Bret, still looking for proof that actors were not like other people, asked Crashaw what the devil he was doing in that galley.
“It’s my pet club,” said Crashaw, “and I belong to a dozen of the best. It’s the most prosperous and the most densely populated club in town, and the only one where a man can always find somebody in a cheerful humor at any hour of the day or night, and I like it best because it’s the only club where people aren’t always acting.”
“What!” Bret exclaimed.
“I mean it,” said Crashaw. “In the other clubs the millionaire is always playing rich, the society man always at his lah-de-dah, the engineer or the painter or the athlete is always posing. But these fellows know all about acting and they don’t permit it here. So that forces them to be natural. It’s the warmest-hearted, gayest-hearted, most human, clubbiest club in town, and you ought to belong.”
Bret gasped at the thought and rather suspected Crashaw than absolved the club.
Bret was introduced to various members, and even his suspicious mind could not tell which were actors and which business men, for there are as many types of actor as there are types of mankind, and as many grades of prosperity, industry, and virtue.
Some of the clubmen joined Bret’s group, and he was finally persuaded to give Vickery up for lost and eat his luncheon with an eminent tragedian who told uproarious stories, and the very buffoon who had conquered him at the benefit in the Metropolitan Opera House. The buffoon had an attack of the blues, but it yielded to the hilarity of the tragedian, and he departed recharged with electricity for his matinée, where he would coerce another mob into a state of rapture.
It suddenly came over Bret that this club of actors was as benevolent an institution in its own way as any monastery. Even the triumphs of players, which they were not encouraged to recount in this sanctuary, were triumphs of humanity. When an actor boasts how he “killed ’em in Waco” it does not mean that he shot anybody, took anybody’s money away, or robbed any one of his pride or health; it means that he made a lot of people laugh or thrilled them or persuaded them to salubrious tears. It is the conceit of a benefactor bragging of his philanthropies. Surely as amiable an egotism as could be!
Bret was now in the frame of mind that Sheila was born in. He felt that the stage did a noble work and therefore conferred a nobility upon its people.
All this he was mulling over in the back of his head while he was listening to anecdotes that brought the tears of laughter to his eyes. He needed the laughter; it washed his bitter heart clean as a sheep’s. Most of the stories were strictly men’s stories, but those abound wherever men gather together. The difference was that these were better told.