Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
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 II
The 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,’