The thought of separating from him for a whole theatrical season grew intolerable. Fatigue and discouragement preyed on her reserve of strength. Fear of the public swept her with flashes of cold sweat. She could not sleep; herds of nightmares stampeded across her lonely bed. She saw herself stricken with forgetfulness, with aphasia; she saw the audiences hooting at her; she read the most venomous criticism; she saw herself in train wrecks and theater fires. She saw the toppling scenery crushing her, or weight-bags dropping on her from the flies.
The production was heavy and complicated and Reben believed in many scenery rehearsals. There were endless periods of waiting for stage carpenters to repair mistakes, for property-men to provide important articles omitted from the property plot. The big set came in with the stairway on the wrong side. Almost the whole business of the act had to be reversed and learned over again. The last-act scene arrived in a color that made Sheila’s prettiest costume hideous. She must have a new gown or the scene must be repainted. A new gown was decided on; this detail meant hours more of fittings at the dressmaker’s.
The final rehearsals were merciless. Sheila left Bret at the stage door at ten o’clock one morning and did not put her head out of the theater till three o’clock the next morning. And five hours later she must stand for costume photographs in a broiling gallery.
Reben, utterly discouraged by the look of the play in its setting, feared to bring it into New York even after the two weeks of trial performances he had scheduled. An opportunity to get into Chicago turned up, and he canceled his other bookings. Sheila was liked in Chicago and he determined to make for there. The first performance was shifted from Red Bank, New Jersey, to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Sheila was in dismay and Bret grew unmanageable. The only excuse for the excitement of both was the fact that lovers have always been the same. Romeo and Juliet would not wait for Romeo to come back from banishment. They had to be married secretly at once. The world has always had its Gretna Greens for frantic couples.
So this frantic couple—not content with all its other torments—must inflict mutual torment. Bret loved Sheila so bitterly that he could not endure the ordeal she was undergoing. The wearier and more harried she grew, the more he wearied and harrowed her with his doubts, his demands, his fears of losing her. He was so jealous of her ambition that he made a crime of it.
He looked at her with farewell in his eyes and shook his head as over her grave and groaned: “I’m going to lose you, Sheila. You’re not for me.”
This frightened her. She was even less willing to lose him than he her. When she demanded why he should say such things he explained that if she left him now he would never catch up with her again. Her career was too much for him, and her loss was more than he could bear.
She mothered him with eyes of such devoted pity that he said: “Don’t stare at me like that. You look a hundred and fifty years old.”
She felt so. She was his nurse and his medicine, and she was at that epoch of her soul when her function was to make a gift of herself.