Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
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