Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
in her manner it was because she would have died if she hadn’t been. Agents are like doctors, they’ve got to grow callous or quit. Her office was a shop where she bought and sold hopes and heartbreaks, and if she had squandered her sympathy on everybody she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But for some reason or other she made a kind of pet of me.”
Mrs. Vining murmured, “I rather fancy that she was not the first, and won’t be the last, woman to do that.”
Eldon flushed like a young boy who has been told that he is pretty. He realized also that he had been talking about himself to a most unusual extent with most unusual frankness, and he relapsed into silence until Sheila urged him on.
It was a stupid Sunday afternoon in the train and he was like a traveler telling of strange lands, under the insatiable expectancy of a fair listener. There are few industries easier to persuade a human being toward than the industry of autobiography. Eldon described the dreary Sahara of idleness that he crossed before his next opportunity appeared.
As a castaway sits in the cabin of a ship that has rescued him and smiles while he recounts the straits he has escaped from, and never dreams of the storms that are gathering in his future skies, so Eldon in the Pullman car chuckled over the history of his past and fretted not a whit over the miseries he was hurrying to.
The only thing that could have completed his luxury was added to him when he saw that Sheila, instead of laughing with him, was staring at him through half-closed eyelids on whose lashes there was more than a suspicion of dew. There was pity in her eyes, but in her words only admiration:
“And you didn’t give up even then!”
“No,” said Eldon; “it is mighty hard knocking intelligence into as thick a skull as mine. I went back to the garage where I had worked as a helper. I had learned something about automobiles when I ran the one my father bought me. But I kept nagging the agencies. Awful idiot, eh?”
To his great surprise the cynical Mrs. Vining put in a word of implied approval:
“We are always reading about the splendid perseverance of men who become leading dry-goods merchants of their towns or prominent politicians or great painters, but the actors know as well as anybody what real perseverance is. And nobody gives them credit for being anything but a lot of dissipated loafers.”
Sheila was not interested in generalizations. She wanted to know about the immediate young man before her. She was still child enough to feel tremendous suspense over a situation, however well she knew that it must have a happy ending. When she had been littler the story of Jack the Giant-killer had enjoyed an unbroken run of forty nights in the bedtime repertoire of her mother. And never once had she failed to shiver with delicious fright and suffer anguishes of anxiety for poor Jack whenever she heard the ogre’s voice. At the first sound of his leit motiv, “Fee, fi, fo, fum—” her little hands would clutch her mother’s arm and her eyes would pop with terror. Yet, without losing at all the thrill of the drama, she would correct the least deviation from the sacred text and rebuke the least effort at interpolation.
It was this weird combination of childish credulity, fierce imagination, and exact intelligence that made up her gift of pretending. So long as she could keep that without outgrowing it, as the vast majority do, she would be set apart from the herd as one who could dream with the eyes wide open.
When she looked at Eldon she saw him as the ragged, hungry beggar at the stage door. She saw him turned away and she feared that he might die, though she knew that he still lived. There was genuine anxiety in her voice when she demanded, “How on earth did you ever manage to succeed?”
“I haven’t succeeded yet,” said Eldon, “or even begun to, but I am still alive. It’s hard to get food and employment in New York, but somehow it’s harder still to starve there. One way or another I kept at work and hounded the managers. And one day I happened in at a manager’s office just as he was firing an actor who thought he had some rights in the world. He snapped me up with an offer of twenty-five dollars a week. If he had offered me a million it wouldn’t have seemed any bigger.”
Mrs. Vining had listened with unwonted interest and with some difficulty, for sleep had been tugging at her heavy old eyelids. As soon as she heard that Eldon had arrived in haven at last she felt no further necessity of attention and fell asleep on the instant.
Sheila sighed with relief, too. And the train had purred along contentedly for half a mile before she realized that after all Eldon was not with that company, but with this. Seeing that her aunt was no longer with them in spirit, she lowered her voice to comment:
“But if you went with the other troupe, what are you doing here?”
“Well, you see, I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Sanchez the good news. I thought she would be glad to hear it, and I was going to offer her the commission for all the work she had done and all the time she had spent on me. She looked disappointed when I told her, and she warned me that the manager was unreliable and the play a gamble. She had just found me a position with a company taking an assured success to the road. It was this play of yours. The part was small and the pay was smaller still, but it was good for forty weeks.
“But I was ambitious, and I told her I would take the other. I wanted to create—that was the big word I used—I wanted to ‘create’ a new part. She told me that the first thing for an actor to do was to connect with a steady job, but I wouldn’t listen to her till finally she happened to mention something that changed my mind.”
He flushed with an excitement that roused Sheila’s curiosity. When he did not go on, she said:
“But what was it that changed your mind?”
Eldon smiled comfortably, and, emboldened by the long attention of his audience, ventured to murmur the truth: “I had seen you act—in New York—in this play, and I—I thought that you were a wonderful actress, and more than that—the most—the most—Well, anyway, Mrs. Sanchez happened to mention that you would be with this company, so I took the part of the taxicab-driver. But I found I was farther away from you than ever—till—till last night.”
And then Eldon was as startled at the sound of his words and their immense import as Sheila was. The little word “you” resounded softly like warning torpedoes on a railroad track signaling: “Down brakes! Danger ahead!”
CHAPTER IX
As Eldon’s words echoed back through his ears he knew that he had said too much and too soon. Sheila was afraid to speak at all; she could not improvise the exquisitely nice phrase that should say neither more nor less than enough. Indeed, she could not imagine just what she wanted to say, what she really felt or ought to feel.
The woman was never born, probably, who could find a declaration of devotion entirely unwelcome, no matter from whom. And yet Sheila felt any number of inconveniences in being loved by this man who was a total stranger yesterday and an old acquaintance to-day. It would be endlessly embarrassing to have a member of the company, especially so humble a member, infatuated with her. It would be infinitely difficult to be ordinarily polite to him without either wounding him or seeming to encourage him. She had the theatric gift for carrying on a situation into its future developments. She was silent, but busily silent, dramatizing to-morrows, and the to-morrows of to-morrows.
Eldon’s thoughts also were speeding noisily through his brain while his lips were uncomfortably idle. He felt that he had been guilty of a gross indiscretion and he wanted to remove himself from the discomfort he had created, but he could not find the courage to get himself to his feet, or the wit to continue or even to take up some other subject.
It was probably their silence that finally wakened Mrs. Vining. She opened her drowsy eyes, wondering how long she had slept and hoping that they had not missed her. She realized at once that they were both laboring under some confusion. She was going to ask what it was.
Sheila