Between the actor and the playwright there was little choice.
A manager also had offered himself to Sheila. She could have Reben for the asking. If he were not so many things she couldn’t endure the thought of, he might make a very good husband. He at least would be free from temperament and personality. Two temperaments in one family would be rather dangerous.
These thoughts, if they were distinct enough to be called thoughts, drifted through her brain like flotsam on the stream of the unending demands of her work. This was wearing her down and out till, sometimes, she resolved that whoever it might be she married he needn’t expect her to go on acting.
This pretty well cleared her slate of suitors, for Reben, as well as the other two, had never suggested anything except her continuance in her career. As if a woman had no right to rest! As if this everlasting battle were not bad for a woman!
In these humors her fatigue spoke for her. And fatigue is always the bitter critic of any trade that creates it. Frequently Sheila resolved to leave the stage. Often, as she fell into her bed and closed her lead-loaded eyelashes on her calcium-seared eyes and stretched her boards-weary soles down into the cool sheets, she said that she would exchange all the glories of Lecouvreur, Rachel, Bernhardt, and Duse for the greater glory of sleeping until she had slept enough.
When Pennock nagged her from her Eden in the morning Sheila would vow that as soon as this wretched play of that brute of a Vickery was produced she would never enter a theater again at the back door. If the Vickery play were the greatest triumph of the cycle, she would let somebody else—anybody else—have it. Mrs. Rhys and Dulcie Ormerod could toss pennies for it.
CHAPTER XXII
Eventually Vickery’s play was ready for production. At least Reben told him, with Job’s comfort:
“We’ve all worked at it till we don’t know what it’s about. We’ve changed everything in it, so let’s put it on and get rid of it.”
The weather of the rehearsal week for the Vickery play was barbarously hot. The theater at night was a sea of rippling fans. The house was none the less packed; the crowd was almost always the same. People had their theater nights as they had their church nights. The prices were very low and a seat could be had for the price of an ice-cream soda. People were no hotter in the theater than on their own porches, and the play took their minds off their thermometers.