one way or another. He had been snubbed in his romance. The other rôle he played would never be dignified even by a tap of the critical bludgeon. He was tired of the stage.
And then the opportunity he had prayed for fell at his feet, after he had ceased to pray for it.
The play opened on a Sunday night. It was Eldon’s first performance of a play on the Sabbath. He rather expected something to come through the roof. But the play went without a mishap. The applause was liberal, and the next morning’s notices were enthusiastic.
Sheila was picked out for especial praise. The leading woman, Miss Zelma Griffen, was slighted. She was very snappy to Sheila, which added the final touch to Sheila’s rapture.
Old Jaffer was complimented and remembered, and now he was loud in the praises of the town, the inspiring, bracing ozone from the Lake, and his splendid hotel. Jim Crumb’s bit as a farmer was mentioned, and his previous appearance recalled with “regret that he had not more opportunity to reveal his remarkable gifts of characterization.”
This was too much for poor Crumb. He went about town renewing former acquaintances with the fervor of a far voyager who has come home to stay. When he appeared at the second performance his speech was glucose and his gait rippling. In his one scene it was his duty to bring in a lantern and hold it over an automobile map on which Sheila and Mrs. Vining were trying to trace a lost road. It was a passage of some dramatic moment, but Crumb in his cups made unexpected farce of it by swinging the lantern like a switchman.
No comic genius from Aristophanes via Molière to Hoyt has ever yet devised a scene that will convulse an audience like the mistake or mishap of an actor. Poor, befuddled Crumb’s wabbly lantern was the laughing hit of the piece. He was too thick to be rebuked that night. Friends took him to his hotel and left him to sleep it off.
When the next morning he realized what he had done, what sacrilege he had committed, he sought relief from insanity in a hair of the dog that bit him. He was soon mellow enough to fall a victim to an hallucination that Tuesday was a matinée day. He appeared at the theater at half-past one, and made up to go on. He fell asleep waiting for his cue, and was discovered when his dressing-room mate arrived at seven o’clock. Then he insisted on descending to report for duty. He was still so befogged that Batterson did not dare let him ruin another performance. He addressed to Crumb that simple phrase which is the theatrical death-warrant:
“Hand me back your part.”
With the automatic heroism of a soldier sentenced to execution, Crumb staggered to his room and, fetching the brochure from his trunk, surrendered it to the higher power, revealing a somewhat shaky majesty of despair.
Eldon was standing in the wings, and Batterson thrust the document at him and growled: “You say you’re a great actor. I’m from Missouri. Get up in that and show me, to-night.”
If he had placed a spluttering bomb in Eldon’s hands, and told him to blow up a Czar with it, Eldon could hardly have felt more terrified.
CHAPTER XI
Eldon climbed the three flights of iron stairway to his cubby-hole more drunkenly than Crumb. The opportunity he had counted on was his and he was afraid of it. This was the sort of chance that had given great geniuses their start, according to countless legends. And he had been waiting for it, making ready for it.
Weeks before during the rehearsals and during the first performances he had hung about in the offing, memorizing every part, till he had found himself able to reel off whole scenes with a perfection and a vigor that thrilled him—when he was alone. Crumb’s rôle had been one of the first that he had memorized. But now, when he propped the little blue book against his make-up box and tried to read the dancing lines, they seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the play. He would have sworn he had never heard them. He had been told that the best method for quickly memorizing a part was to photograph each page or “side.” But the lines danced before him at an intoxicated speed that would have defied a moving-picture camera.
He mumbled good counsels to himself, however, as if he were undertaking the rescue of a drowning heroine, and at length the letters came to a focus, the words resumed their familiarity.
He had received the part nearly an hour before the time for the overture, that faint rumor which is to the actor what the bugle-call is to the soldier. By half past seven he found that he could whisper the lines to himself without a slip.
The character he was to impersonate did not appear until the third act, but Eldon was in the wings made up and on tiptoe with readiness when the first curtain rose. His heart went up with it and lodged in his pharynx, where it throbbed chokingly.
The property-man had been recruited to replace Eldon as the taxicab-driver, but Eldon was on such tenterhooks that when his old cue came for entrance he started to walk on as usual. Only a hasty backward shove from the arm of the property-man saved him from a public blunder.
The rest of the play seemed to unfold itself with an unendurable slowness. The severer critics had remarked on this.
As Eldon watched, the lines he heard kept jostling the lines he was trying to remember and he fell into a panic of uncertainty. At times he forgot where he was and interfered with the entrances and exits of the other actors, yet hardly heard the rebukes they flung at him.
Sheila, following one of her cues to “exit laughing L 2 E,” ran plump into Eldon’s arms. He was as startled as a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and clung to her to keep from falling. His stupor was pleasingly troubled by a vivid sense of how soft and round her shoulders were when he caught them in his hands.
As he fell back out of her way he trod upon Mrs. Vining’s favorite toe and she swore at him with an old-comedy vigor. She would have none of his apology, and the stage-manager with another oath ordered him to his room.
Once there, he fell to studying his lines anew. The more he whispered them to himself the more they eluded him. The vital problem of positions began to harass him. He began to wonder just where Crumb had stood.
He had learned from watching the rehearsals that few things upset or confuse actors like a shift of position. They learned their lines with reference to the geography of the stage and seemed curiously bewildered if the actor whom they had addressed on the right side appeared on the left.
Eldon foresaw himself throwing Sheila and Mrs. Vining out of their stride by standing up-stage when he should stand down, or right when he should stand left. He knew there was an etiquette about “giving the stage” to the superior characters. He remembered one rather heated argument in which Batterson had insinuated that old Mrs. Vining had been craftily “stealing the stage” from one young woman who was selfish enough in all conscience, but who had foolishly imagined that the closer she was to the audience the more she commanded it.
Eldon was disgusted with his ability to forget what he had watched incessantly. He was to make his entrance from the left, yet, as he recollected it, Crumb had stood to the right of Sheila as he held the lantern over the map. Now he wondered how he was to get round her. This bit of stage mechanism had always impressed him. He had seen endless time spent by the stage-manager in trying to devise a natural and inconspicuous method for attaining the simple end of moving an actor from one side of a table to the other side. At first he would have said, bluntly, “The way to go round a table is to go round it.” But he had finally realized that the audience
