  Books by RUPERT HUGHES
CLIPPED WINGS. Frontispiece. Post 8vo. WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY? Illustrated. Post 8vo. THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER. Frontispiece. 16mo. EMPTY POCKETS. Illustrated. Post 8vo.
HARPER & BROTHERS. NEW YORK CLIPPED WINGS PUBLISHED SERIALLY AS “THE BARGE OF DREAMS”
A NOVEL
BY
Rupert Hughes
AUTHOR OF “WHAT WILL PEOPLE SAY?” “EMPTY POCKETS” ETC.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON Clipped Wings
Copyright, 1914, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America Published January, 1916 TO Robert H. Davis WITH AFFECTIONATE ADMIRATION Clipped Wings CHAPTER IThe proud lady in the new runabout was homeward bound from a shopping raid. It was her first voyage down-town alone with the thing. She guided the old family horse up to her curb in a graceful sweep, but, like a new elevator-boy, could not come to a stop at the stopping-place. She could go forward or back, but she could not exactly negotiate her own stepping-block. As she blushingly struggled for it she heard the scream of a child in desperate terror. It inspired an equal terror, for it came from her own house. She had left her two children at home, expecting playmate guests. She had extracted from them every imaginable promise to be good and to abstain from danger. But she knew how easily they romped into perils. She heard the cry again, and clutched her breast in a little death of fear as she half leaped, half toppled from her carriage and ran up the walk, leaving the horse to his own devices. The poor woman was wondering which of her beloved had fallen on the shears or into the fire. Which of the dogs had gone mad, and bitten whom. While she stumbled up the steps she heard the outcry repeated and she paused. That voice was the voice of neither of her own children. The thought that a neighbor’s child might have perished in her home was almost more fearful still. As she fumbled at the door-knob she heard the thud of a little falling body. Then there was a most dreadful silence. She hastened to the big living-room. She thrust back the somber hanging, and stepped on the arm of her own son. He was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. He did not move, though his wrist rolled under her foot. She flinched away, sickened, only to behold a yet ghastlier spectacle: her daughter hung across the arm of a couch, her hair over her face, and one limp hand touching the floor. At her feet was a young nephew in a contorted huddle with his head under the table. The son of a neighbor was stretched out on a chair, his face flung far back and his eyes staring. And on the panther-skin by the fireplace a young girl whom Mrs. Vickery had never seen before lay sidelong, singularly beautiful in death. Before this vision of inconceivable horror the mother stood petrified, her throat in the grip of such fright that she could not utter a sound. Then her knees yielded and she sank to the side of her boy, clutched him to her breast, and cried: “Eugene! my little ’Gene!” She pressed her palsied lips to his cheek. Thank God, it was still warm. He moved, he thrust her arms away, and mumbled. She bent to catch the words: “Lea’ me alone! I’m dead!” With a sigh of infinite relief she spilled him back to the rug, where he lay motionless. She called sharply to the girl on the couch: “Dorothy! Dorothy!” A tremor ran through the child—she seemed to struggle with herself. From her cataract of curls came a sound as of torn canvas, a sound dangerously like one of those explosions of snicker that Dorothy frequently emitted in church during the long prayer. But she did not look up. Half angry, half ecstatic, Mrs. Vickery rose and moved among the littered corpses, like Edith looking for King Harold’s body on Hastings field. She passed by her nephew, Tommy Jerrems, and Mrs. Burbage’s boy, Clyde, and proceeded to the eerie stranger on the panther-skin. This child would have looked deader if she had not been breathing so hard, and if her exquisite face had not been so scarlet in the tangle of her hair, which was curiously adorned with bottle-straw and excelsior from a packing-case in the cellar and with artificial flowers from a last-summer’s hat of Mrs. Vickery’s in the attic. Mrs. Vickery bent above the panting ruins, lifted one relaxed hand, and inquired, “And who are you, little girl?” “Don’t touch me, please; I’m all wet!” Mrs. Vickery forgot her imagination long enough to expostulate, “Why, no, you’re not, my dear!” And now the eyes opened with the answer: “Oh yes, I am, if you please. I’ve just drownded myself in the pool here—if you please.” “Oh!” Mrs. Vickery assented. “Well, hadn’t you better get up before you catch cold?” The answer to this question was another—a poser. “But how can I get up, if you please, until you lower the curtain?” Mrs. Vickery had been a parent often enough and long enough to obey the solemn behests of children without impertinent whys. She could not imagine what incantational power might reside in the roller window-shade, but she hurried to it and pulled it down. The little girl scrambled to her feet with a smile of brave regret: “Thank you ever so much! That’s not a ’maginary curtain, but only a real one. Still, it will have to do, I s’pose.” Then she addressed the other victims of fate, all of whom were craning their necks to peek: “Now, ladies and gent’men, take your curtain calls.” On every hand, as at a little local Judgment Day, the dead arose. They joined hands in a line at her signal. Then she hissed from the side of her mouth, “Now raise it, please.” The curtain shot up with a slap. “Thank