Eldon apologized for his friend’s rudeness, but the doctor took no offense: “It’s his pain that’s talking,” he said. “He’s a sick man. He doesn’t know how sick he is.”
One matinée day Tuell was like a hyena in the wings. He swore even at Batterson. On the stage he was more violently merry than ever. After the performance Eldon looked into his dressing-room and asked him to go to dinner with him. Tuell refused gruffly. He would not eat to-day. He would not take off his make-up. The sweat was everywhere about his greasy face. His jaw hung down and he panted like a sick dog. Eldon offered to bring him in some food—sandwiches or something. Tuell winced with nausea at the mention. Then an anguish twisted through him like a great steel gimlet. He groaned, unashamed. Eldon could only watch in ignorant helplessness. When the spasm was over he said:
“You’ve got to have a doctor, old man.”
“I guess so,” Tuell sighed. “Get that young fellow, Edie. He won’t rob me much. And he’ll wait for his fee.”
Eldon made all haste to fetch Edie from the boarding-house. They returned to find Tuell on the floor of his room, writhing and moaning, unheeded in the deserted theater. The doctor gave Eldon a telephone number and told him to demand an ambulance at once.
Tuell heard the word, and broke out in such fierce protest that the doctor countermanded the order.
“I can’t go to any hospital now,” Tuell raged. “Haven’t you any sense? You know there’s an evening performance. Get me through to-night, and I can rest all day to-morrow. I’ve got to play to-night. I’ve got to! There’s no understudy ready.”
He played. They set a chair for him in the wings and the physician waited there for him, piercing his skin with pain-deadening drugs every time he left the stage. There was sympathy enough from the company. Even Batterson was gentle, his fierce eyes fiercer with the cruelty of the situation. The house was packed, and “ringing down on capacity” is not done.
Tuell sat in a stupor, breathing hard like a groggy prize-fighter. But whenever his cue came it woke him as if a ringside gong had shrilled. He flung off his suffering and marched out to his punishment. Only, to-night, somehow, he lacked his usual speed. The suffering and the bromides dulled him so that in place of dashing on the stage he sauntered on; in place of slamming his lines back he just uttered them.
And somehow the laughter came that had never come before—the laughter the author had imagined and had won from the company at the first reading from the script.