The Story of a Play
W >>
W. D. Howells >> The Story of a Play
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 THE STORY OF A PLAY
A Novel
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD" "AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY" ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1898
W. D. HOWELLS'S WORKS.
_IN CLOTH BINDING._
Copyright, 1898, BY W. D. HOWELLS.
_Electrotyped by J. A. Howells & Co., Jefferson, Ohio._
THE STORY OF A PLAY.
I.
The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell's play had so far
made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt justified in
taking the road with a combination of his own. He met the author at a
dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they were introduced with a
facile flourish of praise from the journalist who brought them together,
as the very men who were looking for each other, and who ought to be
able to give the American public a real American drama. The actor, who
believed he had an ideal of this drama, professed an immediate interest
in the kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying to do, and asked him
to come the next day, if he did not mind its being Sunday, and talk the
play over with him.
He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at about the hour people were
getting home from church, and he asked the author to join him. But
Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he hid his impatience of the
actor's politeness as well as he could, and began at the first moment
possible: "The idea of my play is biblical; we're still a very biblical
people." He had thought of the fact in seeing so many worshippers
swarming out of the churches.
"That is true," said the actor.
"It's the old idea of the wages of sin. I should like to call it that."
"The name has been used, hasn't it?"
"I shouldn't mind; for I want to get a new effect from the old notion,
and it would be all the stronger from familiar association with the
name. I want to show that the wages of sin is more sinning, which is the
very body of death."
"Well?"
"Well, I take a successful man at the acme of his success, and study him
in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in a
way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings;
and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable
sort--a material success that is gross and palpable. I have to use a
large canvas, as big as Shakespeare's, in fact, and I put in a great
many figures."
"That's right," said the actor. "You want to keep the stage full, with
people coming and going."
"There's a lot of coming and going, and a lot of incidents, to keep the
spectator interested, and on the lookout for what's to happen next. The
whole of the first act is working up to something that I've wanted to
see put on the stage for a good while, or ever since I've thought of
writing for the stage, and that is a large dinner, one of the public
kind."
"Capital!" said the actor.
"I've seen a good deal of that sort of thing as a reporter; you know
they put us at a table off to one side, and we see the whole thing, a
great deal better than the diners themselves do. It's a banquet, given
by a certain number of my man's friends, in honor of his fiftieth
birthday, and you see the men gathering in the hotel parlor--well, you
can imagine it in almost any hotel--and Haxard is in the foreground.
Haxard is the hero's name, you know."
"It's a good name," the actor mused aloud. "It has a strong sound."
"Do you like it? Well, Haxard," Maxwell continued, "is there in the
foreground, from the first moment the curtain rises, receiving his
friends, and shaking hands right and left, and joking and laughing with
everybody--a very small joke makes a very large laugh on occasions like
that, and I shall try to give some notion of the comparative size of the
joke and the laugh--and receiving congratulations, that give a notion of
what the dinner is for, and the kind of man he is, and how universally
respected and all that, till everybody has come; and then the doors
between the parlor and the dining-room are rolled back, and every man
goes out with his own wife, or his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt,
if he hasn't got a wife; I saw them do that once, at a big commercial
dinner I reported."
"Ah, I was afraid it was to be exclusively a man's dinner!" the actor
interrupted.
"Oh, no," Maxwell answered, with a shade of vexation. "That wouldn't do.
You couldn't have a scene, or, at least, not a whole act, without women.
Of course I understand that. Even if you could keep the attention of the
audience without them, through the importance of the intrigue, still you
would have to have them for the sake of the stage-picture. The drama is
literature that makes a double appeal; it appeals to the sense as well
as the intellect, and the stage is half the time merely a picture-frame.
I had to think that out pretty early."
The actor nodded. "You couldn't too soon."
"It wouldn't do to have nothing but a crowd of black coats and white
shirt-fronts on the stage through a whole act. You want color, and a lot
of it, and you can only get it, in our day, with the women's costumes.
Besides, they give movement and life. After the dinner begins they're
supposed to sparkle all through. I've imagined the table set down the
depth of the stage, with Haxard and the nominal host at the head,
fronting the audience, and the people talking back and forth on each
side, and I let the ladies do most of the talking, of course. I mean to
have the dinner served through all the courses, and the waiters coming
and going; the events will have to be hurried, and the eating merely
sketched, at times; but I should keep the thing in pretty perfect form,
till it came to the speaking. I shall have to cut that a good deal, but
I think I can give a pretty fair notion of how they butter the object of
their hospitality on such occasions; I've seen it and heard it done
often enough. I think, perhaps, I shall have the dinner an act by
itself. There are only four acts in the play now, and I'll have to make
five. I want to give Haxard's speech as fully as possible, for that's
what I study the man in, and make my confidences to the audience about
him. I shall make him butter himself, but all with the utmost humility,
and brag of everything that he disclaims the merit of."
