged Sheila to
recant, but she beamed and refused. Rehearsals began with Dorothy as the
mother and Jim’s sister Mayme as the fairy queen. Sheila’s children and
Dorothy’s and a mob of others made up the rest of the cast, human and
elfin.
Sheila worked hard, but her material was unpromising—all except her own
daughter, whom she had named after Bret’s mother and whom she called
“Polly” after her own. Little Polly displayed a strange sincerity, a
trace of the Kemble genius for pretending.
When Vickery, who came down to see his work produced and saw little
Polly, it was like seeing again the little Sheila whom he still
remembered.
He told big Sheila of it, and her eyes grew humid with tenderness.
He said, “I wrote my first play for you—and I’d be willing to write my
last for you now if you’d act in it.”
Sheila blessed him for it as if it were a beautiful obituary for her
dead self. He did not tell her that he was writing her into his
masterpiece, that she was posing for him even now.
On the morning of the performance Miss Mayme Greeley woke up with an
attack of hay-fever in full bloom. The June flowers had filled her with
a kind of powder that went off like intermittent skyrockets. She began
to pack her trunk for immediate flight to a pollenless clime. It looked
as if she were trying to sneeze her head into her trunk. There was no
possibility of her playing the fairy queen when her every other word was
ker-choo!
Sheila saw it coming. Before the committee approached her like a
press-gang she knew that she was drafted. She knew the rôle from having
rehearsed it. Mayme’s costume would fit her, and if she did not jump
into the gap the whole affair would have to be put off.
These were not the least of the sarcasms fate was lavishing on her that
her wicked past as an actress, which had kept her under suspicion so
long, should be the means of bringing the village to her feet; that the
church should drive her back on the stage; that the stage should be a
plot of grass, that her own children should play the leading parts, and
she be cast for a “bit” in their support.
Thus it was that Sheila returned to the drama, shanghaied as a reluctant
understudy. The news of the positive appearance of the great Mrs.
Winfield—“Sheila Kemble as was, the famous star, you know”—drew the
whole town to the Winfield lawn.
The stage was a level of sward in front of the two birches, with
rhododendron-bushes for wings. The audience filled the terraces, the
porches, and even the surrounding trees.
The masque was an unimportant improvisation that Vickery had jingled off
in hours of rest from the labor of his big play, “Clipped Wings.”
But it gained a mysterious charm from the setting. People were so used
to seeing plays in artificial light among flat, hand-painted trees with
leaves pasted on visible fishnets, that actual sunlight, genuine grass,
and trees in three dimensions seemed poetically unreal and unknown.
The plot of the masque was not revolutionary.
Dorothy played a mother who quieted her four clamoring children with
fairy-stories at bedtime; then they dreamed that a fairy queen visited
them and transported them magically in their beds to fairyland.
At the height of the revel a rooster cock-a-doodle-did, the fairies
scampered home, the children woke up to find themselves out in the woods
in their nighties, and they skedaddled. Curtain.
The magic transformation scene did not work, of course. The ropes caught
in the trees and Bret’s chauffeur and Gottlieb Hauf had to get a
stepladder and fuss about, while the sleeping children sat up and the
premature fairies peeked and snickered. Then the play went on.
Bret watched the performance with the indulgent contempt one feels for
his unprofessional friends when they try to act. It puzzled him to see
how bad Dorothy was.
All she had to do was to gather her family about her and talk them to
sleep. Sheila had reminded her of this and pleaded:
“Just play yourself, my dear.”
But Dorothy had been as awkward and incorrigible as an overgrown girl.
To the layman it would seem the simplest task on earth—to play oneself.
The acting trade knows it to be the most complex, the last height the
actor attains, if he ever attains it at all.
Bret watched Dorothy in amazement. He was too polite to say what he
thought, since Jim Greeley was at his elbow. Jim was not so polite. He
spoke for Bret when he groaned:
“Gee whiz! What’s the matter with that wife of mine? She’s put her kids
to bed a thousand times and yet you’d swear she never saw a child in her
life before. You’d swear nobody else ever did. O Lord! Whew! I’ll get a
divorce in the morning.”
The neighbors hushed him and protested with compliments as badly read
and unconvincing as Dorothy’s own lines. At last Sheila came on, in the
fairy-queen robes. Everybody knew that she was Mrs. Winfield, and that
there were no fairies, at least in Blithevale, nowadays.
Yet somehow for the nonce one fairy at least was altogether undeniable
and natural and real. The human mother putting her chicks to bed was the
unheard-of, the unbelievable fantasm. Sheila was convincing beyond
skepticism.
At the first slow circle of her wand, and the first sound of her easy,
colloquial, yet poetic speech, there was a hush and, in one heart-throb,
a sudden belief that such things must be true, because they were too
beautiful not to be; they were infinitely lovely beyond the cruelty of
denial or the folly of resistance.
Bret’s heart began to race with pride, then to thud heavily. First was
the response to her beauty, her charm, her triumph with the neighbors
who had whispered him down because he had married an actress. Then came
the strangling clutch of remorse: What right had he to cabin and confine
that bright spirit in the little cell of his life? Would she not vanish
from his home as she vanished from the scene? Actually, she merely
walked between the rhododendron-bushes, but it had the effect of a
mystic escape.
There was great laughter when the children woke up and scooted across
the lawn in their bed-gear, but the sensation was Sheila’s. Her ovation
was overwhelming. The women of the audience fairly attacked Bret with
congratulations. They groaned, shouted, and squealed at him:
“Oh, your wife was wonderful! wonderful! WONderful! You must be so PROUD
of her!”
He accepted her tributes with a guilty feeling of embezzlement, a
feeling that the prouder he was of her the more ashamed he should be of
himself.
He studied her from a distance as she took her homage in shy simplicity.
She was happy with a certain happiness he had not seen on her face since
he last saw her taking her last curtain calls in a theater.
Sheila was so happy that she was afraid that her joy would bubble out of
her in disgraceful childishness. With her first entrance on the grassy
“boards” she had felt again the sense of an audience in sympathy and in
subjection, the strange clasp of hands across the footlights, even
though there were no footlights. It was a double triumph because the
audience was Philistine and little accustomed to the theater. But she
could feel the pulse of all those neighbors as if they had but one wrist
and she held that under her fingers, counting the leap and check of
their one heart and making it beat as she willed.
The ecstasy of her power was closely akin, in so different a way, to
what Samson felt when the Philistines that had rendered him helpless
called him from the prison where he did grind, to make them sport:
“He said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may
feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth that I may lean upon
them.” As he felt his strength rejoicing again in his sinews, he prayed,
“Strengthen me only this once, O God, that I may be avenged of the
Philistines for my two eyes.”
Nobody could be less like Samson than Sheila, yet in her capacity she
knew what it was to have her early powers once more restored to her. And
she bowed herself with all her might—“And the house fell.”
An almost inconceivable joy rewarded Sheila till the final spectator had
italicized the last compliment. Then, just as Samson was caught under
his own triumph, so Sheila went down suddenly under the ruination of her
brief victory.
She was never to act again! She was never to act again!
When Bret came slowly to her, the last of her audience, she read in his
eyes just what he felt, and he read in her eyes just what she felt. They
wrung hands in mutual adoration and mutual torment. But all they said
was:
“You were never so beautiful! You never acted so well!” and “If you
liked me, that’s all I want.”
* * * * *
The next morning Bret woke to a new and busy day after a night of
perfect oblivion. Sheila did not get up, as her new habit was, but she
reverted to type. She said that she had not slept and Bret urged her to
stay where she was till she was rested.
Later, as he was knotting his tie, he glanced from the window as usual
at the birches whose wedding he was so proud of. His hands paused at his
throat and his fingers stiffened. He called, “Sheila! Sheila! Come
look!”
He forgot that she had not risen with him. She lifted herself heavily
from her pillow and came slowly to his side. She brushed back her heavy
hair from her heavy eyes and said, “What is it?”
“Look at the difference in the birches. ‘Bret’ is bright and fine and
every leaf is shining. But look at ‘Sheila’!”
The Sheila tree seemed to have died in the night. The leaves drooped,
shriveled, turning their dull sides outward on the black branches. The
wind, that made the other tree glisten like breeze-shaken water, sent
only a mournful shudder through her listless foliage.
