CHAPTER XLIII

A honeymoon is like a blue lagoon divinely beautiful, with a mimicry of all heaven in its deeps; blinding sweet in the sun, and almost intolerably comfortable in the moon.

But by and by the atoll that circles it like a wedding-ring proves to be a bit narrow and interferes with the view of the big sea pounding at its outer edges. The calm becomes monotonous, and at the least puff of wind the boat is on the reefs. They are coral reefs, but they cut like knives and hurt the worse for being jewelry.

To Bret and Sheila the newspaper storm over her departure from the theater, her elopement from success, was like the surf on the shut-out sea.

The Winfield influence had suppressed most of the newspaper comment in the home papers, but the people of Blithevale read the metropolitan journals, and Sheila’s name flared through those for many days.

When the news element had been exhausted there were crumbs enough left for several symposiums on the subject of “Stage Marriages,” “Actresses as Wives,” “Actresses as Mothers,” “The Home _vs._ the Theater,” and all the twists an ingenious press can give to a whimsy of public interest.

Bret and Sheila suffered woefully from the appalling pandemonium their secret wedding had raised, and Winfield began to be convinced that the policy of the mailed fist, the blow and the word, had not brought him dignity. But it had brought him his wife, and she was at home; and when they could not escape the articles on “Why Actresses Go Back to the Stage,” she laughed at the prophecies that she would return, as so many others had done.

“They haven’t all gone back,” she smiled. “And I am one of those who never will, for I’ve found peace and bliss and contentment. I’ve found my home.”

They were relieved of all that had been unusual in their marriage, and they shared and inspired the usual raptures, which were no less poignant for being immemorially usual. This year’s June was the most beautiful June that ever was, while it was the newest June.

Their honeymoon was usual in being sublime. It was also usual in running into frequent shoals and reefs.

The first reef was Bret’s mother. Bret had always been amazed at the professional jealousy of actors and their contests for the largest type and the center of the stage. Suddenly he was himself the center of the stage and his attention was the large type. He was dismayed to behold with what immediate instinct his mother and his wife proceeded to take mutual umbrage at each other’s interest in him, and to take astonishing pain from his efforts to divide his heart into equal portions.

Sheila recognized that poor Mrs. Winfield had a right to her son’s support in a time of such grief, but she felt that she herself had a right to some sort of honeymoon. And being a stranger in the town and all, she had especial claim to consideration.

Sheila told Bret one day: “Of course, honey, your mother is a perfect dear and I don’t wonder you love her, but she’d like to poison me— Now wait, dearie. Of course I don’t mean just that, but—well, she’s like an understudy. An understudy doesn’t exactly want the star to break her neck or anything, but if a train ran over her she’d bear up bravely.”

Another reef was the factory. Of course Sheila expected her husband to pay the proper attention to his business and she wanted him to be ambitious, but she had not anticipated how little time was left in a day after the necessary office hours, meal hours, and sleep hours were deducted.

She wrote her mother:

Bret is an ideal husband and I’m ideally happy, of course, but women off the stage are terrible loafers. They just sit in the window and watch the procession go by.

When I chucked Reben I said, “Thank Heaven, I don’t have to go on playing that same old part for two or three years night after night, matinée after matinée.” But that’s nothing to the record of the household drama. This is the scene plot of my daily performance:

SCENE: Home of the Winfields. TIME: Yesterday, to-day, and forever.