Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
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