“You ruined one play for me, Mr. Reben, but you can’t monkey with this one. I thought of all the objections you’ve made and a hundred others when I was writing it. I liked it this way then, and I knew as much then as I do now—only I was red-hot at the time, and I’m not going to fool with it in cold blood.”
There were arguments and instances enough against him, and Reben and Batterson showered him with stories of plays that had been saved from disaster by collaboration. He answered with stories of plays that had succeeded without it and plays that had crashed in spite of it.
“It’s all a gamble,” he cried. “Let’s throw our coin on one number and either make or lose. Anyway, my contract says you can’t alter a line without my consent, and you’ll never get that. It’s my last play, and it’s my own play, and they’ve got to take it or leave it just as I write it.”
They yielded more in deference to his feelings than to his art.
At last the company turned to charge down upon New York. They arrived at three o’clock on a Sunday morning.
As Sheila and Mrs. Vining rode through the streets to their hotel they saw on all sides the work of the advertising men. On bill-boards were big “stands” with Sheila’s name in letters as big as herself. On smaller boards her full-length portrait smiled at her from “three sheets.” In the windows were “half-sheets.” Even the garbage-cans proclaimed her name.
Fame was a terrifying thing.
Sunday was given over to a prolonged dress-rehearsal beginning at noon and lasting till four the next morning. At about three o’clock in the afternoon Eugene Vickery in the midst of a wrangle over a scene was overcome with his illness.
A doctor who was brought in haste picked him up and carried him to a taxicab and sped with him to a hospital. The troupe was staggered like a line of infantry in which the first shell drops. Then it closed together and went on.
The next day Sheila visited Eugene and never found a rôle so hard to play as the character of Hope at the bedside of Despair.