The actor rose and reached across the table for the sugar. "That's a
capital notion. That's new. That would make a hit--the speech would."
"Do you think so?" returned the author. "_I_ thought so. I believe that
in the hands of a good actor the speech could be made tremendously
telling. I wouldn't have a word to give away his character, his nature,
except the words of his own mouth, but I would have them do it so
effectually that when he gets through the audience will be fairly 'onto
him,' don't you know."
"Magnificent!" said the actor, pouring himself some more cocoa.
Maxwell continued: "In the third act--for I see that I shall have to
make it the third now--the scene will be in Haxard's library, after he
gets home from the complimentary dinner, at midnight, and he finds a man
waiting for him there--a man that the butler tells him has called
several times, and was so anxious to see him that Mrs. Haxard has given
orders to let him wait. Oh, I ought to go back a little, and explain--"
"Yes, do!" The actor stirred his cocoa with mounting interest. "Yes,
don't leave anything out."
"I merely meant to say that in the talk in the scene, or the act, before
the dinner--I shall have two acts, but with no wait between them; just
let down the curtain and raise it again--it will come out that Haxard is
not a Bostonian by birth, but has come here since the war from the
Southwest, where he went, from Maine, to grow up with the country, and
is understood to have been a sort of quiescent Union man there; it's
thought to be rather a fine thing the way he's taken on Boston, and
shown so much local patriotism and public spirit and philanthropy, in
the way he's brought himself forward here. People don't know a great
deal about his past, but it's understood to have been very creditable. I
shall have to recast that part a little, and lengthen the delay before
he comes on, and let the guests, or the hosts--for _they're_ giving
_him_ the dinner--have time to talk about him, and free their minds in
honor of him behind his back, before they begin to his face."
"Never bring your principal character on at once," the actor
interjected.
"No," Maxwell consented. "I see that wouldn't have done." He went on:
"Well, as soon as Haxard turns up the light in his library, the man
rises from the lounge where he has been sitting, and Haxard sees who it
is. He sees that it is a man whom he used to be in partnership with in
Texas, where they were engaged in some very shady transactions. They get
caught in one of them--I haven't decided yet just what sort of
transaction it was, and I shall have to look that point up; I'll get
some law-student to help me--and Haxard, who wasn't Haxard then, pulls
out and leaves his partner to suffer the penalty. Haxard comes North,
and after trying it in various places, he settles here, and marries, and
starts in business and prospers on, while the other fellow takes their
joint punishment in the penitentiary. By the way, it just occurs to me!
I think I'll have it that Haxard has killed a man, a man whom he has
injured; he doesn't mean to kill him, but he has to; and this fellow is
knowing to the homicide, but has been prevented from getting onto
Haxard's trail by the consequences of his own misdemeanors; that will
probably be the best way out. Of course it all has to transpire, all
these facts, in the course of the dialogue which the two men have with
each other in Haxard's library, after a good deal of fighting away from
the inevitable identification on Haxard's part. After the first few
preliminary words with the butler at the door before he goes in to find
the other man--his name is Greenshaw--"
"That's a good name, too," said the actor.
"Yes, isn't it? It has a sort of probable sound, and yet it's a made-up
name. Well, I was going to say--"
"And I'm glad you have it a homicide that Haxard is guilty of, instead
of a business crime of some sort. That sort of crime never tells with an
audience," the actor observed.
"No," said Maxwell. "Homicide is decidedly better. It's more
melodramatic, and I don't like that, but it will be more appreciable, as
a real sin, to most of the audience; we steal and cheat so much, and we
kill comparatively so little in the North. Well, I was going to say that
I shall have this whole act to consist entirely of the passage between
the two men. I shall let it begin with a kind of shiver creeping over
the spectator, when he recognizes the relation between them, and I hope
I shall be able to make it end with a shudder, for Haxard must see from
the first moment, and he must let the audience see at last, that the
only way for him to save himself from his old crime is to commit a new
one. He must kill the man who saw him kill a man."
"That's good," the actor thoughtfully murmured, as if tasting a pleasant
morsel to try its flavor. "Excellent."