you. And if you wouldn’t mind applaudin’ a little.” The reaction from her terror had rendered Mrs. Vickery almost hysterical, but she managed to keep her face straight and her hands busy while the line bowed and bowed. Once more the directress whispered to Mrs. Vickery, “Pull the curtain down a minute, please, and let it go up again.” When this was done she said, “If you got any flowers handy, they’d be nice.” Mrs. Vickery unpinned a small bouquet of violets she had presented herself with at the florist’s and tossed it at the foot of the swaying line. The directress hissed from the other side of her mouth, “Pick ’em up, ’Gene, and give ’em to me.” Eugene stooped so hastily and with such rigidity of knee that an over-tried button at the back of his knickers shot across the room. Dorothy, who had not ceased to giggle, whooped with joy at this, and received a glare of rebuke from the star. This did not silence Dorothy. But then her parents had tried for nine years to find some way of making her stop laughing without making her begin to cry. Eugene was solemn enough and blushed to his ears as he bestowed the flowers upon the stranger, who first motioned the others back and then acknowledged the tribute alone with profound courtesies to Mrs. Vickery and to unseen and unheard plauditors at the right and left. Her smile was the bizarre parody of innocence imitating sophistication. Then she threw off the mien of artifice and became informal and a child again. The game was evidently over. Mrs. Vickery, realizing now that she was the belated audience at a tragedy, assumed her most lion-hunting manner and pleaded, meekly, “Won’t somebody please introduce me to Mrs. Siddons!” Dorothy gasped with amazement and gulped with amusement at her mother’s stupidity. But before she could make the presentation the stranger cried: “Oh, how did you know?” “Know what, my dear?” “That my name was Siddons!” “Is it, really? But I was referring to the famous actress. She’s been dead for a hundred years, I think.” “Oh yes, but I’m named after her. My middle name is Mrs. Siddons—of course I mean just Siddons. I’m a linyural descender from her.” Dorothy broke in, seriously enough now: “Why, Sheila Kemble, how you talk! You know you’re no such thing. Your name is Kemble. Isn’t it, Clyde?” Clyde nodded and Dorothy exclaimed, “Yah!” Dorothy had not the faintest idea who Mrs. Siddons might be, save that she was evidently a person of distinction, but Dorothy had a child’s ferocious resentment at seeing any one else obtaining prestige under false pretenses. Sheila regarded her with a grandmotherly pity and answered: “My name is Kemble, yes; but if you know so much, Miss Smarty-cat, you ought to know that Mrs. Siddons’s name was Miss Kemble before she married Mr. Siddons.” And now in her turn she added the deadly “Yah!” Mrs. Vickery, in the office of peacemaker, tried to change the subject: “ ‘Sheila’—what a beautiful name!” she cried. “It’s Irish, isn’t it?” “Oh yes, ma’am. My papa says that if you’re a great actor you have to have a streak of either Irish or Jew in you!” “Indeed! And is your father a great actor?” “Is he? Ask him!” Mrs. Vickery was tormented with an intuitional suspicion that she was in the presence of a stage-child. She had never met one on the hither side of the footlights. It was uncanny to stumble upon it dressed like other children and playing among them as a child. There was a kind of weirdness about the encounter as if she had found a goblin or a pixie in the living-room, or a waif suspected of scarlet fever. It was she and not the pixie that felt the embarrassment! The first defense of a person in confusion is usually a series of questions, and Mrs. Vickery was reduced to asking: “What sort of plays does your father play?” “Draw’n-room commerdies mostly. People call ’em Roger Kemble parts.” Mrs. Vickery spoke with a sudden increase of respect: “So your father is the great Roger Kemble! And is your mother an actress, too?” “Is my mother an actress? Why, Mrs. Vickery, didn’t you ever hear of Miss Polly Farren?” It would have been hard indeed to escape the name of Miss Polly Farren. It was incessantly visible in newspapers and magazines, and on bill-boards in letters a yard high, with colossal portraits attached. Mrs. Vickery had seen Polly Farren act. A girlish, hoydenish thing she was, who made even the women laugh and love her. Mrs. Vickery felt at first a pride in meeting any relative of hers. Then a chill struck her. She lowered her voice lest the children hear: “But Miss Farren isn’t your mother?” “Indeed and she is! And I’m her daughter.” “And Roger Kemble is your father?” “Yes, indeedy. We’re all each other’s.” Mrs. Vickery turned dizzy; the room began to roll like a merry-go-round—without the merriment. Sheila, never realizing the whirl she had started, brought it to a sudden and gratifying stop by her next chatter. “You see, when mamma married papa” (Mrs. Vickery’s relief was audible) “they wanted to travel as Mr. and Mrs. Kemble, but the wicked old manager objected. He said mamma’s name was a household word, and she was worth five hunderd a week as Polly Farren and she wasn’t worth seventy-five as Mrs. Kemble.” Mrs. Vickery, whose husband was proud of his hundred a week, was awestruck at the thought of a woman who earned five hundred. Of course it was wicked money, but wasn’t there a lot of it? She was reassured wonderfully, and, though a trifle tinged with shame for her curiosity, she baited the child with another question: “And have you been on the stage, too?” “Indeed, I have! Oh yes, Mrs. Vickery. I was almost born on the stage—they tell me. I don’t ’member much about it myself. But I ’member bein’ carried on when I was very young. They tell me I behaved perf’ly beau’fully. And then once I was one of the little princes that got smothered in the Tower, at a benefit, and then once we childern gave a childern’s performance of ‘The Rivals.’ And I was Mrs. Mallerpop.” Mrs. Vickery shook her head over her in pity and sighed, “You poor child!” Sheila gasped, “Oh, Mrs. Vickery!” Her eyes were enlarged with wonder and protest as if she had been struck in the face. Mrs. Vickery hastened to explain: “To be kept up so late, I mean: and—and—weren’t you frightened to death of all those people?” “Frightened? Why, they wouldn’t hurt me. They always applauded me and said, ‘Oh, isn’t she sweet!’ ” Mrs. Vickery had read much about the woes of factory children and of the little wretches who toil in the coal-mines, and she had heard of the agitation to forbid the appearance of children on the stage. The tradition of misery was so strong that she was blinded for the moment to the extraordinary beauty, vigor, and vivacity of this example. She felt sorry for her. Sheila had encountered such mysterious pity once or twice before and she flamed to resent it. But even as eloquence rushed to her lips she remembered her mother’s last words as she kissed her good-by—they had been an injunction to be polite at all costs. The struggle to defend her mother’s glory and to obey her mother’s self-denying ordinance was so bitter that it squeezed a big tear out of each big eye. Mrs. Vickery, seeming to divine the secret of her plight, cuddled her to her breast with a gush of affectionate homage. Reassured by this surrender, Sheila became again a child. And now Dorothy, with that professional jealousy which actors did not invent and do not monopolize, that jealousy which is seen in animals and read of in gods—Dorothy stood aloof and pouted at the invader of her mother’s lap. Her lip crinkled and she batted out a few tears of her own till her mother stretched forth an arm and made a haven for her at her bosom. Then Mrs. Vickery spoke between the two wet cheeks pressed to hers: “And now what was this wonderful game where so many people got killed? Was it a war or a shipwreck or—or what?” Sheila forgot her tears in the luxury of instructing an elder. With unmitigated patronage, as who in her turn should say, “You poor thing, you!” she exclaimed: “Why, don’t you know? It’s the last ack of ‘Hamlet!’ ” “Oh, I see! Of course! How perfectly stupid of me!” Sheila endeavored to comfort her: “Oh no, it wasn’t stupid a tall, Mrs. Vickery, if you’ll pardon me for cont’adictin’, but—well, you see, we got no real paduction, no costumes or scenery or anything.” Mrs. Vickery said: “That doesn’t matter; but who was who? You see, I got in so late the usher didn’t give me a program.” Sheila was rejoiced at this collaboration in the game. She explained: “Oh, the p’ograms didn’t arrive in time from the pwinter, and so we had a ’nouncement made before the curtain. He’s a most un’liable pwinter and I sent the usher for the p’ograms and he never came back. ’Gene was Hamlet and he was awful good. He read the silloloquy out of the book there. He reads very well. And Dorothy was his mother, the Queen, and she was awful good, too—very good, indeed, ’ceptin’ for gigglin’ in the serious parts, and after she was dead.” Dorothy giggled and wriggled again, to show how it was done. After this interruption was quelled Sheila went on: “Tommy Jerrems was Laertes and he was awful good. The duel with ’Gene was terrible. I’m afraid one of your umbrellas was bent—the poisoned one. Tommy didn’t want to die and I had to hit him with a hassock, and then he was so long dyin’, he held up the whole paformance. But he was very good. And Cousin Clyde he was the wicked King, and he was awful good, but then, o’ course, he comes of our family, and you’d naturally expeck him to be good.” Mrs. Vickery suppressed a gasp of protest from Dorothy, who was intolerant of self-advertisement, and said: “But you were dead, too, Sheila. Who were you?” “Why, I was Ophelia, o’ course!” “Oh! But I thought Ophelia died long before the rest, and was buried, and Hamlet and Laertes fought in her grave, and—” “Oh yes, that’s the way it is in the old book. But I fixed it up so’s Ophelia only p’tended to die—or, no, I mean they thought she was dead, and they buried another lady, thinkin’ she was her—and all the while Ophelia is away in a kind of a—a—insanitarum gettin’ cured up. And she comes home in the last ack to s’prise everybody, and she enters, laughing, and says, ‘Well, caitiffs and fellow-countrymen, I’m well again!’ And she sees everybody lyin’ around dead—and then she goes mad all over again and drownds herself in the big swimmin’-pool—or I guess it’s a—a fountain—near the throne.” “Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Vickery. “That sounds ever so much better.” “Well,” said Sheila, shrugging her impudent little shoulders like any other jackanapes of a reviser, “as my papa says, ‘It sort of knits things together better and bolsters up the finish.’ You know it’s kind of bad to leave the leading lady out of the last ack. It makes the audience mad, you know.” “Yes, I know! And was it you who screamed so at the end of the play?” Sheila hung her head and tugged at a button on Mrs. Vickery’s waist as she confessed: “Well, I did my best. O’ course I’m not very good—yet.” Dorothy was so matter-of-fact that she would not tolerate even self-depreciation. She exploded: “Why, Sheila Kemble, you are so! She was wonderful, mamma! And she was so mad crazy she gave me the creeps. And when finally she plounced down and died, all us other deaders sat up and felt so scared we fell over again. She went mad simply lovely.” And Tommy Jerrems added his posy: “I bet you could ’a’ heard her holler for three blocks.” “I bet I did!” Mrs. Vickery sighed, remembering the fright she had had from that edged cry. The other children fell into a wrangle celebrating Sheila as a person of amazing learning, powers of make-believe and command, and Sheila, throned on Mrs. Vickery’s lap, sat twisting her fingers in the pleasant confusion of one who is too truthful to deny and too modest to confess a splendid achievement. Now and then she heaved the big lids from her eyes and Mrs. Vickery read there rapture, deprecation, appeal for applause, superiority to flattery, self-confidence, and meekness. And Mrs. Vickery felt that those eyes were born to persuade, to charm, to thrill and compel. At last Mrs. Vickery said, mainly for politeness’ sake, “I wish I could have seen the performance.” The hint threw a bombshell of energy into the troupe. The mummers all began to dance and stamp and shriek, “Oh, let’s do it again! Let’s! Oh, let’s!” Every one shouted but Sheila. Her silence silenced the others at last. She already knew enough to be silent when others were noisy and to shriek when others were silent. Then like a leaderless army the children urged her to take the crown. Sheila thought earnestly, but shook her head: “It isn’t diggenafied to play two a day.” This evoked such a tomblike sigh that she relented a trifle: “We might call this other one a matinÉe, though, and call the other one a evening paformance.” This was agreed to with ululation. The children set to gathering up the disjected equipment, the deadly umbrellas, and the envenomed cup. The last was a golf prize of Mr. Vickery’s. Dropped from the nerveless hand of the dying king, it had received a bruised lip and a profound dimple. With the humming-bird instinct, the children stood tremulously poised before one flower only a moment, then flashed to another. It was a proposal by Tommy Jerrems that called them away now. Tommy Jerrems had frequently revealed little glints of financial promise. He had been a notorious keeper of lemonade-stands, a frequent bankrupt, a getter-up of circuses, and a zealous impresario of baseball games in which he did all the work and got none of the play. He was of a useful but unenviable type and would undoubtedly become in later life a dozen or more unsalaried treasurers and secretaries to various organizations. Tommy Jerrems proposed that the play of “Hamlet” should be enacted at his mother’s house as a regular entertainment with a fixed price of admission. This project was hailed with riotous enthusiasm, and King Claudius turned a cart-wheel in the general direction of a potted palm—and potted it. There was some excitement over the restoration of this alien verdure, and Mrs. Vickery was glad that her own home had not been re-elected as playhouse. She made a mild protest on behalf of Mrs. Jerrems, but she was assailed with so frenzied a horde of suppliants that she capitulated; at least she gave her consent that Dorothy and Eugene might take part. There was a strenuous Austrian parliament now upon a number of matters. Somehow, out of the chaos, it was gradually agreed that there should be real costumes as well as what Sheila called “props.” She explained that this included gold crowns, scepters, thrones, swords, helmets, spears, and what not. Suddenly Sheila let out another of those heart-stopping shrieks of hers. She had been struck by a very lightning of inspiration. She seized Tommy as if she would rend him in pieces and howled: “Oh, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy! You ask your mother to have the bath-tub brought down to the back parlor and filled up and then I can drownd myself in real water.” A pack of wolves could not have fallen more noisily on a wounded brother than the children fell on this. Tommy alone was dubious. He was afraid that the bath-tub was too securely fastened to the bath-room to be uprooted. But he promised to ask his mother. Sheila, the resourceful, had an alternative ready: “Well, anyway, she could have a wash-boiler brought in from the kitchen, couldn’t she?” Tommy thought mebbe she could, but would she? Mrs. Vickery did not interfere. She had an idea that Mrs. Jerrems could be trusted to see to it that Ophelia had an extra-dry drowning. Mrs. Jerrems was rather fond of her furniture. Money to buy gold paper for the crowns, and silver paper to make canes look like swords and curtain-poles like spears, nearly wrecked the project. But Tommy thought that by patience and assiduity he could shake out of the patent savings-bank his father had given him enough dimes to subsidize the institution, on condition that he might reimburse himself out of the first moneys that were bound to flood the box-office. There was earnest debate over the price of admission. Clyde Burbage suggested five pins, but Sheila turned up her nose at this; it sounded amateurish. She said that her father and mother would never play in any but two-dollar theaters—or “fe-aters,” as she still called them. Still, she supposed that since the comp’ny was all juveniles they’d better not charge more than a dollar for seats, and fifty cents for the nigger-heaven. Tommy Jerrems, who had some bitter acquaintance with the ductile qualities of that community, emitted a long, low “Whew!” He said that they would be lucky to get five cents a head in that town, and not many heads at that. This sum was reluctantly accepted by Sheila, and the syndicate moved to adjourn. Sheila put her hand in Mrs. Vickery’s