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 expected in college towns. Strangely, students have been always and everywhere rioters.
The first warning the audience had of unusual purposes came when a round of uproarious applause greeted a comedian’s delivery of a bit of very cheap wit which had been left in because the author declined to waste time polishing the seat-banging part of his first act. In this country an audience that is extremely displeased does not hiss or boo; it applauds sarcastically and persistently. The poor actor who had aimed to hurry past the line found himself held up by the ironic hand-clapping. When he tried to go on, it broke out anew.
An actor cannot disclaim or apologize for the lines he has to speak, however his own prosperities are involved in them. So poor Mr. Tuell had now to stand and perspire while the line he had begged the author to delete provoked the tempest.
Whenever the fuming comedian opened his mouth to speak the applause drowned him. It soon fell into a rhythm of one-two, one-two-three, one-two, one-two-three. Tuell could only wait till the claque had grown weary of its own reproof. Then he went on to his next feeble witticism, another play upon words so childish that it brought forth cries of, “Naughty, naughty!”
The other members of the company gathered in the wings, as uncomfortable as a band of early martyrs waiting their turns to appear before the lions. To most of them this was their first encounter with a mutinous audience.
Audiences are usually a chaos of warring tastes and motives which must somehow be given focus and unity by the actors. That was the hardest part of the day’s work—to get the house together. To-night they must face a ready-made audience with a mind of its