CHAPTER LI
Bret turned with anxious, almost with superstitious query to Sheila. He
found her wan and tremulous and weirdly aged. He cried out: “Sheila!
What’s the matter? You’re ill!”
She tried to smile away his fears: “I had a bad night. I’m all right.”
But she leaned on him, and when he led her back to bed she fell into her
place like a broken tree. She was stricken with a chill and he bundled
the covers about her, spread the extra blankets over her, and held her
in his arms, but the lips he kissed shivered and were gray.
He was in a panic and begged her to let him send for the doctor, but she
reiterated through her chattering teeth that she was “all right.” When
he offered to stay home from the office she ridiculed his fears and
insisted that all she needed was sleep.
He left her anxiously, and came home to luncheon earlier than usual. He
did not find Sheila on the steps to greet him. She was not in the hall.
He asked little Polly where her mother was, and she said:
“Mamma’s sick. She’s been crying all day.”
“No, I haven’t,” said Sheila; “I’m all right.”
She was coming down the stairs; she was bravely dressed and smiling
bravely, but she depended on the banister, and she almost toppled into
Bret’s arms.
He kissed her with terror, demanding: “What’s the matter, honey? Please,
please tell me what’s the matter.”
But she repeated her old refrain: “Why, I’m all right, honey! I’m
perfectly all right!”
But she was not. She was broken in spirit and her nerves were in shreds.
Though she sat in her place at table, Bret saw that she was only
pretending to eat. Dinner was the same story. And there was another bad
night and a haggard morning.
Bret sent for the doctor in spite of her. He found only a general
constitutional depression, or, as Bret put it, “Nothing is wrong except
everything.”
A week or two of the usual efforts with tonics brought no improvement.
Meanwhile the doctor had asked a good many questions. It struck him at
last that Sheila was suffering from the increasingly common malady of
too much nervous energy with no work to expend it on. She must get
herself interested in something. Perhaps a change would be good, a long
voyage. Bret urged a trip abroad. He would leave the factory and go with
her. Sheila did not want to travel, and she reminded him of the vital
importance of his business duties. He admitted the truth of this and
offered to let her go without him. She refused.
The doctor advised her to take up some active occupation. Bret suggested
water-colors, authorship, pottery, piano-playing, the harp, vocal
lessons—Sheila had an ear for music and sang very well, for one who did
not sing. Sheila waved the suggestions aside one by one.
Bret and the doctor hinted at charity work. It is necessary to confess
that the idea did not fascinate Sheila. She had the actor’s instinct and
plenteous sympathy, and had always been ready to give herself gratis to
those benefit performances with which theatrical people are so generous,
and whose charity should cover a multitude of their sins. But charity as
a job! Sheila did not feel that going about among the sick and poverty
stricken people would cheer her up especially.
The doctor as his last resort suggested a hobby of his own—he suggested
that Sheila take up the art of hammering brass. He had found that it
worked wonders with some of his patients.
Sheila, not knowing that it was the doctor’s favorite vice and that his
home was full of it, protested: “Hammered brass! But where would I hide
it when I finished it? No, thank you!”
She said the same to every other proposal. You can lead a woman to an
industry, but you cannot make her take it up. Still Bret agreed with the
doctor that idleness was Sheila’s chief ailment. There was an abundance
of things to do in the world, but Sheila did not want to do them. They
were not to her nature. Forcing them on her was like offering a banquet
to a fish. Sheila needed only to be put back in the water; then she
would provide her own banquet.
Bret gave up trying to find occupations for her. The summer did not
retrieve her strength as he hoped. She tired of beaches and mountains
and family visitations.
In Bret’s baffled anxiety he thought perhaps it was himself she was so
sick of; that love had decayed. But Sheila kept refuting this theory by
her tempests of devotion.
He knew better than the doctor did, better than he would admit to
himself, what was the matter with her. She wanted to go on the stage,
and he could not bear the thought of it. Neither could he bear the
thought of her melancholia.
If Sheila had stormed, complained, demanded her freedom he could have
put up a first-class battle. But he could not fight the poor, meek
sweetheart whose only defense was the terrible weapon of reticence, any
more than he could fight the birch-tree that he had brought from its
native soil.
The Sheila tree made a hard struggle for existence, but it grew shabbier
and sicker, while the Bret tree, flourishing and growing, offered her
every encouragement to prosper where she was. But she could not prosper.
One evening when Bret came home, nagged out with factory annoyances, he
saw old Gottlieb patting the trunk of the Sheila tree and shaking his
head over it. Bret went to him and asked if there were any hope.
There were tears in Gottlieb’s eyes. He scraped them off with his
wrist-bone and sighed:
“_Die arme schöne Birke._ Ain’t I told you she don’t like? She goink
die. She goink die.”
“Take her back to the sunlight, then,” said Bret.
But Gottlieb shook his head. “_Jetzt ist’s all zu spät._ She goink die.”
Bret hurried on to the house, carrying a load of guilt. Sheila was lying
on a chair on the piazza. She did not rise and run to him. Just to lift
her hand to his seemed to be all that she could achieve. When he dropped
to his knee and embraced her she seemed uncannily frail.
The servant announcing dinner found him there.
Bret said to Sheila, “Shall I carry you in?”
She declined the ride and the dinner.
Bret urged, “But you didn’t eat anything for lunch.”
“Didn’t I? Well, no matter.”
He stared at her, and Gottlieb’s words came back to him. The two Sheilas
would perish together. He had taken them both from the soil where they
had first taken root. Neither of them could adapt herself to the new
soil. It was too late to restore the birch to its old home. Was it too
late to save Sheila?
He would not trust the Blithevale fogies longer. She should have the
best physician on earth. If he were in New York, well and good; if he
lived in Europe, they would hunt him down. Craftily he said to Sheila:
“How would you like to take a little jaunt to New York?”
“No, thanks.”
“With me. I’ve got to go.”
“I’m sorry I can’t; but it will be a change for you.”
“I’ll be lonely without you.”
“Not in New York,” she laughed.
“In heaven,” he said, and the extravagance pleased her. He took courage
from her smile and pleaded: “Come along. You can buy a raft of new
clothes.”
She shook her head even at that!
“You could see a lot of new plays.”
This seemed to waken the first hint of appetite. She whispered, “All
right; I’ll go.”
CHAPTER LII
Paris fashions rarely get a good word from men or a bad word from women.
The satirists and the clergy and native dressmakers who do not import
have delivered tirades in all languages against them for centuries. They
are still giving delight and refreshment from the harems on the Bosporus
to the cottages on the Pacific and the rest of the way around the world.
The doctors have not seemed to recognize their medicinal value. They
recommend equally or even more expensive changes of occupation or of
climate which work a gradual improvement at best in the condition of a
failing woman.
But for instant tonic and restorative virtue there is nothing to match
the external application of a fresh Paris gown. For mild attacks a Paris
hat may work, and where only domestic wares are obtainable they
sometimes help, if fresh. For desperate cases both hat and gown are
indicated.
Mustard plasters, electric shocks, strychnia, and other remedies have
nothing like the same potency. The effect is instantaneous, and the
patient is not only brought back to life, but stimulated to exert
herself to live up to the gown. Husbands or guardians should be excluded
during the treatment, as the reaction of Paris gowns on male relatives
is apt to cause prostration. There need be no fear, however, of
overdosing women patients.
As a final test of mortality, the Paris gown has been strangely
overlooked. Holding mirrors before the lips, lifting the hands to the
light, and like methods sometimes fail of certainty. If, however, a
Paris gown be held in front of the woman in question, and the words
“Here is the very newest thing from Paris just smuggled in” be spoken in
a loud voice, and no sign of an effort to sit up is made, she is dead,
and no doubt of it.
Bret had decoyed Sheila to New York with an elaborate story of having to
go on business and hating to go alone. When they arrived she was so weak
that Bret wanted to send a red-cap for a wheeled chair to carry her from
the train to the taxicab. Her pride refused, but her strength barely
sufficed the distance.
Bret chose the Plaza for their hotel, since it required a ride up Fifth
Avenue. His choice was justified by the interest Sheila displayed in the
shop windows. She tried to see both sides of the street at once.
