While Sheila was drafting herself a future, Eldon was gnashing his teeth in a pillory of inaction. He could make no step forward and he could not back out. He had taken cheap and nasty lodgings in the same boarding-house with Vincent Tuell, who added to his depression by his constant distress. Tuell could not sleep nights or days; he filled Eldon’s ears with endless denunciations of the stage and with cynical advice to chuck it while he could. Eldon would probably have taken Tuell’s advice if Tuell had not urged it so tyrannically. In self-defense Eldon would protest:
“Why don’t you leave it yourself, man? You ought to be in the hospital or at home being nursed.”
And Tuell would snarl: “Oh, I’d chuck it quick enough if I could. But I’ve got no other trade, and there’s the pair of kiddies in school—and the wife. She’s sick, too, and I’m here. God! what a business! It wouldn’t be so bad if I were getting anywhere except older. But I’ve got a rotten part and I’m rotten in it. Every night I have to breeze in and breeze out and fight like the devil to keep from dying on the job. And never a laugh do I get. It’s one of those parts that reads funny and rehearses the company into convulsions and then plays like a column from the telephone-book. I’ve done everything I could. I put in all the old sure-fire business. I never lie down. I trip over rugs, I make funny faces, I wear funny clothes, but does anybody smile?—nagh! I can’t even fool the critics. I haven’t had a clipping I could send home to the wife since I left the big town.”
Eldon had been as puzzled as Tuell was. He had watched the expert actor using an encyclopedia of tricks, and never achieving success. Tuell usually came off dripping with sweat. The moment he reached the wings his grin fell from him like a cheap comic mask over a tragic grimace of real pain and despair. In addition to his mental distress, his physical torment was incessant. In his boarding-house Tuell gave himself up to lamentations without end. Eldon begged him to see a doctor, but Tuell did not believe in doctors.
“They always want to get their knives into you,” he would growl. “They’re worse than the critics.”
One day Eldon made the acquaintance of a young physician named Edie, who had recently hung a sign in the front window and used the parlor as an office during certain morning hours. Patients came rarely, and the physician berated his profession as violently as Tuell his. Eldon persuaded the doctor to employ some of his leisure in examining Tuell. He persuaded Tuell to submit, and the doctor’s verdict came without hesitation or delicacy:
“Appendicitis, old man. The quicker you’re operated on the better for you.”
“What did I tell you?” Tuell snarled. “Didn’t I say they were like critics? Their only interest in you is to knife you.”
The young doctor laughed. “Perhaps the critics turn up the truth now and then, too.”
But Tuell answered, bitterly: “Well, I’ve got to stand them. I haven’t got to stand for you other butchers.”