They were hardly interested in the groups lingering on the stage in quiet, after-the-funeral conversation. But the situation was vitally interesting to the actors and the staff. Without Sheila the play would be starless. How could it go on? The company would be disbanded, the few weeks of salary would not have paid for the long rehearsals or the costumes. The people would be taken back to New York and dumped on the market again, and at a time when most of the opportunities were gone.
It meant a relapse to poverty for some of them, a postponement of ambitions and of loves, a further deferment of old bills; it meant children taken out of good schools, parents cut off from their allowances; it meant all that the sudden closing of any other factory means.
The disaster was so unexpected and so outrageous that some of them found it incredible. They could not believe that Sheila would not come back and patch up a peace with Reben and Eldon and let the success continue. Successes were so rare and so hard to make that it was unbelievable that this tremendous gold-mine should be closed down because of a little quarrel, a little jealousy, a little rough temper and hot language.
Eldon alone did not believe that Sheila would return. He had loved her and lost her. He had known her great ambitions, how lofty and beautiful they had been. He had dreamed of climbing the heights at her side; then he had learned of her marriage and had seen how completely her art had ceased to be the big dream of her soul, how completely it had been shifted to a place secondary to love.
No, Sheila would not make peace. Sheila was dead to this play, and this play dead without her, and without this play Sheila would die. Of this he felt solemnly assured.
Therefore when the others expressed their sympathy for the attack he had endured, or made jokes about it, he did not boast of what he might have done, or apologize for what he had left undone, or try to laugh it off or lie it off.
He could think only solemnly of the devastation in an artist’s career and the deep damnation of her taking off.
Batterson said, “Say, that was a nasty one he handed you.”
Eldon confessed: “Yes, it nearly knocked my head off; but it was coming to me.”
“Why didn’t you hand him one back?”