Clipped Wings. Hughes Rupert
credit that she was meek as Moses in the presence of domestic genius. But it must be added that the things she learned from Dorothy were likely to be exploited later in some drama where Sheila took full sway. In Dorothy’s games the dolls always recovered when Dr. Eugene was called in with his grandmother’s spectacles on. In Sheila’s dramas the dolls almost always perished in agony, while the desperate mother clung to the embarrassed doctor, at the same time screaming to him to save the child and whispering him to pronounce it dead.
Roger Kemble happened to be passing Mrs. Vickery’s front yard during one of these tragedies, and paused to watch it across the fence while Mrs. Vickery attended from the porch. One of those startling unconscious scandals in which children’s plays abound was suddenly developed, and Roger moved on rapidly while Mrs. Vickery vanished into the house.
All the while the young Shakespeare of Braywood wrought upon his play for Sheila. But the moment he thought he had it perfected, he would hear her toss off one of the dramatic principles that she had overheard her father and mother discussing after some rehearsal. Then Eugene would blush to realize that his drama had violated this dictum and was unworthy of the great actress. And he would steal away to unravel his fabric and knit it up again.
At last it began to shape itself according to her ideals as he had gleaned them. He sat up finishing it until he was sent to bed for the fourth time, then he worked in his room till his mother knocked on his door and ordered his light out and forbade him to leave his bed again.
He waited till he knew that his parents were asleep, then he cautiously renewed his light and, sitting up in bed, wrote with that grasshopper-legged finger of his till he could keep his eyes ajar no longer. Then he held one eye open with his left hand till the hand itself went to sleep. He never knew it when his head rolled over to the pillow. He knew nothing more till he woke, shivering, to find the daylight in the room and the light still burning expensively.
He put out the light and worked till breakfast and his play were ready. After he had spooned up his porridge and chewed down his second glass of milk he made haste toward Clyde Burbage’s house. He hesitated at the nearest corner till he found courage to proceed. He mounted the steps with his precious manuscript buttoned against his swinging heart. He rang the bell. Mrs. Burbage came to the door, and he peeled his cap from his burning head:
“Is—is Clyde at home, Mis’ Burbage?”
Mrs. Burbage was surprised at the formality of the visit. Boys usually stood outside and whistled for Clyde or called “Hoo-oo!” or “Hay, Clyde—oh, Cly-ud!” till he answered. In fact, he had only recently answered just such a signal from another boy and slammed the door after him.
When Eugene learned that Clyde was abroad he made as if to depart, then paused and, with a violent carelessness, mumbled, “I don’t suppose Sheila is home, either?”
“Sheila? Oh no! She and her father and mother left on the midnight train.”
“Is that so?” said Eugene as casually as if he had just learned that all his relatives were dead or that he had overslept Christmas.
He tried to make a brave exit, but he was so forlorn that Mrs. Burbage forgot to smile as grown-ups smile at the big tragedies of the little folk. She watched him struggling overlong at the gate-latch. She saw him break into a frantic run for home as soon as he had gained the sidewalk. Then she went inside, shaking her head and thinking the same words that were clamoring in the boy’s sick heart:
“Oh, Sheila! Sheila!”
CHAPTER V
The big young man with the shoulders of a bureau would never have been taken for a student if he had not been crossing the campus with a too small cap precariously perched on his too much hair, and if he had not been swinging a strapful of those thin, weary-worn volumes that look to be text-books and not novels. The eye-glasses set on his young nose mainly accented his youth. If he had not depended on them he would have made a splendid center rush. Instead, he was driven to the ’varsity crew, where he won more glory than in the class-room. He paused before a ground-floor window of the oldest of the old dormitories. That window-seat as usual displayed the slim and gangling form of a young man who was usually to be found there stretched out on his stomach and reading or writing with solemn absorption. It was necessary to call him repeatedly before he came back from the mist he surrounded himself with:
“Hay! ’Gene! Oh, Vick! ’Gene Vickery! Hay you!”
“Hay yourself! Oh, hey-o, Bret Winfield, h’are you?”
“Rotten! Say—you going to the theater to-night?”
“I usually do. What’s the play?”
“ ‘A Friend in Need.’ Ran six months in New York.”
“All right, I’ll go.”
“Better get a seat under cover of the balcony.”
“Why?”
“Looks like a big night to-night. The Freshmen are going to bust up the show.”
“Really? Why?”
Vickery was only a post-graduate, in his first year at Leroy University. He had gone through the home-town schools and a preparatory school and a smaller college, before he had moved on to Leroy to earn a PhD. He had long ago given up his ambitions to replace Shakespeare. So now he asked in his ignorance why the Freshmen of Leroy must break up the play. And Winfield answered from his knowledge:
“Because about this time of year the Freshman class always busts up a show. It’s one of the sacredest traditions of our dear old Alum Mater. Last year’s Freshies put a big musical comedy on the blink. Kidnapped half the chorus girls. This year there’s no burlesque in view, so the cubs are reduced to pulling down a high comedy.”
“Won’t the faculty do anything about it?”
“Faculty won’t know anything about it till the morning papers tell how many policemen were lost and how much damage was done to the theater. If you’re going, either take an umbrella or sit under the balcony, for there will be doings.”
“I’ll be there, Bret.”
“I wish I could have you with me, but a gang of us Seniors have taken a front box together. S’long!”
“S’long!”
Vickery went back to his text-book. He was to be a professor of Greek. He had almost forgotten that he had ever fallen in love with an actress. He had kept no track of stage history.
His acquaintance with Bret Winfield had been casual until his sister Dorothy came on to spend a few days near her brother. Dorothy had grown up to be the sort of woman her childhood prophesied—big, beautiful, placid, very noble at her best and stupid at her worst. Her big eyes were the Homeric “ox-eyes,” and Eugene in the first flush of his first Greek had called her thence Bo-opis, which he shortened later to “Bo.”
The bo-optic Dorothy made a profound impression on Bret Winfield, and he cultivated Eugene thereafter on her account. He had a rival in the scientific school, Jim Greeley, a fellow-townsman of Winfield’s. Greeley’s matter-of-fact soul was completely congenial to Dorothy, but the two young men hated each other with great dignity, and Dorothy reveled in their rivalry. She was quite forgotten, however, when matters of real college moment were under way—such as the Freshman assault on the drama.
The news of the riot-to-be percolated through the two thousand students without a word reaching the ears of the faculty or the officers of the theater. There was no reason to expect trouble on this occasion. There had been no football or baseball or other contest to excite the students. They made a boisterous audience before the curtain rose—but then they always did. They called to each other from crag to crag. They whistled and stamped in unison when the curtain was a moment late; but that was to be