Back of that glum curtain the actors, powdered, caparisoned, painted, wait in the wings like clowns for the crack of the whip—and yet also like soldiers about to receive the command to charge on trenches where unknown forces lie hidden. No one can tell whether they are to be hurled back in shame and confusion, or to sweep on in uproarious triumph. Their courage, their art, will be the same. The result will be history or oblivion, homage or ridicule.
It is an old story, an incessantly recurring story, a tragi-farce so commonplace that authors and actors and managers and critics make jokes of their failures and successes—afterward. But they are not jokes at the time.
It was no joke for the husband who had intrusted Sheila to the mercy of the public and the press, and who made one of the audience, though he quivered with an anguish of fear as each line was delivered, and an anguish of joy or woe as it scored or lapsed.
It was no joke to Eugene Vickery, lying in the quiet white room with the light low and one stolid stranger in white to sentinel him. It was hard not to be there where the lights were high, where the throngs heard his pen and ink made flesh and blood. It was hard not to know what the words he had put on paper sounded like to New York—the Big Town of his people. He wanted to see and hear and his soul would have run there if it could have lifted his body. But that it could not do.
It could lift thousands of hands to applause and lift a thousand voices to cry his name, but it could not lift his own hands or his own voice.
The nurse, who did not understand playwrights, tried to keep him quiet. She kept taking the sheet from his hands where they kept tugging at its edge. She forbade him to talk. She refused to tell him what time it was.
But he would say, “Now the overture’s beginning,” and then, later, “Now the curtain’s going up.” He tried to rise with it, but she pressed him back. Later he reckoned that the first act was over, and then that the second act was begun.
Then a telephoned message was brought to him that Mr. Reben telephoned to say, “the first act got over great.”
That almost lifted him to his feet, but he fell back, sighing, “He’d say it anyway, just to cheer me up.”