“Yes, honey.”
“I guess I’ll write a play.”
“Fine!” she said.
“For Sheila.”
“Oh!”
Mrs. Vickery cast up her eyes and stole out, not knowing what to say. Already the child was turning his affections away from home and her.
An hour later she almost stepped on him again. He was lying on the rug by the twilight-glimmering window of the dining-room, whither Dorothy’s relentless scales had driven him. He was lying on his stomach with his nose almost touching his composition-book, and he was scrawling large words laboriously with a nub of pencil so stubby that he seemed to be writing with his own forefinger bent like a grasshopper’s leg.
William Shakespeare, Gent., sleeping in Avon church, had no knowledge of what conspiracy was hatching against his long-enough prestige. And if he had known, that very human mind of his might have suspected the truth, that the inspiration of his new rival was less a desire to crowd an old gentleman from the top shelf of fame than to supplant him in the esteem of a certain very young woman.
Shakespeare himself in that same kidnapped play of his called “Hamlet” complained of the children’s theater that rivaled his own.
There was complaint now of the new children’s theater in the minor city of Braywood. Three homes were topsy-turvied by the insatiable, irrepressible mummers.
CHAPTER III
It was less than an hour after Sheila had left Mrs. Vickery’s when Mrs. Jerrems was on the telephone, plaintively demanding, “Who on earth is this Kemble child?”
Mrs. Vickery told her what she knew, and Mrs. Jerrems sighed: “A stage-child! That explains everything. She’s got Tommy simply bewitched.”
Besides the requisition for costumes and accessories that turned every attic trunk inside out there was an uneasy social complication.
Mrs. Jerrems and Mrs. Burbage knew each other only slightly and liked each other something less than that. Yet Tommy and Sheila had arranged that Mrs. Burbage and her husband and her mother and the strangers within their gates should all descend upon Mrs. Jerrems and pay five cents apiece for the privilege of entering her drawing-room.
Only one thing could have been more intolerable than obeying the children’s embarrassing demand, and that would have been breaking the children’s hearts by refusing it. So Sheila’s mother and father, her grandmother and her aunt, were all browbeaten into accepting the invitations that Mrs. Jerrems had been browbeaten into extending.
Sheila assumed that Mrs. Jerrems was as much interested in Mr. Shakespeare’s success as she was. And she rather took control of the house, saying a great many “Pleases,” but uprooting the furniture from the places it had occupied till they had become almost sacred. She had half of the drawing-room cleared of chairs and the other half packed with rows of them. She commandeered two of Mrs. Jerrems’s guest-room sheets (the ones with the deep hemstitching and the swollen initials). These she pinned upon a rope stretched from two nails driven into the walls, with conspicuous damage to the plaster, since the first places chosen did not hold the nails—and came out with them. The rope was the clothes-line, which was needed in the yard, but which Tommy had calmly cut down at Sheila’s requisition. He had cut his own finger incidentally and it bled copiously on the dining-room drugget. He had later nailed the bandage to the wall and gone overboard with the stepladder, carrying with him what he could clutch from the mantelpiece en passant.
This was not the only damage; item, a wonderful imitation cut-glass celery-jar used during rehearsals to represent the chalice of poison; item, several gouges in furniture, which Mrs. Jerrems would almost rather have had in her own flesh than in her mahogany.
But eventually the evening came and the guests went shyly into the rows of chairs that made Mrs. Jerrems’s drawing-room look like a funeral. Mrs. Jerrems was worried, too, by the thought of entertaining not only the child of stage people, but an actor and an actress too famous to be disguised.
She wondered what her preacher would say of it.
And she could not feel easy about the spectacle of her son standing in her hallway and collecting money from callers before they were admitted.
The performance was a torment. The strutting children were so pompous that it was impossible to watch them without laughter, yet laughter would have been heinously cruel. The usual relations were reversed: the children comported themselves with vast reverence for a great work of art, and the naughty parents sat smothering their snickers.
The voice of the prompter was loud in the wings (the dining-room and hall), and the action was suspended occasionally while the actors quarreled with the prompter as to whose turn it was to speak. The Sheila-ized Shakespeare had not been written down, and, though the play was greatly compressed, the company forgot a good deal of what was left. In her innocence, the editress had also neglected to omit certain phrases that polite grown-ups suppress. These came forth with appalling effect.
Laertes was so enraptured with counting and recounting the box-office receipts that he had to be sent for on two occasions. Clyde and Eugene came to blows on a dispute extraneous to the plot, and Dorothy, as the mother, giggled all through the closet scene and continued to whinny long after she had quaffed the fatal cup. Her last words were: “Oh Ha-ha-hamlet, the drink, the d-d-drink! I am poi-hoi-hoi-hoisoned.” This, combined with the litter of corpses, set the audience into a roar of laughter.
Then Sheila entered as the late-returning Ophelia and sobered them somehow on the instant.
Sheila won an indisputable triumph. The others were at best children, and peculiarly childish in the rôles that have swamped all but the largest hulls. But Sheila, for all her shortcomings and far-goings, had an uncanny power. Even when she doubled as the Ghost and tripped over the sheet in which she squeaked and gibbered nobody laughed. Her girlish treble, trying to be orotund, had moments of gruesome influence. Her Ophelia was pathetically winsome in the earlier scenes, and in the mania she struck notes that put sudden ice into the blood. There was no denying her a dreadful intuition of things she could not know, and a gift for interpreting what she had never felt.
The other parents were ashamed of the contrast. As Mrs. Jerrems whispered to Mrs. Vickery, “One thing is certain, your Dorothy and my boy Tom will never know how to act.”
“But,” Mrs. Vickery whispered back, “that doesn’t prove that they won’t go on the stage.”
After the final curtain and innumerable curtain calls the play was ended and the audience filed back of the sheet to lavish its homage on the troupe.
Mrs. Jerrems had resolved to make the best of it, once she was in for it; and tried to take the curse off the profanation of collecting money from her guests by entertaining them and the actors at a little supper. Her son Tommy, always the financier, felt a greater profanation in the idea of charging five cents admission and then throwing in a supper that cost fifty cents a head. But Mrs. Jerrems told Tommy to take care of his end of the enterprise and she would take care of hers. And she reminded him that the supper would cost him nothing. He consoled himself with the reflection that