She was as excited as a child at Coney Island. She astounded Bret by
gifts of observation that would have appalled an Indian scout.
After one fleeting glance at a window full of gowns she could describe
each of them with a wealth of detail that dazzled him and a technical
terminology that left him in perfect ignorance.
At the hotel she displayed unsuspected vigor. She needed little
persuasion to spend the afternoon shopping. He was afraid that she might
faint if she went alone, and he insisted that his own appointments were
for the next day.
He followed her on a long scout through a tropical jungle of
dressmakers’ shops more brilliant than an orchid forest. Sheila clapped
her hands in ecstasy after ecstasy. She insisted on trying things on and
did not waver when she had to stand for long periods while the fitters
fluttered about her. She promenaded and preened like a bird-of-paradise
at the mating season. She was again the responsive, jocund Sheila of
their own seaside mating period.
She found one audacious gown and a more audacious hat that suited her
and each other without alterations. And since Bret urged it, she let him
buy them for her to wear that night at the theater. She made
appointments for further fittings next day.
On the way to the hotel she tried to be sober long enough to reproach
herself for her various expenditures, but Bret said:
“I’d mortgage the factory to the hilt for anything that would bring back
that look to your face—and keep it there.”
At the hotel they discussed what play they should see. The ticket agent
advised the newest success, “Twilight,” but Sheila knew that Floyd Eldon
was featured in the cast and she did not want to cause Bret any
discomfort. She voted for “Breakers Ahead” at the Odeon, though she knew
that Dulcie Ormerod was in it. Dulcie was now established on Broadway,
to the delight of the large rural-minded element that exists in every
city.
Bret bought a box for the sake of the new gown. It took Sheila an age to
get into it after dinner, but Bret told her it was time well spent. When
they reached the theater the first act was well along, and in the
otherwise deserted lobby Reben was talking to Starr Coleman concerning a
learned interview he was writing for Dulcie.
Both stared at the sumptuous Delilah floating in at the side of Bret
Winfield. They did not recognize either Bret or Sheila till Sheila was
almost past them. Then they leaped to attention and called her by name.
All four exchanged greetings with cordiality. Time had blurred the old
grudges. The admiration in the eyes of both Reben and Coleman reassured
Sheila more than all the compliments they lavished.
Reben ended a speech of Oriental floweriness with a gracious
implication: “You are coming in at the wrong door of the theater. This
is the entrance for the sheep. The artists—Ah, if we had you back there
now!”
Bret whitened and Sheila flushed. Then they moved on. Reben called after
her, laughingly:
“I’ve got that contract in the safe yet.”
It was a random shot, but the arrow struck. When the Winfields had gone
on Reben said to Coleman:
“She’s still beautiful—she is only now beautiful.”
Coleman, whose enthusiasms were exhausted on his typewriting machine,
agreed, cautiously: “Ye-es, but she’s aged a good deal.”
Reben frowned. “So you could say of a rosebud that has bloomed. She was
pretty then and clever and sweet, but only a young thing that didn’t
know half as much as she thought she did. Now she has loved and suffered
and she has had children and seen death maybe, and she has cried a lot
in the night. Now she is a woman. She has the tragic mask, and I bet she
could act—my God! I know she could act—if that fellow didn’t prevent.”
“Fellow” was not the expression he used. Reben abhorred Bret even more
than Bret him.
* * * * *
Once more Sheila was in the Odeon, but as one of the laity. When she
entered the dark auditorium her eyes rejoiced at the huge, dusty, gold
arch of the proscenium framing the deep brilliant canvas where the
figures moved and spoke. It was a finer sight to her than any sunset or
seascape or any of the works of mere nature, for they just happened;
these canvas rocks and cloth flowers were made to fit a story. She
preferred the human to the divine, and the theatrical to the real.
The play was good, the company worthy of the Odeon traditions. Even
Dulcie was not bad, for Reben had subtly cast her as herself without
telling her so. She played the phases of her personality that everybody
recognized but Dulcie. The play was a comedy written by a gentle
satirist with a passion for making a portrait of his own times. The
character Dulcie enacted was that of a pretty and well-meaning girl of a
telephonic past married into a group of snobs, through having fascinated
a rich man with her cheerful voice. Dulcie could play innocence and
amiability, for she was not intelligent enough to be anything but
innocent, even in her vices, and she usually meant well even when she
did her worst.
The author had selected Dulcie as his ideal for the rôle, but he had
been at a loss how to tell her to play herself without hurting her
feelings. She saved him by asking:
“Say, listen, should I play this part plebean or real refined?”
He hastened to answer, “Play it real refined.”
And she did. She was delicious to those who understood; and to those who
didn’t she was admirable. Thus everybody was pleased.
Sheila would have enjoyed the rôle as a _tour de force_, or what she
called a stunt, of character-playing. But she was glad that she was not
playing it. She felt immortal longings in her for something less trivial
than this quaint social photograph; something more earnest than any
light satire.
She did not want to play that play, but she wanted to play—she
smoldered with ambition. Her eyes reveled in the splendor of the
theater, the well-groomed informality of the audience so eager to be
swayed, in the boundless opportunity to feed the hungry people with the
art of life. She felt at home. This was her native land. She breathed it
all in with an almost voluptuous sense of well-being.
Bret, eying her instead of the stage, caught that contentment in her
deep breathing, the alertness of her very nostrils relishing the
atmosphere, the vivacity of her eager eyes. And his heart told him what
her heart told her, that this was where she belonged.
He leaned close to her and whispered, “Don’t you wish you were up
there?”
She heard the little clang of jealousy in his mournful tone, and for his
sake she answered, “Not in the least.”
He knew that she lied, and why. He loved her for her love of him, but he
felt lonely.
Dulcie did not send for Sheila to come back after the play. Broadway
stars are busy people, with many suppliants for their time. Dulcie had
no time for ancient history.
Sheila was glad to be spared, but did not misunderstand the reason. As
she walked out with the audience she did not feel the aristocracy of her
wealth and her leisure. She wanted to be back there in her
dressing-room, smearing her features into a mess with cold-cream and
recovering her every-day face from her workaday mask.
Bret and she supped in the grand manner, and Sheila had plenty of stares
for her beauty. But she could see that nobody knew her. Nobody
whispered: “That’s Sheila Kemble. Look! Did you see her in her last
play?” It was not a mere hunger for notoriety that made her regret
anonymity; it was the artist’s legitimate need of recognition for his
work.
She went back to the hotel and took off her fine plumage. It had lost
most of its warmth for her. She had not earned it with her own success.
It was the gift of a man who loved her body and soul, but hated her
mind.
Sheila was very woman, and one Paris gown and the prospect of more had
lifted her from the depths to the heights. But she was an ambitious
woman, and clothes alone were not enough to sustain her. In her
situation they were but gilding on her shackles. The more gorgeously she
was robed the more restless she was. She was in the tragi-comic plight
of the man in the doleful song, “All dressed up and no place to go!”
Fatigue enveloped her, but it was the fag of idleness that has seen
another day go by empty, and views ahead an endless series of empty days
like a freight-train.
She tried to comfort Bret’s anxiety with boasts of how well she was, but
she fell back on the pitiful refrain, “I’m all right.” If she had been
all right she would not have said so; she would not have had to say so.
Both lay awake and both pretended to be asleep. In the two small heads
lying as motionless on the pillows as melons their brains were busy as
ant-hills after a storm. Eventually both fell into that mysterious state
called sleep, yet neither brain ceased its civil war.
Bret was wakened from a bitter dream of a broken home by Sheila’s
stifled cry. He spoke to her and she mumbled in her nightmare. He
listened keenly and made out the words:
“Bret, Bret, don’t leave me. I’ll die if I don’t act. I love you, I love
my children. I’ll take them with me. I’ll come home to you. Don’t hate
me. I love you.”
Her voice sank into incoherence and then into silence, but he could tell
by the twitching of her body and the clutching of her fingers that she
was still battling against his prejudice.
He wrapped her in his arms and she woke a little, but only enough to
murmur a word of love; then she sank back into sleep like a drowning
woman who has slipped from her rescuer’s grasp.
He fell asleep again, too, but the daybreak wakened him. He opened his
eyes and saw Sheila standing at the window and gazing at her beloved
city, her Canaan which she could see but not possess.