and ducked one knee respectfully. But Mrs. Vickery, with an impulse of curious subservience, knelt down and embraced the child and kissed her. She had an odd feeling that some day she would say, “Sheila Kemble? Oh yes, I knew her when she was a tiny child. I always said she would startle the world.” She seemed even now to hear her own voice echoing faintly back from the future. The guests made a quiet exit at the door, but they stampeded down the steps like a scamper of sheep. Sheila’s piercing cry came back. It was wildly poignant, though it expressed only her excitement in a game of tag. CHAPTER IIThe house seemed still to quiver after the neighbors’ young had left. Mrs. Vickery moved about restoring order. And Dorothy bustled after her, full of talk and snickers. But Eugene curled up in a chair by a window as solemn as Sophokles. Mrs. Vickery was still thinking of Sheila. She asked first of her, “How did you come to meet this little Kemble girl?” Dorothy explained: “Oh, I telephoned Clyde Burbage to come over and play, and he said he couldn’t, ’cause they had comp’ny; and I said, ‘Bring comp’ny along,’ and he did, and she’s his cousin; her grandma lives at his house, and her papa and mamma are going to visit there at Clyde’s for a week. Isn’t Sheila a case, mamma? She says the funniest things. I wish I could ’member some of ’em.” Mrs. Vickery smiled and stared at Dorothy. In the grand lottery of children she had drawn Dorothy. She saw in the child many of her own traits, many of the father’s traits. She loved Dorothy, of course, and had much good reason for her instinctive devotion, and many rewards for it. And yet the child was singularly talentless, as her father was, as Mrs. Vickery confessed herself to be. She wondered at the strange distribution of human gifts—some dowered from their cradles with the workaday virtues and commonplace vices, and some mysteriously flecked with a kind of wildness that is both less and more than virtue, an oddity that gives every speech or gesture an unusual emphasis, a rememberable differentness. Dorothy was a safe child to have; she would make a reliable, admirable, good woman. But Mrs. Vickery felt that if Sheila had been her child she would have been incessantly afraid of the girl and for her, incessantly uncertain of the future. Yet, she would have watched her, and the neighbors would have watched her, with a breathless fascination as one watches a tight-rope walker who moves on a hazardous path, yet moves above the heads of the crowd and engages all its eyes. Little Eugene Vickery had a quirk of the unusual, but it was not conspicuous; he was a burrower, who emerged like a mole in unexpected places, and led a silent, inconspicuous life gnawing at the roots of things. His mother found him now, as so often, taciturn, brooding, thinking long thoughts—the solemnest thing there is, a solemn child. “Why are you so silent, Eugene?” she said. He smiled sedately and shook his head with evasion. But Dorothy pointed the finger of scorn at him; she even whittled one finger with another and taunted him, shrilly: “ ’Gene’s in love with Sheila! ’Gene’s in love with Sheila!” “Am not!” he growled with a puppy’s growl. “Are so!” cried Dorothy, jubilantly. “Well, s’posin’ I am?” he answered, sullenly. “She’s a durned sight smarter and prettier than—some folks.” This sobered Dorothy and crumpled her chin with distress. Like her mother, she had long ago recognized with helpless regret that she was not brilliant. Mrs. Vickery, amazed at hearing the somber Eugene accused of so frivolous a thing as a love-affair, stared at him and murmured, “Why, ’Gene!” Feeling a storm sultry in the air, she warned Dorothy that it was time to practise her piano-lesson. Dorothy, whose other name was Dutiful, made no protest, but began to trudge up and down the scales with a perfect accuracy that was somehow perfectly musicless and almost unendurable. Mrs. Vickery knew that Eugene would speak when he was ready, and not before. She pretended to ignore him, but her heart was beating high with the thrill of that new era in a mother’s soul when she sees the first of her children smitten with the love-dart and becomes a sort of painfully amused Niobe, wondering always where the next arrow will come from and which it will hit next. After a long while Eugene spoke, though not at all as she expected him to speak. But then he never spoke as she expected him to speak. He murmured: “Mamma?” “Yes, honey.” “Do you s’pose I could write a play as good as that old Shakespeare did?” “Why—why, yes, I’m sure you could—if you tried.” Mrs. Vickery had always understood the rarely comprehended truth that praise creates less conceit than the withholding of it, as food builds strength and slays the hunger that cries for it. Eugene was evidently encouraged, but he kept silence so long that finally she gave him up. She was leaving the room when he murmured again: “Mamma.” “Yes, honey.” “I guess I’ll write a play.” “Fine!” she said. “For Sheila.” “Oh!” Mrs. Vickery cast up her eyes and stole out, not knowing what to say. Already the child was turning his affections away from home and her. An hour later she almost stepped on him again. He was lying on the rug by the twilight-glimmering window of the dining-room, whither Dorothy’s relentless scales had driven him. He was lying on his stomach with his nose almost touching his composition-book, and he was scrawling large words laboriously with a nub of pencil so stubby that he seemed to be writing with his own forefinger bent like a grasshopper’s leg. William Shakespeare, Gent., sleeping in Avon church, had no knowledge of what conspiracy