Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
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 rôles 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.”
CHAPTER IV
That was a tremendous week for the children of Braywood. As some quiet bayou harbors for a time a few birds of passage restlessly resting before they fly on into the sky, so the domestic poultry of Braywood was stirred by the Kemble wild fowl.
Four generations were gathered at the Burbage home. Sheila’s great-grandmother was always there at the home of Clyde Burbage, senior, who had fallen out of the line of strollers, and become a merchant. His wife’s mother, who was Polly Farren’s mother, too, was there for a visit. The old lady and the older lady had left the stage and now spent their hours in regretting the decadence of earlier glories, as their elders had done before them, and as their children would do in their turn.
The Kembles and Farrens and Burbages were all peers in the aristocracy of the theater, which, like every other world, has its princes and peasants, its merchants and vagabonds, saints and sinners.
None of this line dated back, however, to the time when Holy Week was a period of industry for the churchly actors who prepared their miracles and moralities for the edification of the people. Nowadays Holy Week is a time when most of the theaters close, and the others entertain diminished audiences and troupes whose enthusiasm is diminished by the halving of their salaries.
It is a period when so many people desire to be seen in church or fear to be seen in the playhouse, that the receipts drop off amazingly, though the same people feel it no sin to crowd the same theater the week before or the week after the Passion sennight.
Sometimes a play is strong enough in draught to pack the theater in spite of the anniversary. This year the Farren-Kemble play was not quite successful enough to justify the risk of half-filled auditoriums. So they “rested.”
But to the children, as to the other animals, there are no holy days, or rather no unholy days. The children of Braywood made a theatrical week of it, and Sheila reveled in her opportunity. She had an audience everywhere she went.
The other children stood about her and wondered. She fascinated them, and they were eager to do as she bade, though they felt a certain uneasiness; as if they had wished for a fairy queen to play with and had got their wish.
The other children commanded in their own specialties and in their turns. At outdoor romps and sports Clyde Burbage led the way, and endangered future limbs or present lives by his fearless banter. At household games with dolls and diseases Dorothy had a matronly authority and Sheila was like a novice. In hospital games, Dorothy,