She shook her head despairingly and it reminded him of the old
gardener’s farewell to the birch-tree that must die.
She looked so eery there in the mystic dawn; her gown was so fleecy and
her body so frail that she seemed almost translucent, already more
spirit than flesh. She seemed like the ghost, the soul of herself
departed from the flesh and about to take flight.
Bret thought of her as dead. It came to him suddenly with terrifying
clarity that she was very near to death; that she could not live long in
the prison of his love.
He was the typical American husband who hates tyranny so much that he
would rather yield to his wife’s tyranny than subject her to his own. He
took no pride in the thought of sacrificing any one on the altar of his
self, and least of all did he want Sheila’s bleeding heart laid out
there.
The morning seemed to have solved the perplexities of the night; chill
and gray, it gave the chill, gray counsel: “She will die if you do not
return her where you found her.” He vowed the high resolve that Sheila
should be replaced upon the stage.
The pain of this decision was so sharp that when she crept back to bed
he did not dare to announce it. He was afraid to speak, so he let her
think him asleep.
That morning Sheila was ill again, old again, and jaded with discontent.
He reminded her of her appointments with the dressmakers, but she said
that she would put them off—or, better yet, she would cancel the
orders.
He had their breakfast brought to the room, and he chose the most
tempting luxuries he could find on the bill of fare. Nothing interested
her. He suggested a drive in the Park. She was too tired to get up.
Suddenly he looked at his watch, snapped it shut, rose, said that he was
late for his conference. She asked him what time it was, and he did not
know till he looked at his watch again. He kissed her and left her,
saying that he would lunch down-town.
CHAPTER LIII
Though there was a telephone in their rooms, Bret went down to the
public booths. He remembered Eugene Vickery’s tirade about the crime of
Sheila’s idleness. He telephoned to Vickery’s apartments and told
Vickery that he must see him at once. Vickery answered:
“Sorry I can’t ask you up or come to where you are this morning, but the
fact is I’m at the last revision of my new play and I can’t leave it
while it’s on the fire. Meet me at the Vagabonds Club and we’ll have
lunch, eh?—say, at half past twelve.”
Bret reached the club a little before the hour. Vickery had not come.
The hall captain ushered Bret into the waiting-room. He sat there
feeling a hopeless outsider. “The Vagabonds” was made up chiefly of
actors. From where he sat he could see them coming and going. He studied
them as one looking down into a pool to see how curious fish behave or
misbehave. They hailed each other with a simple cordiality that amazed
him. The spirit was rather that of a fraternity chapter-house than of a
city club, where every man’s chair is his castle. Everything was without
pose; nearly everybody called nearly everybody by his first name. There
were evidences of prosperity among them. Through the window he could see
actors, whose faces were familiar even to him, roll up in their own
automobiles.
At one o’clock Vickery had not come, and a friend of Bret’s, named
Crashaw, who had grown wealthy in the steel business, caught sight of
Bret and took him under his wing, registered him in the guest-book and
led him to the cocktail desk. Then Crashaw urged him to wait for the
uncertain Vickery no longer, but to lunch with him. Bret declined, but
sat with him while he ate.
Bret, still looking for proof that actors were not like other people,
asked Crashaw what the devil he was doing in that galley.
“It’s my pet club,” said Crashaw, “and I belong to a dozen of the best.
It’s the most prosperous and the most densely populated club in town,
and the only one where a man can always find somebody in a cheerful
humor at any hour of the day or night, and I like it best because it’s
the only club where people aren’t always acting.”
“What!” Bret exclaimed.
“I mean it,” said Crashaw. “In the other clubs the millionaire is always
playing rich, the society man always at his lah-de-dah, the engineer or
the painter or the athlete is always posing. But these fellows know all
about acting and they don’t permit it here. So that forces them to be
natural. It’s the warmest-hearted, gayest-hearted, most human, clubbiest
club in town, and you ought to belong.”
Bret gasped at the thought and rather suspected Crashaw than absolved
the club.
Bret was introduced to various members, and even his suspicious mind
could not tell which were actors and which business men, for there are
as many types of actor as there are types of mankind, and as many grades
of prosperity, industry, and virtue.
Some of the clubmen joined Bret’s group, and he was finally persuaded to
give Vickery up for lost and eat his luncheon with an eminent tragedian
who told uproarious stories, and the very buffoon who had conquered him
at the benefit in the Metropolitan Opera House. The buffoon had an
attack of the blues, but it yielded to the hilarity of the tragedian,
and he departed recharged with electricity for his matinée, where he
would coerce another mob into a state of rapture.
It suddenly came over Bret that this club of actors was as benevolent an
institution in its own way as any monastery. Even the triumphs of
players, which they were not encouraged to recount in this sanctuary,
were triumphs of humanity. When an actor boasts how he “killed ’em in
Waco” it does not mean that he shot anybody, took anybody’s money away,
or robbed any one of his pride or health; it means that he made a lot of
people laugh or thrilled them or persuaded them to salubrious tears. It
is the conceit of a benefactor bragging of his philanthropies. Surely as
amiable an egotism as could be!
Bret was now in the frame of mind that Sheila was born in. He felt that
the stage did a noble work and therefore conferred a nobility upon its
people.
All this he was mulling over in the back of his head while he was
listening to anecdotes that brought the tears of laughter to his eyes.
He needed the laughter; it washed his bitter heart clean as a sheep’s.
Most of the stories were strictly men’s stories, but those abound
wherever men gather together. The difference was that these were better
told.
Gradually the clatter decreased; the crowd thinned out. It was Wednesday
and many of the actors had matinées; the business men went back to their
offices. Still no Vickery.
By and by only a few members were left in the grill-room.
Bret had laughed himself solemn; now he was about to be deserted.
Vickery had failed him, and he must return to that doleful, heartbroken
Sheila with no word of help for her.
He had come forth to seek a way to compel her to return to the stage as
a refuge from the creeping paralysis that was extinguishing her life. He
hated the cure, but preferred it to Sheila’s destruction. Now he was
persuaded that the cure was honorable, but beyond his reach. He had
heard many stories of the hard times upon the stage, and of the unusual
army of idle actors and actresses, and he was afraid that there would be
no place for Sheila even though he was himself ready to release her.
Crashaw rose at length and said: “Sorry, old man, but I’ve got to run.
Before I go, though, I’d like to show you the club. You can choose your
own spot and wait for Vickery.”
He led Bret from place to place, pointing out the portraits of famous
actors and authors, the landscapes contributed by artist members, the
trophies of war presented by members from the army and navy, the cups
put up for fearless combatants about the pool-tables. He gave him a
glimpse of the theater, where, as in a laboratory, experiments in drama
and farce and musical comedy were made under ideal conditions before an
expert audience.
Last he took him to the library. It was deserted save by somebody in a
great chair which hid all but his feet and the hand that held a big
volume of old plays. Crashaw went forward to see who it was. He
exclaimed:
“What are you doing here, you loafer? Haven’t you a matinée to-day?”
A voice that sounded familiar to Bret answered, “Ours is Thursday.”
“Fine. Then you can take care of a friend of mine who’s waiting for
Vickery.”
The voice answered as the man rose: “Certainly. Any friend of
Vickery’s—” Crashaw said:
“Mr. Winfield, you ought to know Mr. Floyd Eldon. Famous
weighing-machine, shake hands with famous talking-machine.”
The two men shook hands because Crashaw asked them to. He left them with
a hasty “So long!” and hurried to the elevator.
* * * * *
It is a curious contact, the hand-clasp of two hostile men. It has
something of the ritual value of the grip that precedes a prize-fight to
the finish.
Once Bret’s and Eldon’s hands were joined, it was not easy to sever
them. There was a kind of insult in being the first to relinquish the
pressure. They looked at each other stupidly, like two school-boys who
have quarreled. Neither could say a harsh word or feel a kind one. They
had either to fight or to laugh.
Eldon was more used than Bret to speaking quickly in an emergency. He
ended what he would have called a “stage wait” by lifting his left hand
to his jaw, rubbing it, and smiling.
“It’s some time since we met.”
“Nearly five years, I guess,” said Bret, and returned the compliment by
rubbing his own jaw.
“We meet every few years,” said Eldon. “I believe it’s my turn to slug
now.”