was hatching against his long-enough prestige. And if he had known, that very human mind of his might have suspected the truth, that the inspiration of his new rival was less a desire to crowd an old gentleman from the top shelf of fame than to supplant him in the esteem of a certain very young woman. Shakespeare himself in that same kidnapped play of his called “Hamlet” complained of the children’s theater that rivaled his own. There was complaint now of the new children’s theater in the minor city of Braywood. Three homes were topsy-turvied by the insatiable, irrepressible mummers. CHAPTER IIIIt was less than an hour after Sheila had left Mrs. Vickery’s when Mrs. Jerrems was on the telephone, plaintively demanding, “Who on earth is this Kemble child?” Mrs. Vickery told her what she knew, and Mrs. Jerrems sighed: “A stage-child! That explains everything. She’s got Tommy simply bewitched.” Besides the requisition for costumes and accessories that turned every attic trunk inside out there was an uneasy social complication. Mrs. Jerrems and Mrs. Burbage knew each other only slightly and liked each other something less than that. Yet Tommy and Sheila had arranged that Mrs. Burbage and her husband and her mother and the strangers within their gates should all descend upon Mrs. Jerrems and pay five cents apiece for the privilege of entering her drawing-room. Only one thing could have been more intolerable than obeying the children’s embarrassing demand, and that would have been breaking the children’s hearts by refusing it. So Sheila’s mother and father, her grandmother and her aunt, were all browbeaten into accepting the invitations that Mrs. Jerrems had been browbeaten into extending. Sheila assumed that Mrs. Jerrems was as much interested in Mr. Shakespeare’s success as she was. And she rather took control of the house, saying a great many “Pleases,” but uprooting the furniture from the places it had occupied till they had become almost sacred. She had half of the drawing-room cleared of chairs and the other half packed with rows of them. She commandeered two of Mrs. Jerrems’s guest-room sheets (the ones with the deep hemstitching and the swollen initials). These she pinned upon a rope stretched from two nails driven into the walls, with conspicuous damage to the plaster, since the first places chosen did not hold the nails—and came out with them. The rope was the clothes-line, which was needed in the yard, but which Tommy had calmly cut down at Sheila’s requisition. He had cut his own finger incidentally and it bled copiously on the dining-room drugget. He had later nailed the bandage to the wall and gone overboard with the stepladder, carrying with him what he could clutch from the mantelpiece en passant. This was not the only damage; item, a wonderful imitation cut-glass celery-jar used during rehearsals to represent the chalice of poison; item, several gouges in furniture, which Mrs. Jerrems would almost rather have had in her own flesh than in her mahogany. But eventually the evening came and the guests went shyly into the rows of chairs that made Mrs. Jerrems’s drawing-room look like a funeral. Mrs. Jerrems was worried, too, by the thought of entertaining not only the child of stage people, but an actor and an actress too famous to be disguised. She wondered what her preacher would say of it. And she could not feel easy about the spectacle of her son standing in her hallway and collecting money from callers before they were admitted. The performance was a torment. The strutting children were so pompous that it was impossible to watch them without laughter, yet laughter would have been heinously cruel. The usual relations were reversed: the children comported themselves with vast reverence for a great work of art, and the naughty parents sat smothering their snickers. The voice of the prompter was loud in the wings (the dining-room and hall), and the action was suspended occasionally while the actors quarreled with the prompter as to whose turn it was to speak. The Sheila-ized Shakespeare had not been written down, and, though the play was greatly compressed, the company forgot a good deal of what was left. In her innocence, the editress had also neglected to omit certain phrases that polite grown-ups suppress. These came forth with appalling effect. Laertes was so enraptured with counting and recounting the box-office receipts that he had to be sent for on two occasions. Clyde and Eugene came to blows on a dispute extraneous to the plot, and Dorothy, as the mother, giggled all through the closet scene and continued to whinny long after she had quaffed the fatal cup. Her last words were: “Oh Ha-ha-hamlet, the drink, the d-d-drink! I am poi-hoi-hoi-hoisoned.” This, combined with the litter of corpses, set the audience into a roar of laughter. Then Sheila entered as the late-returning Ophelia and sobered them somehow on the instant. Sheila won an indisputable triumph. The others were at best children, and peculiarly childish in the rÔles that have swamped all but the largest hulls. But Sheila, for all her shortcomings and far-goings, had an uncanny power. Even when she doubled as the Ghost and tripped over the sheet in which she squeaked and gibbered nobody laughed. Her girlish treble, trying to be orotund, had moments of gruesome influence. Her Ophelia was pathetically winsome in the earlier scenes, and in the mania she struck notes that put sudden ice into the blood. There was no denying her a dreadful intuition of things she could not know, and a gift for interpreting what she had never felt. The other parents were ashamed of the contrast. As Mrs. Jerrems