Reben had come down for the rehearsals. There were to be few of them—five mornings and Sunday. There was no chance to put in or take out. The actors could do no more than tack their lines to their positions.
Still Reben found so much fault with everything that Vickery was ready for the asylum. Sheila simply had to comfort him through the crisis. Eldon proceeded to complicate matters by developing into a fiend of jealousy. Fatigue and strain and the weather were all he could bear. The extra courtesies to Vickery were the final back-breaking straws.
He told Sheila he had a mind to throw the play. The distracted girl, realizing his irresponsible and perilous state, tried to tide him over the ordeal by adopting him and mothering him with melting looks and rapturous compliments. This course brought her into further difficulties with the peevish author.
While they were rehearsing Vickery’s play they were of course performing another.
By some unconscious irony the manager had chosen to revive a melodrama of arctic adventure, thinking perhaps to cool the audience with the journey to boreal regions. The actors were forced to dress in polar-bear pelts, and each costume was an ambulant Turkish bath. The men wore long wigs and false beards. The spirit gum that held the false hair in place frequently washed away from the raining pores and there were astonishingly sudden shaves that sent the audience into peals of laughter.
Eldon congratulated himself that his face at least was free, for he was a faithful Eskimo. But in one scene, which had been rehearsed without the properties, it was his duty to lose his life in saving his master’s life. On the first night of the performance the hero and the villain struggled on two big wabbly blocks of blue papier-maché supposed to represent icebergs. Eldon, the Eskimo, was slain and fell dead to magnificent applause. But his perspiratory glands refused to die and his diaphragm continued to pant.
And then his grateful master delivered a farewell eulogy over him. And as a last tribute spread across his face a great suffocating polar-bear skin! There were fifteen minutes more of the act, and Sheila in the wings wondered if Eldon would be alive or completely Desdemonatized when the curtain fell.
He lived, but for years after he felt smothered whenever he remembered that night.
During the rest of the week his master’s farewell tribute was omitted at Eldon’s request. But it was impossible to change the scene to Florida and the arctic costumes had to be endured. Sheila’s own costumes were almost fatal to her.
And that was the play they played afternoons and evenings while they devoted their mornings to whipping Vickery’s drama into shape.