“It is,” said Bret. “Go on. I’ve found that I didn’t owe you that last
one. I misunderstood. I apologize.” Bret said this not because of any
feeling of cordiality, but because he believed it especially important
not to be dishonest to an enemy.
Eldon, with equal punctilio and no more affection, answered: “I imagine
the offense was outlawed years ago. I never knew what the cause of your
anger was, but I’m glad if you know it wasn’t true.”
Silence fell upon them. Bret was wondering whether he ought to describe
the injustice he had done Eldon. Eldon was debating whether it would be
more conspicuous to ask about Sheila or to avoid asking about her.
Finally he took a chance:
“And how is Mrs. Winfield?”
The question cleared the air magically. Bret said, “Oh, she’s well,
thank you, very well—that is, no, she’s not well at all.”
Bret had attempted a concealment of his cross, but the truth leapt out
of him. Eldon was politely solicitous:
“Oh, I am sorry! Very sorry! She’s not seriously ill, I hope.”
“She’s worse than ill. I’m worried to death!”
Eldon’s alarm was genuine. “What a pity! Have you been to see a
specialist? What seems to be the trouble?”
“She’s pining away. She—I think I made a mistake in taking her off the
stage. I think she ought to be at work again.”
Eldon was as astounded at hearing this from Winfield as Bret at hearing
himself say it. But Bret was in a panic of fear for Sheila’s very life
and he had to tell some one. Once he had betrayed himself so far, he was
driven on:
“She won’t admit it. She’s trying to fight off the longing. But the
battle is wearing her out. You see, we have two children. We have no
quarrel with each other. We’re happy—ideally happy together. She feels
that she ought to be contented. She insists that she is. But—well, she
isn’t, that’s all. I’ve tried everything, but I believe that the only
hope of saving her is to get her back where she belongs. Idleness is
killing her.”
Eldon hid in his heart any feeling that might have surged up of
disprized love finding itself vindicated. His thoughts were solemn and
he spoke with earnestness:
“I believe you are right. You must know. I can quite understand. People
laugh a good deal at actresses who come back after leaving the stage.
They think it is a kind of craze for excitement. But it is better than
that. The stage is still the only place where a woman’s individuality is
recognized and where she can be really herself.
“Sheila—er—Miss Kemble—pardon me—Mrs. Winfield has the theater in
her blood, of course. Almost all the Kemble women have been actresses,
and good ones. Your wife was a charming woman to act with. We fought
each other—for points. I feel very grateful to her, for she gave me my
first encouragement. She and her aunt, Mrs. Vining, taught me my first
lessons. I grew very fond of them both and very grateful.
“There’s a natural enmity between a leading woman and a leading man.
They love each other as two rival prize-fighters do. The better boxer
each of them is, the better the fight. Sheila—your wife, always gave me
a fight—on the stage—and after, sometimes, off the stage. She was a
great actress—a born aristocrat of the theater.”
Bret took fright at the word “was.” It tolled like a passing-bell. He
had made up his mind that Sheila should not be destroyed on his account.
He had determined, after the morning’s relapse, that he would restore
his stolen sweetheart to her rightful owners as soon as he could. He
would keep as close to her as might be. His business would permit him to
make occasional journeys to Sheila. His mother would take care of the
children and be enchanted with the privilege. Sometimes they could
travel a little with Sheila.
His great-grandmother had crossed the plains in a prairie-schooner with
five children, and borne a sixth on the way. That was considered
praiseworthy in all enthusiasm. Wherein was it any worse for an actress
to take her children with her?
There was no hiding from slander in any case, and he must endure the
contempt of those who did not understand. The one unendurable thing was
the ruination of his beloved’s happiness, of her very life, even.
He had sought out Vickery as an old friend who knew the theater world.
But Vickery had failed him. He dreaded to go back to Sheila without
definite news.
Of all men he most hated to ask Eldon’s help, but Eldon was the sole
rescuer on the horizon. He threw off his pride and appealed to the man
he had fought with.
“Mr. Eldon, you say you think my wife is a great artist. Will you help
me to—to set her to work? I’m afraid for her, Mr. Eldon. I’m afraid
that she is going to die. Will you help me?”
“Me? Will I help?” Eldon stammered. “What can I do? I’m not a manager, I
have no company, no theater, hardly any influence.”
Bret’s courage went to pieces. He was a stranger in a strange land. “I
don’t know any manager—except Reben, and he hates me. I don’t know
anything at all about the stage. I only know that my wife wants her
career, and I’m going to get it for her if I have to build a theater
myself. But that takes time. I thought perhaps you would know some way
better than that.”
Eldon was stirred by Bret’s resolution. He said: “There must be a way.
I’ll do anything I can—everything I can, for the sake of the stage—and
for the sake of an old colleague—and for the sake of—of a man as big
as you, Mr. Winfield.”
And now their hands shot out to each other without compunction or
restraint and wrestled, as it were, in a tug of peace.
CHAPTER LIV
It was thus that Eugene Vickery found them. His gasp of astonishment
ended in a fit of coughing as he came forward, trying to express his
amazement and his delight.
Bret seized his right hand, Eldon his left. Bret was horrified at the
ghostly visage of his friend. Already it had a post-mortem look.
Vickery saw the shock in Bret’s eyes. He dropped into a seat.
“Don’t tell me how bad I look. I know it. But I don’t care. I’ve
finished my play! Incidentally my play has finished me. But what does
that matter? I put into it all there was of me. That’s what I’m here
for. That’s why there’s nothing much left. But I’m glad. I’ve done all I
can. _J’ai fait mon possible._ It’s glorious to do that. And it’s a good
play. It’s a great play—though I do say it that shouldn’t. Floyd, I’ve
got it!” He turned back to Bret. “Poor Floyd here has heard me read it a
dozen times, and he’s suggested a thousand changes. I was in the vein
this morning. I worked all day yesterday, and all night till sunrise.
Then I was up at seven. When you called me I was writing like a madman.
And when the lunch hour came I was going so fast I didn’t dare stop then
even to telephone. I apologize.”
“Please don’t,” said Bret.
“I see you’ve had your luncheon. Will you have another with me? I’m
famished.”
He rang for a waiter and ordered a substantial meal and then returned to
Bret.
“How’s Sheila?”
“She—she’s not well.”
“What a shame! She ought to be at work and I wish to the Lord she were.
I may as well tell you, Bret, that I took the liberty of imagining
Sheila as the principal woman of my play. And now that it’s finished, I
can’t think of anybody who fills the bill except your wife. There are
thousands of actresses starving to death, but none of them suits my
character. None of them could play it but your Sheila.”
“Then for God’s sake let her play it!” Bret groaned. Vickery, astonished
beyond surprise, mumbled, “What did you say?”
Bret repeated his prayer, explained the situation to the incredulous
Vickery, apologized for himself and his plight. Vickery’s joy came
slowly with belief. The red glow that spotted his cheeks spread all over
his face like a creeping fire.
When he understood, he murmured: “Bret, you’re a better man than I
thought you were. Whether or not you’ve saved Sheila’s life, you’ve
certainly saved mine.” A torment of coughing broke down his boast, and
he amended, “Artistically, I mean. You’ve saved my play, and that’s all
that counts. The one sorrow of mine was that when I had finished it
there was no one to give it life. But what if Sheila doesn’t like it?
What if she refuses!”
His woe was so profound that Bret reached across the table and squeezed
his arm—it was hardly more than a bone. Bret said, “I’ll make her like
it!”
“She’s sure to,” Eldon said.
Vickery broke in: “You ought to hear him read it. Sometimes he reads a
doubtful scene to me. Then it sounds greater to me than I ever dreamed.
A manuscript is like an electric-light bulb, all glass and brass and
little loops of thread that don’t mean anything. When the right actor
reads it it fills with light like a bowl of fire and shines into dark
places.” His mood was so grave that it influenced his language.
Bret said, “Let me take the manuscript to Sheila.”
Vickery frowned. “It’s not in shape for her eyes. It ought to be read to
her.”
“Come read it to her, then.”
“My voice is gone and I cough all the time, but if—”
He paused. He did not dare suggest that Eldon read it for him. Eldon did
not dare to volunteer. Bret did not dare to ask him. But at length,
after a silence of crucial distress, he overcame himself and said, with
difficulty:
“Perhaps Mr. Eldon would be—would be willing to read it.”
