“I don’t really belong on the stage, you know. I haven’t a big enough part to show how bad an actor I really could be if I had the chance. But I set my mind on going on the stage, and go I went.”
“Did you find it hard to get a position?”
“Well, when I left college and the question of my profession came up, dad and I had several hot-and-heavies. Finally he swore that if I didn’t accept a job in his office I need never darken his door again. Business of turning out of house. Father shaking fist. Son exit center, swearing he will never come back again. Sound of door slamming heard off.”
Sheila still loved life in theatrical terms. “But what did your poor mother do?” she said.
A film seemed to veil Eldon’s eyes as he mumbled: “She wasn’t there. She was spared that.” Then he gulped down his private grief and went on with his more congenial self-derision: “I left home, feeling like Columbus going to discover America. I didn’t expect to star the first year, but I thought I could get some kind of a job. I went to New York and called on all the managers. I was such an ignoramus that I hadn’t heard of the agencies. I got to know several office-boys very well before one of them told me about the employment bureaus. Well, you know all about that agency game.”
Sheila had been spared the passage through this Inferno on her way to the Purgatory of apprenticeship. But she had heard enough about it to feel sad for him, and she spared him any allusions to her superior luck. Still, she encouraged him to describe his own adventures.
He told of the hardships he encountered and the siege he laid to the theater before he found a breach in its walls to crawl through. Constantly he paused to apologize for his garrulity, but Sheila urged him on. She had been born within the walls and she knew almost nothing of the struggles that others met except from hearsay. And she had never heard say from just such a man with just such a determination. So she coaxed him on and on with his history, as Desdemona persuaded Othello to talk. With a greedy ear she devoured up his discourse and made him dilate all his pilgrimage. Only, Eldon was not a Blackmoor, and it was of his defeats and not his victories that he told. Which made him perhaps all the more attractive, seeing that he was well born and well made.
He laughed at his own ignorance, and felt none of the pity for himself that Sheila felt for him. When she praised his determination, he sneered at himself:
“It was just bull-headed stubbornness. I was ashamed to go back to my dad and eat veal, and so I didn’t eat much of anything for a long while. The only jobs I could get were off the stage, and I held them just long enough to save up for another try. How these actors keep alive I can’t imagine. I nearly starved to death. It wouldn’t have been much of a loss to the stage if I had, but it wasn’t much fun for me. I wore out my clothes and wore out my shoes and my overcoat and my hat. I wore out everything but my common sense. If I’d had any of that I’d have given up.”
Mrs. Vining moved uneasily. “If you’d had common sense you wouldn’t have tried to get on the stage.”