At the rehearsal the first of Prior’s new scenes was gone over. It emphasized the “heart-interest” with a vengeance. Sheila trembled to think what her husband would do when he saw it played. She was glad that it was not to be tried until the following week. Every moment of postponement for the inevitable storm was so much respite.
They rehearsed all afternoon. The struggle for dinner was more trying than for the luncheon. The performance was early and hasty, as it was necessary to catch a train immediately after the last curtain, in order to reach Bay City for the Saturday matinée. Worse yet, they had to leave the car at four o’clock in the morning.
This time it was Bret who was hard to waken. His big body was so famished for sleep that Sheila was afraid she would have to leave him on the train. She was wiry, and her enthusiasm for the battle gave her a courage that her disgusted husband lacked. There was no carriage at the station and Bret stumbled and swore drowsily at the dark streets and the intolerable conditions.
He had nothing to interest him except the infinite annoyances and exactions of his wife’s career. There was nothing to reward him for his privations except to lumber along in her wake like a coal-barge hauled by a tug.
His pride was mutinous, and it seemed a degradation to permit his bride to run from place to place as if she were a fugitive from justice. He had wealth and the habit of luxury, and his idea of a honeymoon was the ultimate opposite of this frenzied gipsying.
He had always understood that actors were a lazy folk whose life was one of easy vagabondage, with all the vices that indolence fosters. Three days of trouping had wrecked his strength; yet he had done none of the work but the travel.
When he protested the next morning at early breakfast that the tour would be the death of them both Sheila looked up from the part she was studying and laughed:
“Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. We haven’t made any long jumps yet. The route-sheet says we leave Bay City at one o’clock to-night and get to Ishpeming at half past four to-morrow afternoon. We rehearse Sunday night and all day Monday, play that night, and take a train at midnight back to Menominee. From there we rush back to Calumet, and then on to Duluth.”
Bret set his coffee-cup down hard and growled, “Well, this is where I leave you.”
He spoke truer than he knew. He had kept his family informed of his whereabouts by night-letters, in which he alluded to the blissful time he ought to have been having. When he took Sheila to the theater for the matinée he found a telegram for him.