“ ’Gene here,” said Bret, “has been roasting me for keeping you off the stage. I want him to hear me tell you that I’m not keeping you off the stage. Do you want to go on the stage, Sheila?”
Sheila’s voice was housewifely and matter-of-fact. “Of course not. I want to go to bed. And it’s time ’Gene was in his. Send him home.”
She heard Bret cry, “You see!” and heard his triumphant laughter as he clapped Vickery on the shoulder. Then she went to her room and locked herself in. The click of the bolt had the sound of a jailer’s key. She was a prisoner in a cell, in a solitary confinement, since her husband’s soul was leagues away from any sympathy with hers. She paced the floor like a caged panther, and when the sobs came she fell on her knees and silenced them in her pillow lest Bret hear her. She had made her renunciation and plighted her troth. She would keep faith with her lover though she felt that it was killing her. Her soul was dying of starvation.
CHAPTER XLIX
Vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his play for Eldon. For months he toiled and moiled upon it. Sometimes he would write all day and all night upon a scene, and work himself up into a state of what he called soul-sweat.
He would go to bed patting himself on the shoulder and talking to himself as if he were a draught-horse and a Pegasus combined: “Good boy, ’Gene! Good work, old Genius!”
In the morning he would wake feeling all the after-effects of a prolonged carouse. He would reach for a cigarette and review with contempt all he had previously done. No critic could have reviled his work with less sympathy.
“By night I write plays and by day I write criticisms,” he would say.
Lazily he would cough himself out of bed, cough through his tub and into his clothes, and go to his table like a surly butcher to carve his play with long slashes of the blue pencil.
At length he had it as nearly finished as any play is likely to be before it has been read. He went to New York, where Eldon was playing, and easily persuaded him to listen to the drama. Vickery would not explain the story of the play beforehand.