Cassard, the manager, once said that he could tell if a play were a success by merely passing the theater an hour after the performance was over. A more certain test at the Odeon Theater was the manner of Mr. Chittick, the box-office man. If he laid aside his nail-file without a sigh and proved patient and gracious with the autobiographical woman who loitered over a choice of seats and their date, the play was a failure. If Mr. Chittick insulted the brisk business man who pushed the exact sum of money over the ledge and weakly requested “the two best, please” the play was a triumph. Mr. Chittick was a very model of affability while Incledon’s play occupied the stage of the unoccupied theater.
Reben’s motto was “The critics can make or break the first three weeks of a play and no more. After that they are forgotten.” If he saw the business growing by so much as five dollars a night he hung on. But the Incledon play sagged steadily. At the end of a week Reben had the company rehearsing another play called “Your Uncle Dudley,” an old manuscript he had bought years ago to please a star he quarreled with later.
Reben talked big for a while about forcing the run; then he talked smaller and smaller with the receipts. Finally he announced that “owing to previous bookings it will be necessary,” etc. “Mr. Reben is looking for another theater to which to transfer this masterwork of Sir Ralph Incledon. He may take it to Boston, then to Chicago for an all-summer run.”
Eventually he took it to Mr. Cain’s storage warehouse.
“Your Uncle Dudley,” appealed to Reben as a stop-gap. It would cost little. The cast was small; only one set was required. The title rôle fitted Brereton to a nicety. He offered Sheila the heroine, who was a “straight.” She cannily chose a smaller part that had “character.” The play was flung on “cold”—that is, without an out-of-town try-out.
It caught the public at “the psychological moment,” to use a denatured French expression. The morning after the first night the telephone drove Mr. Chittick frantic. He almost snapped the head off a dear old lady who wanted to buy two boxes. It was a hopeless success.
The only sour face about the place except his was the star’s. The critics accused Tom Brereton of giving “a creditable performance.” All the raptures were for Sheila. She was lauded as the discovery of the year.
The critics are always “discovering” people, as Columbus discovered the Indians, who had been there a long while before. Two critics told Reben in the lobby between the acts that there was star-stuff in Sheila. He thanked them both for giving him a novel idea: “I never thought of that, old man.” And the old men walked away like praised children. Like children, they were very, very innocent when they were good and very, very incorrigible when they were horrid.
Tom Brereton behaved badly, to Sheila’s thinking. To his thinking she was the evil spirit. He gave one of those examples of good business policy which is called “professional jealousy” in the theater. He did what any manufacturer does who resists the substitution of a “just as good” for his own widely advertised ware. Tom Brereton was the star of the piece according to his contracts and his prestige. He had toiled lifelong to attain his height and he was old enough and wise enough to realize that he must maintain himself stubbornly or new ambitions would crowd him from his private peak.
Sheila had youth, femininity, and beauty, none of which qualities were Brereton’s. The critics and the public acclaimed the comet and neglected the planet. Reben’s press agent, Starr Coleman, flooded the press with Sheila’s photographs and omitted Brereton’s, partly because the papers will always give more space to a pretty woman than a plain man, and would rather publish the likeness of a rear-row chorus girl than of the eccentric comedian who heads the cast.