whispered to Mrs. Vickery, “One thing is certain, your Dorothy and my boy Tom will never know how to act.” “But,” Mrs. Vickery whispered back, “that doesn’t prove that they won’t go on the stage.” After the final curtain and innumerable curtain calls the play was ended and the audience filed back of the sheet to lavish its homage on the troupe. Mrs. Jerrems had resolved to make the best of it, once she was in for it; and tried to take the curse off the profanation of collecting money from her guests by entertaining them and the actors at a little supper. Her son Tommy, always the financier, felt a greater profanation in the idea of charging five cents admission and then throwing in a supper that cost fifty cents a head. But Mrs. Jerrems told Tommy to take care of his end of the enterprise and she would take care of hers. And she reminded him that the supper would cost him nothing. He consoled himself with the reflection that “Women got no head for business.” The juvenile tragedians ate at a small side-table, and so completely relaxed the solemnity they had revealed on the boards that the elder laity chiefly listened and smiled among themselves. Mrs. Jerrems studied Roger Kemble and his wife, “Miss” Farren, surreptitiously, as one would study a Thibetan or a Martian. Knowing in advance that they were actors, she felt sure that she found in them odd and characteristic mannerisms, for it is easy to find proofs when we have the facts. And once a man is known to be an actor it is easy to see the marks of the grease-paint, though, not knowing it, one is as likely to think him a preacher or a prize-fighter or whatever else he may suggest. The talk of Mr. Kemble and Miss Farren was normal; their manners polished, as became a class with so much leisure and culture. But Mrs. Jerrems felt that she could see the glamour of the footlights in everything they said or did. She had seen them both in some of their plays. On her excursions to New York, a visit to their theater was hardly less important, and much more likely to be accomplished, than a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When “Farren and Kemble,” as they were apt to be called, left New York for a tour they rarely visited Braywood, or if they did the prices at the opera-house were sure to be advanced and all Braywood put on its best clothes. For one thing, Polly Farren and Roger Kemble were pre-eminently fashionable. Their plays dealt with the fashionable people of Europe and America. They were generally English, and Roger Kemble was likely to be Lord Somebody, and Polly Farren at least an Honorable Miss This-or-That. Or, if they appeared in an American manuscript, they usually owned country houses and yachts and had titles for guests. Their clothes were sure to be a sort of prospectus of the next season’s modes. Roger Kemble was never a fop, and always kept on the safe side of ostentation, yet he was always scrupulously a pace ahead of the style and groomed to flawlessness. He represented Piccadilly patterns and his clock was about five hours ahead of New York time. Polly was a little braver. She was beautiful, lithe, and dashing, and she was not afraid of anything that French taste and caprice might prophesy. Everybody knew, too, that Polly Farren and Roger Kemble “went with” the smartest people. Those who knew they were married knew that their summer cottage was among the handsomest in the Long Island groups. Their manners were smart, too, with just the right flippancy and just the right restraint. It was a school of etiquette to see them enter a drawing-room or sip tea importantly, or tear a passion to embroidery. Polly had made her first sensation in a play in which she was supposed to have imbibed more champagne than her pretty head could carry. The critics raved over her demonstration of the fine art of being tipsy in a ladylike manner. Roger Kemble’s rÔles frequently compelled him to be “as drunk as a lord,” and young men of bibulosity tried to remember him in their cups. So now Mrs. Jerrems, watching the husband and wife at the homely task of stowing away a small-city supper, seemed to be watching a scene on the stage. She dreaded them, yet she tried to copy them. Faithful church-member that she was, she abhorred the stage theoretically, and practically followed its influence more than the church’s. She kept taking notes on Polly Farren’s costume and carriage, and her husband would later be admonished that many, many things he did were pitiably below the standard of Roger Kemble. The Kembles were not unaware of the inspection they underwent. They were used enough to it, yet it irked them in this small community whither they had retired during the Holy Week closing of their company. They were glad to be gone as soon as they could decently take their leave and carry off their wonder-child. Sheila was so exhausted by her labors as editress, directress, and actress that she had yawned even in the midst of her prettiest thank-yous for the praise she battened on. On the way she clung to her father’s hand in a sleep-walking drowse, and lurched into him until he caught her into his bosom and carried her home and up the stairs to her bed. She slept while her mother undressed her, and there was no waking her to her prayers. Even in her heavy slumbers she fell into an attitude of such grace that it seemed almost conscious. Roger and Polly looked at her and smiled; and shook their heads over her. “She is hopelessly ours,” said Kemble. “I’m afraid there’ll be no keeping her off the stage when she grows up.” Kemble was in his bath-robe in the bath-room before his wife, who had not moved from her