now what was this wonderful game where so many people got killed? Was it a war or a shipwreck or—or what?”
Sheila forgot her tears in the luxury of instructing an elder. With unmitigated patronage, as who in her turn should say, “You poor thing, you!” she exclaimed: “Why, don’t you know? It’s the last ack of ‘Hamlet!’ ”
“Oh, I see! Of course! How perfectly stupid of me!”
Sheila endeavored to comfort her: “Oh no, it wasn’t stupid a tall, Mrs. Vickery, if you’ll pardon me for cont’adictin’, but—well, you see, we got no real paduction, no costumes or scenery or anything.”
Mrs. Vickery said: “That doesn’t matter; but who was who? You see, I got in so late the usher didn’t give me a program.”
Sheila was rejoiced at this collaboration in the game. She explained: “Oh, the p’ograms didn’t arrive in time from the pwinter, and so we had a ’nouncement made before the curtain. He’s a most un’liable pwinter and I sent the usher for the p’ograms and he never came back. ’Gene was Hamlet and he was awful good. He read the silloloquy out of the book there. He reads very well. And Dorothy was his mother, the Queen, and she was awful good, too—very good, indeed, ’ceptin’ for gigglin’ in the serious parts, and after she was dead.”
Dorothy giggled and wriggled again, to show how it was done. After this interruption was quelled Sheila went on:
“Tommy Jerrems was Laertes and he was awful good. The duel with ’Gene was terrible. I’m afraid one of your umbrellas was bent—the poisoned one. Tommy didn’t want to die and I had to hit him with a hassock, and then he was so long dyin’, he held up the whole paformance. But he was very good. And Cousin Clyde he was the wicked King, and he was awful good, but then, o’ course, he comes of our family, and you’d naturally expeck him to be good.”
Mrs. Vickery suppressed a gasp of protest from Dorothy, who was intolerant of self-advertisement, and said: “But you were dead, too, Sheila. Who were you?”
“Why, I was Ophelia, o’ course!”
“Oh! But I thought Ophelia died long before the rest, and was buried, and Hamlet and Laertes fought in her grave, and—”
“Oh yes, that’s the way it is in the old book. But I fixed it up so’s Ophelia only p’tended to die—or, no, I mean they thought she was dead, and they buried another lady, thinkin’ she was her—and all the while Ophelia is away in a kind of a—a—insanitarum gettin’ cured up. And she comes home in the last ack to s’prise everybody, and she enters, laughing, and says, ‘Well, caitiffs and fellow-countrymen, I’m well again!’ And she sees everybody lyin’ around dead—and then she goes mad all over again and drownds herself in the big swimmin’-pool—or I guess it’s a—a fountain—near the throne.”
“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Vickery. “That sounds ever so much better.”
“Well,” said Sheila, shrugging her impudent little shoulders like any other jackanapes of a reviser, “as my papa says, ‘It sort of knits things together better and bolsters up the finish.’ You know it’s kind of bad to leave the leading lady out of the last ack. It makes the audience mad, you know.”
“Yes, I know! And was it you who screamed so at the end of the play?”
Sheila hung her head and tugged at a button on Mrs. Vickery’s waist as she confessed: “Well, I did my best. O’ course I’m not very good—yet.”
Dorothy was so matter-of-fact that she would not tolerate even self-depreciation. She exploded:
“Why, Sheila Kemble, you are so! She was wonderful, mamma! And she was so mad crazy she gave me the creeps. And when finally she plounced down and died, all us other deaders sat up and felt so scared we fell over again. She went mad simply lovely.”
And Tommy Jerrems added his posy: “I bet you could ’a’ heard her holler for three blocks.”
“I bet I did!” Mrs. Vickery sighed, remembering the fright she had had from that edged cry.
The other children fell into a wrangle celebrating Sheila as a person of amazing learning, powers of make-believe and command, and Sheila, throned on Mrs. Vickery’s lap, sat twisting her fingers in the pleasant confusion of one who is too truthful to deny and too modest to confess a splendid achievement. Now and then she heaved the big lids from her eyes and Mrs. Vickery read there rapture, deprecation, appeal for applause, superiority to flattery, self-confidence, and meekness. And Mrs. Vickery felt that those eyes were born to persuade, to charm, to thrill and compel.
At last Mrs. Vickery said, mainly for politeness’ sake, “I wish I could have seen the performance.”
The hint threw a bombshell of energy into the troupe. The mummers all began to dance and stamp and shriek, “Oh, let’s do it again! Let’s! Oh, let’s!”
Every one shouted but Sheila. Her silence silenced the others at last. She already knew enough to be silent when others were noisy and to shriek when others were silent. Then like a leaderless army the children urged her to take the crown.
Sheila thought earnestly, but shook her head: “It isn’t diggenafied to play two a day.” This evoked such a tomblike sigh that she relented a trifle: “We might call this other one a matinée, though, and call the other one a evening paformance.”
This was agreed to with ululation. The children set to gathering up the disjected equipment, the deadly umbrellas, and the envenomed cup. The last was a golf prize of Mr. Vickery’s. Dropped from the nerveless hand of the dying king, it had received a bruised lip and a profound dimple.
With the humming-bird instinct, the children stood tremulously poised before one flower only a moment, then flashed to another. It was a proposal by Tommy Jerrems that called them away now.
Tommy Jerrems had frequently revealed little glints of financial promise. He had been a notorious keeper of lemonade-stands, a frequent bankrupt, a getter-up of circuses, and a zealous impresario of baseball games in which he did all the work and got none of the play. He was of a useful but unenviable type and would undoubtedly become in later life a dozen or more unsalaried treasurers and secretaries to various organizations.
Tommy Jerrems proposed that the play of “Hamlet” should be enacted at his mother’s house as a regular entertainment with a fixed price of admission. This project was hailed with riotous enthusiasm, and King Claudius turned a cart-wheel in the general direction of a potted palm—and potted it.
There was some excitement over the restoration of this alien verdure, and Mrs. Vickery was glad that her own home had not been re-elected as playhouse. She made a mild protest on behalf of Mrs. Jerrems, but she was assailed with so frenzied a horde of suppliants that she capitulated; at least she gave her consent that Dorothy and Eugene might take part.
There was a strenuous Austrian parliament now upon a number of matters. Somehow, out of the chaos, it was gradually agreed that there should be real costumes as well as what Sheila called “props.” She explained that this included gold crowns, scepters, thrones, swords, helmets, spears, and what not.
Suddenly Sheila let out another of those heart-stopping shrieks of hers. She had been struck by a very lightning of inspiration. She seized Tommy as if she would rend him in pieces and howled: “Oh, Tommy, Tommy, Tommy! You
