Eldon resumed the livery of the taxicab-driver and spoke his two lines each night with his accustomed grace, and received his accustomed tribute of silence. He arrived on the stage just before his cue, and he went to his room just after his exit.
He avoided Sheila, and she, feeling repulsed, turned her attention from him. Friends of her father and mother and friends of her school days besieged her with entertainment. People who took pride in saying they knew somebody on the stage sought introductions. Rich or handsome young men were presented to her at every turn. They poured their praises and their prayers into her pretty ears, but got no receipt for them nor any merchandise of favor. She was not quite out of the hilarious stage of girlhood. She said with more philosophy than she realized that she “had no use for men.” But they were all the more excited by her evasive charms. Her prettiness was ripening into beauty and the glow of youth from within gave her a more shining aureole than even the ingenuities of stage make-up and lighting. Homes of wealth were open to her and her growing clientèle frequented the theater. Miss Griffen was voted common, and left to the adulation of the fast young men.
The traveling-manager of the company was not slow to notice this. He saw that Sheila had not only the rare gifts of dramatic instinct and appeal, but that she had the power of attracting the approval of distinguished people as well as of the general. Men of all ages delighted in her; and this was still more important—women of all ages liked her, paid to see her. Women who gave great receptions in brand-new palaces bought up all the boxes or several rows in the orchestra in honor of Sheila Kemble. School-girls clambered to the balcony and shop-girls to the gallery to see Sheila Kemble.
The listening manager heard the outgoing voices again and again saying such things as, “It’s the third time I’ve seen this. It’s not much of a play, but Sheila Kemble—isn’t she sweet?”
The company-manager and the house-manager and the press agent all wrote to Reben, the manager-in-chief:
“Keep your eye on Kemble. She’s got draught. She makes ’em come again.”
And Reben, who had made himself a plutocrat with twenty companies on the road, and a dozen theaters, owned or leased—Reben who had grown rich by studying his public, planned to make another fortune by exploiting Sheila Kemble. He kept the secret to himself, but he set on foot a still hunt for the play that should make her while she seemed to be making it. He schemed how to get her signature to a five-year contract without exciting her cupidity to a duel with his own. He gave orders to play her up gradually in the publicity. The thoughts of managers are long, long thoughts.
He gave out an interview to the effect that what the public wanted was “Youth—youth, that beautiful flower which is the dearest memory of the old, and the golden delight of the young.”
His chief publicity man, Starr Coleman, a reformed dramatic critic, wrote the interview for Reben, explained it to him, and was proud of it with the vicarious pride of those strange scribes whose lives are devoted to getting for others what they deny to themselves.
Reben had told Coleman to play up strong his belief in the American dramatist, particularly the young dramatist. Reben always did this just before he set out on his annual European shopping-tour among the foreign play-bazars. Over there he could inspect the finished products of expert craftsmen; he could see their machines in operation, in lieu of buying pigs in pokes from ambitious Yankees who learned their trade at the managers’ expense.
This widely copied “Youth” interview brought down on Reben’s play-bureau a deluge of American manuscripts, almost all of them devoid of theme or novelty, redolent of no passion except the passion for writing a play, and all of them crude in workmanship. Reben kept a play-reader—or at least a play-rejector, and paid him a moderate salary to glance over submitted manuscripts so that Reben could make a bluff at having read them before he returned them. This timid person surprised Reben one day by saying:
“There’s a play here with a kind of an idea in it. It’s hopeless as it stands, of course, but it might be worked over a little. It’s written by a man named Vicksburg, or Vickery, or something like that. Funny thing—he suggests that Sheila Kemble would be the ideal woman for the principal part. And, do you know, I’ve been thinking she has the makings of a star some day. Had you ever thought of that?”
“No,” said Reben, craftily.
“Well, I believe she’ll bear watching.”
In after-years this play-returner used to say, “I put Reben on to the idea that there was star material in Kemble, before he ever thought of it himself.”
But long before either of them thought of Sheila Kemble as a star, that destiny had been dreamed and planned for her by Sheila Kemble.
Frivolous as she appeared on the stage and off, her pretty head was full of sonorous ambitions. That head was not turned by the whirlwinds of adulation, or drugged by the bouquets of flattery, because it was full of self-criticism. She was struggling for expressions that she could not get; she was groping, listening, studying, trying, discarding, replacing.
She thought she was free from any nonsense of love. Nonsense should not thwart her progress and make a fool of her, as it had of so many others. It should not interrupt her career or ruin it as it had so many others. She would make friends with men, oh yes. They were so much more sensible, as a rule, than women, except when they grew sentimental. And that was a mere form of preliminary sparring with most of them. Once a girl made a fellow understand that she was not interested in spoony nonsense, he became himself and gave his mind a chance. And all the while nature was rendering her more ready to command love from without, less ready to withstand love from within. She was becoming more and more of an actress. But still faster and still more was she becoming a woman.
While Sheila was drafting herself a future, Eldon was gnashing his teeth in a pillory of inaction. He could make no step forward and he could not back out. He had taken cheap and nasty lodgings in the same boarding-house with Vincent Tuell, who added to his depression by his constant distress. Tuell could not sleep nights or days; he filled Eldon’s ears with endless denunciations of the stage and with cynical advice to chuck it while he could. Eldon would probably have taken Tuell’s advice if Tuell had not urged it so tyrannically. In self............