posture of contemplation, suddenly thought aloud: “After all, why not?” Kemble paused with the tooth-paste tube above his tooth-brush to query, “Why not what?” “What better chance is there for a woman?” Kemble moved close enough to her to nudge her out of her muse and demand again, “What woman are you talking about?” “That one,” said Polly. “That little understudy of life. You say we sha’n’t be able to keep her off the stage. Why should we try to?” “Well, knowing what we do of the stage, my dear,—it isn’t exactly the ideal place for a girl, now is it?” “No, of course not. But where is the ideal place for a girl? Is there such a thing? We know all too well how much suffering and anxiety and disappointment and wickedness there is on the stage; but where will you go to escape it? Look at the society wives and daughters we know, in town and out in the country. Look at the poor girls in the shops and factories.” “That’s so,” Kemble spluttered across his shuttling tooth-brush. “I rather fancy a smaller city is better.” His wife laughed softly: “You ought to have heard what I’ve been hearing about this town! You’d think it was the home of all villainy. There’s enough scandal and tragedy here to fill a hundred volumes. There are problem-plays here—among busy church-members, too—that make Ibsen read like a copy of St. Nicholas.” She put out the light in Sheila’s room and went into her own, lighted herself a cigarette from the cigar her husband had left in her hair-pin tray, and sat down before the cold radiator as before a fireplace to talk about life. People were all rÔles to her and their histories were scenarios that interested her more or less as she saw herself playing them. “When I look around at my old school friends and relatives off the stage,” she said, “I can’t see that they’ve found any recipe for happiness. Clara Gaines is a domestic soul and her husband is a druggist, but he leaves her to be domestic all by herself, and she tells me he never spends a minute at home that he can spend outside. Ella Westover has divorced two husbands in Terre Haute already. Marjorie Cranford tells me that her home town out in—in the Middle West somewhere—has a fast set that makes the Tenderloin look stupid. Clarice—What’s her name now?—well, she has married an awfully good man, but she has to wheedle every cent she gets out of him or cheat him out of it, and she says she wants to scream at his hypocrisy. She thinks she’ll run off and leave him any day now.” Kemble drew a chair to her side and put his feet on the radiator alongside hers. He found his cigar out, and relighted it with difficulty from her cigarette as he laughed: “Polly is a bit of a pessimist to-night, eh? Is it the quietness of this little burg? I was rather enjoying the peace and repose and all that sort of thing.” “So was I. But that’s because it’s a change for us to have an evening off. Think of the women who never have anything else. They’re not happy, Roger. You can’t find one of them that will say she is.” “You don’t fancy small-town respectability for your daughter, then?” “I hope she’ll be respectable. But there’s so little real respectability in being just dull and bored to death, in just sitting round and waiting for some man to come home, in having nothing to spend except what you can steal out of his trousers or squeeze out of an allowance. I’d rather have Sheila an actress than a toadstool or a parasite on some man. She has one of those wild-bird natures that I had. The safest thing for her is the freedom and a lot of work and admiration, and a chance to act. The stage is no paradise, the Lord knows, but the first woman that ever knew freedom was the actress. These votes-for-women rebels are all clamoring now for what we actresses have always had. Would it break your heart, Roger, if our little Sheila went on the stage?” Kemble followed a slow cloud of smoke with the soft words: “My mother was an actress.” He drew in more smoke and let it curl forth luxuriously as he murmured, “And my wife is an actress.” It would have surprised the Farren-Kemble following to see those flippant comedians so domesticated and holding a solemn ante-vitam inquest over the future of their child. But a father is a father and a mother a mother the world over. Polly put out her hand and squeezed Roger’s, and he lifted hers and touched it to his lips with an old comedy grace. She drew the two hands back across the little gulf between them and returned the compliment, then rested her cheek on their conjoined fingers and pondered: “We could save Sheila the hardest part of it. She wouldn’t have to hang round the agencies or bribe any brute with herself, or barnstorm with any cheap company. And she wouldn’t have to go on the stage by way of any scandal.” Roger growled comfortably: “That’s so. She could step right into the old-established firm of Farren & Kemble. The main thing for us to see is that she is a good actress—as her mother was and her two grandmothers and three of her four great-grandmothers, and so on back.” Polly amended: “She mustn’t go on the stage too soon, though—or too late; and she must have a good education—French and German, and travel abroad and all that.” “Then that’s settled,” Kemble laughed. “And as soon as we’ve got her all prepared and established and on the way to big success, she’ll fall in love with some blamed cub who’ll drag her to his home in Skaneateles.” “Probably; but she’ll come back.” “All right. And now, having written Sheila’s life for her to rewrite, let’s go to bed. There’ll be no sleeping in this noisy house in the morning.” |
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