in at the door, gave one hungry look around, and started away again. The agent—Mrs. Sanchez, it was—beckoned to me, but I didn’t see; she called after me, but I didn’t hear; she sent an office-boy to bring me back.
“When I squeezed through the crowd in the office it was like being called out of my place in the bread-line to get the last loaf of the day. I felt ashamed of my success and I was afraid that I was going to be asked to take the place of some Broadway star who had suddenly fallen ill.
“Mrs. Sanchez swung open the gate in the rail and said: ‘Young man, can you sing?’
“My heart fell to the floor and I stepped on it. I heard myself saying, ‘Is Caruso sick?’
“Mrs. Sanchez explained: ‘It’s not so bad as all that. But can you carry a tune?’
“I told her that I used to growl as loud a bass as the rest of them when we sang on the college fence.
“ ‘That’s enough,’ said Mrs. Sanchez. ‘They’re putting on a Civil War play and they want a man to be one of a crowd of soldiers who sing at the camp-fire in one of the acts. The part isn’t big enough to pay a singer and there is nothing else to do but get shot and play dead in the battle scene.’
“I told her I thought I could play dead to the satisfaction of any reasonable manager and she gave me a card to the producer.
“Then she said, ‘You’ve never been on the stage, have you?’
“I shook my head. She told me to tell the producer that I had just come in from the road with a play that had closed after a six months’ run. I took the card and dashed out of the office so fast I nearly knocked over a poor old thing with a head of hair like a bushel of excelsior. It took me two days to get to the producer, and then he told me that it had been decided not to send the play out, since the theatrical conditions were so bad.”
Mrs. Vining interpolated, “Theatrical conditions are like the weather—always dangerous for people with poor circulation.”
“I went back to the office,” said Eldon, “and told Mrs. Sanchez the situation. The other members of the company had beaten me there. The poor old soul was broken-hearted, and I don’t believe she regretted her lost commissions as much as the disappointment of the actors.
“A lot of people have told me she was heartless. She was always good to me, and if she was a little hard in her manner it was because she would have died if she hadn’t been. Agents are like doctors, they’ve got to grow callous or quit. Her office was a shop where she bought and sold hopes and heartbreaks, and if she had squandered her sympathy on everybody she wouldn’t have lasted a week. But for some reason or other she made a kind of pet of me.”
Mrs. Vining murmured, “I rather fancy that she was not the first, and won’t be the last, woman to do that.”
Eldon flushed like a young boy who has been told that he is pretty. He realized also that he had been talking about himself to a most unusual extent with most unusual frankness, and he relapsed into silence until Sheila urged him on.
It was a stupid Sunday afternoon in the train and he was like a traveler telling of strange lands, under the insatiable expectancy of a fair listener. There are few industries easier to persuade a human being toward than the industry of autobiography. Eldon described the dreary Sahara of idleness that he crossed before his next opportunity appeared.
As a castaway sits in the cabin of a ship that has rescued him and smiles while he recounts the straits he has escaped from, and never dreams of the storms that are gathering in his future skies, so Eldon in the Pullman car chuckled over the history of his past and fretted not a whit over the miseries he was hurrying to.
The only thing that could have completed his luxury was added to him when he saw that Sheila, instead of laughing with him, was staring at him through half-closed eyelids on whose lashes there was more than a suspicion of dew. There was pity in her eyes, but in her words only admiration:
“And you didn’t give up even then!”
“No,” said Eldon; “it is mighty hard knocking intelligence into as thick a skull as mine. I went back to the garage where I had worked as a helper. I had learned something about automobiles when I ran the one my father bought me. But I kept nagging the agencies. Awful idiot, eh?”
To his great surprise the cynical Mrs. Vining put in a word of implied approval:
“We are always reading about the splendid perseverance of men who become leading dry-goods merchants of their towns or prominent politicians or great painters, but the actors know as well as anybody what real perseverance is. And nobody gives them credit for being anything but a lot of dissipated loafers.”
Sheila was not interested in generalizations. She wanted to know about the immediate young man before her. She was still child enough to feel tremendous suspense over a situation, however well she knew that it must have a happy ending. When she had been littler the story of Jack the Giant-killer had enjoyed an unbroken run of forty nights in the bedtime repertoire of her mother. And never once had she failed to shiver with delicious fright and suffer anguishes of anxiety for poor Jack whenever she heard the ogre’s voice. At the first sound of his leit motiv, “Fee, fi, fo, fum—” her little hands would clutch her mother’s arm and her eyes would pop with terror. Yet, without losing at all the thrill of the drama, she would correct the least deviation from the sacred text and rebuke the least effort at interpolation.
It was this weird combination of childish credulity, fierce imagination, and exact intelligence that made up her gift of pretending. So long as she could keep that without outgrowing it, as the vast majority do, she would be set apart from the herd as one who could dream with the eyes wide open.
When she looked at Eldon she saw him as the ragged, hungry beggar at the stage door. She saw him turned away and she feared that he might die, though she knew that he still lived. There was genuine anxiety in her voice when she demanded, “How on earth did you ever manage to succeed?”
“I haven’t succeeded yet,” said Eldon, “or even begun to, but I am still alive. It’s hard to get food and employment in New York, but somehow it’s harder still to starve there. One way or another I kept at work and hounded the managers. And one day I happened in at a manager’s office just as he was firing an actor who thought he had some rights in the world. He snapped me up with an offer of twenty-five dollars a week. If he had offered me a million it wouldn’t have seemed any bigger.”
Mrs. Vining had listened with unwonted interest and with some difficulty, for sleep had been tugging at her heavy old eyelids. As soon as she heard that Eldon had arrived in haven at last she felt no further necessity of attention and fell asleep on the instant.
Sheila sighed with relief, too. And the train had purred along contentedly for half a mile before she realized that after all Eldon was not with that company, but with this. Seeing that her aunt was no longer with them in spirit, she lowered her voice to comment:
“But if you went with the other troupe, what are you doing here?”
“Well, you see, I thought I ought to tell Mrs. Sanchez the good news. I thought she would be glad to hear it, and I was going to offer her the commission for all the work she had done and all the time she had spent on me. She looked disappointed when I told her, and she warned me that the manager was unreliable and the play a gamble. She had just found me a position with a company taking an assured success to the road. It was this play of