“I should be very glad to,” said Eldon in a low tone.
It was strange how solemn and tremulous they were all three over so
small a matter. A razor edge is a small thing, but a most uncomfortable
place to balance.
Vickery broke out with a revulsion to hope. “Great!” he exclaimed.
“When?”
“This afternoon would please me best,” said Bret, rather sickly, now
that the business had gone so far. “If Mr. Eldon—”
“I am free till seven,” said Eldon.
“I’ll go back and ask Mrs. Winfield, if she hasn’t gone out,” said Bret,
rising.
“I’ll go fasten the manuscript together,” said Vickery, rising.
“I’ll go along and glance over the new scenes,” said Eldon, rising.
“Telephone me at my place,” said Vickery, “and let me know one way or
the other as soon as you can. The suspense is killing.”
They walked out on the steps of the club, and Bret hailed a passing
taxicab. As he turned round he saw Eldon lifting Vickery into a car that
was evidently his own, for he took the wheel.
The nearer he got to the hotel the more Bret repented of his rash
venture, the uglier it looked from various angles. He hoped that Sheila
would be at the dressmaker’s, contenting herself with rhapsodies in
silk.
But she was sitting at the window. She was dressed, but her eyes were
dull as she turned to greet him.
“How are you, honey?” he asked.
“I’m all right,” she sighed. The old phrase!
Then he knew he had crossed the Rubicon and must go forward. “Why didn’t
you go to your fitting?”
“I tried to, but I was too weak. I don’t need any new clothes. How was
your business talk?”
“I can’t tell yet,” he said, and, after a battle with his stage-fright,
broached the most serious business of his life. He had a right to be a
bad actor and he read wretchedly the lines he improvised on his own
scenario. “By the way, I stumbled across Eugene Vickery this afternoon.”
“Oh, did you? How is he?”
“Pretty sick. He’s just finished a new play.”
“Oh, has he?”
“He says it’s the work of his life.”
“Poor boy!”
“I don’t think he’ll write another.”
“Great heavens! Is he so bad?”
“Terribly weak. I told him you were in town and he was anxious to see
you.”
“Why didn’t you invite him up?”
“I did. He said he’d like to come this afternoon if you were willing.”
“By all means. Better call him up at once.”
Bret went to the telephone, but turned to say, trying to be casual, “He
asked if you’d be interested in hearing his play.”
“Indeed I would!” There was distinct animation in this. “Ask him to
bring it along.”
Bret cleared his throat guiltily. “I told him I was sure you’d be dying
to hear it, and he said he wondered if you would mind if he—er—brought
along a friend to read it. Vick’s voice is so weak, you know.”
“I’m not in the mood for strangers, but if Vickery wants it, why—of
course. Did he say who it was?”
“Floyd Eldon.”
That name had a way of dropping into the air like a meteor. When two
lovers have fought over an outsider’s name that name always recurs with
all its battle clamor. It is as hard to mention idly as “Gettysburg” or
“Waterloo.”
Sheila knew what Bret had said of Eldon, what he had thought of him and
done to him. She was amazed, and it is hard not to look guilty when old
accusations of guilt are remembered. Bret saw the sudden tensity in her
hands where they held the arms of her chair. He felt a miserable return
of the old nausea, the incurable regret of love that it can never count
on complete possession of its love, past, present, and future. But he
was committed now to the conviction that he could not keep Sheila behind
bars, and had no right to try. He had given her back to herself and the
world, as one uncages a bird, hoping that it will hover about the house
and return, but never sure what will draw it, or whither, once it has
climbed into the sky.
To escape the ordeal of watching Sheila, and the ordeal of being
questioned, he called up Vickery’s’ number and told him to come over at
once, and added, “Both of you.”
Then he hung up the receiver and went forward to face Sheila’s eyes. He
told her all that had happened except his appeal to Eldon and their
conspiracy to get her back on the stage.
She was agitated immensely, and risked his further suspicion by setting
to work to primp and to change her gown to one that her nature found
more appropriate to such an audition.
Eldon and Vickery arrived while she was in the dressing-room, and Bret
whispered to them:
“I haven’t told her that the play is for her. Don’t let her know.”
This threw Eldon and Vickery into confusion, and they greeted Sheila
with helpless insincerity.
She saw how feeble Vickery was and how well Eldon was, and both saw that
she was not the Sheila that had left the stage. Eldon felt a resentment
against Winfield for what time and discontent had wrought to Sheila, but
he knew what the theater can do for impaired beauty with make-up and
artifice of lights.
After a certain amount of small talk and fuss about chairs the reading
began. To Bret it was like a death-warrant; to Vickery and Eldon it was
a writ of habeas corpus; to Sheila it was like the single copy of a
great romance that she could never own.
* * * * *
Eldon read without action or gesticulation and with almost no attempt to
indicate dialect or characterization. But he gave hint enough of each to
set the hearers’ imagination astir and not enough to hamper it.
Outside in the far-below streets was a muffled hubbub of motors and
street-cars. And within there was only the heavy elegance of hotel
furniture. But the listeners felt themselves peering into the lives of
living people in a conflict of interests.
The light in the room grew dimmer and dimmer as Eldon read, till the air
was thick with the deep crimson of sunset straining across the roofs. It
served as the very rose-light of daybreak in which the play ended,
calling the husband and wife to their separate tasks in the new manhood
and the new womanhood, outside the new home to which they should return
in the evening, to the peace they had earned with toil.
Bret hated the play because he loved it, because he felt that it had a
right to be and it needed his wife to give it being; because it seemed
to command him to sacrifice his old-fashioned home for the sake of the
ever-demanding world.
Sheila made no comment at all during the reading. She might have been an
allegory of attention.
Even when Eldon closed the manuscript and the play with the quiet word
“Curtain” Sheila did not speak. The three men watched her for a long
hushed moment, and then they saw two great tears roll from the clenched
eyes.
She murmured, feebly: “Who is the lucky woman that is to—to create it?”
“You!” said Bret.
Woman-like, Sheila’s first emotion at the vision of her husband urging
her to go back on the stage was one of pain and terror. She stared at
Bret through the tears evoked by Vickery’s art, and she gasped: “Don’t
you love me any more? Are you tired of me?”
“Oh, my God!” said Bret.
But when he collapsed Vickery took the floor and harangued her till she
yielded, to be rid of him and of Eldon, that she might question her
husband.
CHAPTER LV
When they were alone Bret explained his decision and the heartbreaking
time he had had arriving at it. He would not debate it again. He
permitted Sheila the consolation of feeling herself an outcast, and she
reveled in misery. But the first rehearsal was like a bugle-call to a
cavalry horse hitched to a milk-wagon.
She entered the Odeon Theater again by the back door and bowed to the
same old man, who smiled her in with bleary welcome. And Pennock was at
her post looking as untheatrical as ever. She embraced Sheila and said,
“It’s good to see you workin’ again.”
The next person she met was Mrs. Vining, looking as time-proof as ever.
“What on earth are you doing here?” Sheila cried.
And Mrs. Vining sighed. “Oh, there’s an old catty mother-in-law in the
play, and Reben dragged me out of the Old Ladies’ Home to play it.”
Sheila’s presence at the Odeon was due to the fact that when Eldon asked
Reben to release him so that he might play in “Clipped Wings,” with
Sheila as star and Bret Winfield as the angel, Reben declined with
violence.
When Eldon told him of the play he demanded the privilege of producing
it. He ridiculed Bret as a theatrical manager and easily persuaded him
to retire to his weighing-machines. Reben dug out the yellowed contract
with Sheila, had it freshly typed, and sent it to her, and she signed it
with all the woman’s terror at putting her signature to a mortgage.
One matinée day, as Sheila left the stage door, she met Dulcie coming in
to make ready for the afternoon’s performance.
Dulcie clutched her with overacted enthusiasm and said: “Oh, my dear,
it’s so nice that you’re coming back on the stage, after all these
years. Too bad you can’t have your old theater, isn’t it? We’re doomed
to stay here forever, it seems. But—oh, my dear!—you mustn’t work so
hard. You look all worn out. Are you ill?”
