it 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 r?les 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 r?les 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 r?les 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.”