Sheila retreated in as good order as possible, breathing resolutions to
oust Dulcie from the star dressing-room and quench her name in the
electric lights. That vow sustained her through many a weak hour.
But at times she was not sure of even that success. At times she was
sure of failure and the odious humiliation of returning to Blithevale
like a prodigal wife fed on husks of criticism.
Bret was called back to his factory by his business and by his request.
He did not want to impede Sheila in any way. He had gone through
rehearsals and try-outs with her once, and, as he said, once was plenty.
Sheila wept at his desertion and called herself names. She wept for her
children and called herself worse names. She wept on Mrs. Vining at
various opportunities when she was not rehearsing.
At length the old lady’s patience gave out and she stormed, “I warned
you not to marry.”
“You warned me not to marry in the profession, and I didn’t.”
“Well,” sniffed Mrs. Vining, “I supposed you had sense enough of your
own not to marry outside of it.”
“But—”
“And now that you did, take your medicine. You’re crying because you
want to be with your man and your children. But when you had them you
cried just the same. All the women I know on the stage and off, married
and single, childless or not, are always crying about something. Good
Lord! it’s time women learned to get along without tears. Men used to
cry and faint, and they outgrew it. Women don’t faint any more. Why
can’t they quit crying? The whole kit and caboodle of you make me sick.”
“Thank you!” said Sheila, and walked away. But she was mad enough to
rehearse her big scene more vigorously than ever. Without a slip of
memory she delivered her long tirade so fiercely that the company and
Vickery and Batterson broke into applause. From the auditorium Reben
shouted, “Bully!”
As Sheila walked aside, Mrs. Vining threw her arms around her and called
her an angel and proved that even she had not lost the gift of tears.
* * * * *
Bret was not without his own torments. The village people drove him
frantic with their questions and their rapturous horror and the gossip
they bandied about.
His mother, who hurried to the “rescue” of his home and his “abandoned
children,” strengthened him more by her bitterness against Sheila than
she could have done by any praise of her. A man always discounts a
woman’s criticism of another woman. It always outrages his male sense of
fairness and good sportsmanship.
Besides, Bret was driven by every reason of loyalty to defend his wife.
He told his mother and his neighbors that he would see her oftener than
a soldier or a sailor sees his wife. He would keep close to her. His
business would permit him to make occasional journeys to her. Their
summers would be honeymoons together.
He made good use of the _argumentum ad feminam_ by telling his mother
how well the children would profit by their grandmother’s wisdom, and he
promised them the fascinating privilege of traveling with their mother
at times.
But it was not easy for Bret. He knew that many people would laugh at
him for a milksop; others would despise him for a complacent assistant
in his wife’s dishonor. At times the dread of this gossip drove him
almost mad.
He had his dark hours of jealous distrust, too, and the very thought of
Eldon filled him with dread. Eldon was gifted and handsome, and
congenial to Sheila, and a fellow-artist as well. And his other self,
the Iago self that every Othello has, whispered that hateful word
“propinquity” in his ear with vicious insinuation.
He gnashed his teeth against himself and groaned, “You fool, you’ve
thrown her into Eldon’s arms.”
His better self answered: “No, you have given her to the arms of the
world. Propinquity breeds hatred and jealousy and boredom and emulation
as often as it breeds love.”
He would have felt reassured if he had seen Sheila fighting Eldon for
points, for positions, and for lines.
There was one line in Eldon’s part that Sheila called the most beautiful
line in the play, a line about the husband’s dead mother. Sheila first
admired then coveted the line.
At last she openly asked for it. Eldon was furious and Vickery was
aghast.
“But, my dear Sheila,” he explained, “you couldn’t use that line. Your
mother is present in the cast.”
“Couldn’t we kill her off?” said Sheila.
“I like that!” cried Mrs. Vining, who was playing the part.
Sheila gave up the line, but with reluctance. But it was some time
before Eldon and Vickery regained their illusions concerning her.
And yet it was something more than selfish greed that made her grasp at
everything for the betterment of her rôle. It was like a portrait she
was painting and she wished for it every enhancement. An architect who
plans a cathedral is not blamed for wishing to raze whole acres so that
his building may command the scene. The actor’s often berated avarice is
no more ignoble, really. And the actor who is indifferent or
over-generous is like the careless artist in other fields. He builds
neither himself nor his work.
Mrs. Vining fought half a day against the loss of a line that emphasized
the meanness of her character. She wanted to be hated. She played
hateful rôles with such exquisite art that audiences loved her while
they loathed her.
So Sheila spared nothing and nobody to make the part she played the
greatest part was ever played. Least of all she spared herself, her
strength, her mind, her time. But she battened on work, she was a
glutton for punishment. She had her stage-manager begging for a rest,
and that is rare achievement.
And all the while she grew stronger, haler, heartier; she grew so
beautiful from needing to be beautiful that even Dulcie Ormerod, passing
her once more at the mail-box, gasped:
“My Gawd! but that hat is becoming. Tell me quick what’s the address of
your milliner.”
That was approbation indeed from Dulcie.
At length the dreadful dress-rehearsal was reached. The usual unheard-of
mishaps happened. Everybody was hopeless. The actors parroted the old
saying that “a bad dress-rehearsal means a good first performance,”
knowing that it proves true about half the time.
The piece was tried first in Plainfield. The local audience was not
demonstrative. Eldon tried to comfort himself by saying that the play
was too big, too stunning, for them to understand.
The next night they played in Red Bank and were stunned with applause in
the first scene and increasing enthusiasm throughout. But that proved
nothing, and Jaffer, who was with the company, remembered a famous
failure that had been a triumph in Red Bank and a disaster on Broadway.
The fear of that merciless Broadway gauntlet settled over the company.
Success meant everything to every member. It meant the paying of bills,
a warm home for the winter, a step upward for the future. Even one of
the stage-hands had a romance that required a New York run.
CHAPTER LVI
Some of the provincial cities said the play was disgustingly immoral and
the police ought to stop it. The accusation hurt. Was it immoral? A
certain clergy man said the play was a sermon; a certain critic said it
was vile. Which was true? It is not pleasant to be called vile even
though the epithet has been hurled at many of the noblest.
The bitter discussion it aroused wounded Vickery mortally. Eldon told
him that nothing was better for success than to arouse discussion, and
that the final proof of great art is its ability to make a lot of people
ferociously angry.
But Vickery would not be cheered up. He said that the bumps were killing
him.
“You see, I’m so lean and weak, I’ve got no shock-absorbers. I can’t do
anything but cough like a damned he-Camille.”
Sheila and Batterson and even Reben begged him to leave the company and
go back to town. But he was in a frenzy for perfection. He was
relentless with his own lines and scenes. He denounced them rabidly. He
tore out pages of manuscript from the prompt-copy, and sat at the table
writing new scenes while the rehearsals went on. Between the acts he
wrote new lines. He wrote in a terrible hurry. He was in a terrible
hurry.
But he was in a frenzy for perfection. He was relentless with the
actors. Every word, every silence, was important to him as a link in his
chain of gold.
Batterson and Reben and Sheila questioned many of his words, phrases,
and even whole scenes. Everybody had a more or less respectful
criticism, a more or less brilliant contribution, but Vickery had had
enough of this piecemeal microscopy.
“A play succeeds or falls by its big idea,” he said, “by its big sweep,
and nothing else matters. The greatest play in the world is ‘Hamlet,’
and it’s so full of faults that a whole library has been written about
it. But you can’t kill its big points. What difference does it make how
the shore-line runs if your ocean is an ocean? Let me alone, I tell you.
Do my play the best you can, then we’ll soon know if the public wants
it.
“You ruined one play for me, Mr. Reben, but you can’t monkey with this
one. I thought of all the objections you’ve made and a hundred others
when I was writing it. I liked it this way then, and I knew as much then
as I do now—only I was red-hot at the time, and I’m not going to fool
with it in cold blood.”
There were arguments and instances enough against him, and Reben and
Batterson showered him with stories of plays that had been saved from
disaster by collaboration. He answered with stories of plays that had
succeeded without it and plays that had crashed in spite of it.
“It’s all a gamble,” he cried. “Let’s throw our coin on one number and
either make or lose. Anyway, my contract says you can’t alter a line
without my consent, and you’ll never get that. It’s my last play, and
it’s my own play, and they’ve got to take it or leave it just as I write
it.”
They yielded more in deference to his feelings than to his art.
At last the company turned to charge down upon New York. They arrived at
three o’clock on a Sunday morning.
As Sheila and Mrs. Vining rode through the streets to their hotel they
saw on all sides the work of the advertising men. On bill-boards were
big “stands” with Sheila’s name in letters as big as herself. On smaller
boards her full-length portrait smiled at her from “three sheets.” In
the windows were “half-sheets.” Even the garbage-cans proclaimed her
name.
Fame was a terrifying thing.
Sunday was given over to a prolonged dress-rehearsal beginning at noon
and lasting till four the next morning. At about three o’clock in the
afternoon Eugene Vickery in the midst of a wrangle over a scene was
overcome with his illness.
A doctor who was brought in haste picked him up and carried him to a
taxicab and sped with him to a hospital. The troupe was staggered like a
line of infantry in which the first shell drops. Then it closed together
and went on.
The next day Sheila visited Eugene and never found a rôle so hard to
play as the character of Hope at the bedside of Despair.
The nurse would not let her stay long and forbade Vickery to talk, but
he managed to whisper, brokenly:
“Don’t worry about me. Don’t think about me. Work for yourself and the
play. That will be working for me. If it succeeds, it’s a kind of a
little immortality for me; if it fails—well, don’t worry, I won’t
mind—then. Go and rest now. I’ve no strength to give you, or I’d make
you as strong as a giant—you poor, brave, beautiful little woman! God
bless you! Good luck!”
CHAPTER LVII
Eight o’clock and a section of Broadway is a throng of throngs, as if
all the world were prowling for pleasure. At this theater or that, parts
of the crowd turn in. Where many go there is success; but there are sad
doorways where few cabs draw up and few people march to the lonely
window; and that is a home of failure, though as much work has been done
and as much money deserved. Only, the whim of the public is not for that
place.
Eight o’clock and Sheila sits in her dressing-room in an ague of dread,
painting her face and wondering why she is here, a lone woman fighting a
mob for the sake of a dying man’s useless glory, and for the ruin of a
living man’s schedule of life. Why is she not where Bret Winfield said a
woman’s place was—at home?
She wonders about Bret. If she fails, if she succeeds, what does it mean
to him and her? She understands that he has left her alone till now
because he could not help her. But no flowers, no telegram, nothing? She
looks over the heap of telegrams—no, there is nothing from him.
Then a note comes. He is there. Can he see her? Her heart leaps with
rapture, but she dares not see him before the play. She would cry and
mess her make-up, and she must enter with gaiety. She sends Pennock with
word begging him to come after the play is over—“if he still wants
to—if he’s not ashamed of me; tell him that.”
She thinks of him wincing as he is turned away from the stage door. Then
she banishes the thought of him, herself, everybody but the character
she is to play.
Outside the curtain is a throng eager to be entertained, willing to pay
a fortune for entertainment, but merciless to those who fail. There is
no active hostility in the audience—just the passive inertia of a dull,
dreary, anxious mob afraid of being bored and cheated of an evening.
“Here are our hearts,” it says; “we are sick of our own lives. We do not
care what your troubles are or your good intentions. We have left our
homes to be made happy, or to be thrilled to that luxurious sorrow for
some one else that is the highest happiness. We have come here at some
expense and some inconvenience. We have a hard day ahead of us
to-morrow. It is too late to go elsewhere. You have said you have a good
show. Show us!”
Back of that glum curtain the actors, powdered, caparisoned, painted,
wait in the wings like clowns for the crack of the whip—and yet also
like soldiers about to receive the command to charge on trenches where
unknown forces lie hidden. No one can tell whether they are to be hurled
back in shame and confusion, or to sweep on in uproarious triumph. Their
courage, their art, will be the same. The result will be history or
oblivion, homage or ridicule.
* * * * *
It is an old story, an incessantly recurring story, a tragi-farce so
commonplace that authors and actors and managers and critics make jokes
of their failures and successes—afterward. But they are not jokes at
the time.
It was no joke for the husband who had intrusted Sheila to the mercy of
the public and the press, and who made one of the audience, though he
quivered with an anguish of fear as each line was delivered, and an
anguish of joy or woe as it scored or lapsed.
It was no joke to Eugene Vickery, lying in the quiet white room with the
light low and one stolid stranger in white to sentinel him. It was hard
not to be there where the lights were high, where the throngs heard his
pen and ink made flesh and blood. It was hard not to know what the words
he had put on paper sounded like to New York—the Big Town of his
people. He wanted to see and hear and his soul would have run there if
it could have lifted his body. But that it could not do.
It could lift thousands of hands to applause and lift a thousand voices
to cry his name, but it could not lift his own hands or his own voice.
The nurse, who did not understand playwrights, tried to keep him quiet.
She kept taking the sheet from his hands where they kept tugging at its
edge. She forbade him to talk. She refused to tell him what time it was.
But he would say, “Now the overture’s beginning,” and then, later, “Now
the curtain’s going up.” He tried to rise with it, but she pressed him
back. Later he reckoned that the first act was over, and then that the
second act was begun.
Then a telephoned message was brought to him that Mr. Reben telephoned
to say, “the first act got over great.”
That almost lifted him to his feet, but he fell back, sighing, “He’d say
it anyway, just to cheer me up.”
The same message or better came after the other acts. But he would not
believe, he dared not believe, till suddenly Sheila was there in her
costume of the last act. The divine light of good news poured from her
eyes. She had not waited to meet the people who crowded back to
congratulate her—“and they never crowd after a failure,” she said.
She had not waited to change her costume lest she be too late with her
music. She had waited only for Bret to run to her and tell her how
wonderful she was, and to crush him as hard as she could in her arms.
Then she had haled him to the cab that was held in readiness, and they
had dashed for Vickery’s bed—his “throne,” she called it.
Perhaps she exaggerated the excitement of the audience; perhaps she drew
a little on prophecy in quoting what the critics had been overheard to
say in praise of the drama—“epoch-making” was the least word she
quoted.
But she brought in with her a very blast of beauty and of rapture, and
she carried flowers that she would have flung across his bed if she had
not suddenly feared the look of them there.
As for Vickery, he felt the beauty and fragrance of the triumphal red
roses on the towering stems.
But he closed the great eyelids over the great eyes and inhaled the
sweeter, the ineffable aroma of success. It was so sweet that he turned
his face to the wall and sobbed.
Sheila tried to console him—console him for his triumph! She said:
“Why, ’Gene, ’Gene, the play is a sensation! The royalties will be
enormous. The notices will be glorious. You mustn’t be unhappy.”
He put out a hand that tried to be soft, he made a sound that tried to
be a laugh, and he spoke in a sad rustle that tried to be a voice:
“I’m not unhappy. I never was happy till now. The royalties won’t be
necessary where I’m going—just a penny to pay the ferryman. The notices
I’ll read over there—I suppose they get the papers over there so that
the obituary notices can be read—the first kind words some of us ever
get from this world.
“I owe it to you two that my play got on and succeeded. Success! to
write your heart’s religion and have it succeed with the people—that’s
worth living for—that’s worth dying for—”
His speech was frail, and broken with long pauses and with paroxysms:
“I hope I haven’t ruined your lives for you two. But you weren’t very
happy when I came along, were you? Sheila was breaking your heart, Bret,
just because she couldn’t keep her own from breaking. You were like a
man chained to a dead woman. If you had gone on, maybe you would have
been less happy than you will be now. Look at poor Dorothy. How long
will she stand her unhappiness? My royalties will go to her! They will
make her independent of that—But I’ve got no time to be bitter against
anybody now.
“I hope you’ll be happy, you two. But happiness isn’t the thing to work
for. The thing to work for is work—to do all you can with what you
have. I’m a poor, weak, ramshackle sack of bones, but I’ve done what I
could—and a little more. _J’ai fait mon possible._ That’s all God or
man can ask. Go on and do your possible, Bret—you in your factory—and
Sheila in her factory. I can’t see why your chance for happiness isn’t
as good as anybody’s, if you’ll be patient with each other and run home
to each other when you can—and—and—now I’ve got to run home, too.”
Then a deep peace soothed him, and them.
CURTAIN
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.