Maxwell laughed for pleasure, and went on: "He arranges to meet the man
again at a certain time and place, and that is the last of Greenshaw. He
leaves the house alone; and the body of an unknown man is found floating
up and down with the tide under the Long Bridge. There are no marks of
violence; he must have fallen off the bridge in the dark, and been
drowned; it could very easily happen. Well, then comes the most
difficult part of the whole thing; I have got to connect the casualty
with Haxard in the most unmistakable way, unmistakable to the audience,
that is; and I have got to have it brought home to him in a supreme
moment of his life. I don't want to have him feel remorse for it; that
isn't the modern theory of the criminal; but I do want him to be anxious
to hide his connection with it, and to escape the consequences. I don't
know but I shall try another dinner-scene, though I am afraid it would
be a risk."
The actor said, "I don't know. It might be the very thing. The audience
likes a recurrence to a distinctive feature. It's like going back to an
effective strain in music."
"Yes," Maxwell resumed, "slightly varied. I might have a private dinner
this time; perhaps a dinner that Haxard himself is giving. Towards the
end the talk might turn on the case of the unknown man, and the guests
might discuss it philosophically together; Haxard would combat the
notion of a murder, and even of a suicide; he would contend for an
accident, pure and simple. All the fellows would take a turn at the
theory, but the summing-up opinion I shall leave to a legal mind,
perhaps the man who had made the great complimentary speech at the
public dinner to Haxard in the first act. I should have him warm to his
work, and lay it down to Haxard in good round fashion, against his
theory of accident. He could prove to the satisfaction of everybody that
the man who was last seen with the drowned man--or was supposed to have
been seen with him--according to some very sketchy evidence at the
inquest, which never amounted to anything--was the man who pushed him
off the bridge. He could gradually work up his case, and end the
argument with a semi-jocular, semi-serious appeal to Haxard himself,
like, 'Why, suppose it was your own case,' and so forth, and so forth,
and so forth, and then suddenly stop at something he notices queer in
Haxard, who is trying to get to his feet. The rest applaud: 'That's
right! Haxard has the floor,' and so on, and then Haxard slips back into
his chair, and his head falls forward---- I don't like death-scenes on
the stage. They're usually failures. But if this was managed simply, I
think it would be effective."
The actor left the table and began to walk about the room. "I shall want
that play. I can see my part in Haxard. I know just how I could make up
for him. And the play is so native, so American, that it will go like
wildfire."
The author heard these words with a swelling heart. He did not speak,
for he could not. He sat still, watching the actor as he paced to and
fro, histrionically rapt in his representation of an actor who had just
taken a piece from a young dramatist. "If you can realize that part as
you've sketched it to me," he said, finally, "I will play it
exclusively, as Jefferson does Rip Van Winkle. There are immense
capabilities in the piece. Yes, sir; that thing will run for years!"
"Of course," Maxwell found voice to say, "there is one great defect in
it, from the conventional point of view." The actor stopped and looked
at him. "There's no love-business."
"We must have that. But you can easily bring it in."
"By the head and shoulders, yes. But I hate love-making on the stage,
almost as much as I do dying. I never see a pair of lovers beyond the
footlights without wanting to kill them." The actor remained looking at
him over his folded arms, and Maxwell continued, with something like a
personal rancor against love-making, while he gave a little, bitter
laugh, "I might have it somehow that Haxard had killed a pair of
stage-lovers, and this was what Greenshaw had seen him do. But that
would have been justifiable homicide."
The actor's gaze darkened into a frowning stare, as if he did not quite
make out this kind of fooling. "All the world loves a lover," he said,
tentatively.
"I don't believe it does," said Maxwell, "except as it's stupid, and
loves anything that makes it laugh. It loves a comic lover, and in the
same way it loves a droll drunkard or an amusing madman."
"We shall have to have some sort of love-business," the actor returned,
with an effect of leaving the right interpretation of Maxwell's peculiar
humor for some other time. "The public wants it. No play would go
without it. You can have it subordinate if you like, but you have got
to have it. How old did you say Haxard was?"
"About fifty. Too old for a lover, unless you could make him in love
with some one else's wife, as he has one of his own already. But that
wouldn't do."
The actor looked as if he did not know why it would not do, but he said,
"He could have a daughter."
"Yes, and his daughter could have a lover. I had thought of something of
that kind, and of bringing in their ill-fated passion as an element of
the tragedy. We could have his disgrace break their hearts, and kill two
birds with one stone, and avenge a long-suffering race of playwrights
upon stage-lovers."
The actor laughed like a man of small humor, mellowly, but hollowly.
"No, no! We must have the love-affair end happily. You can manage that
somehow. Have you got the play roughed out at all?"
"Not in manuscript. I've only got it roughed out in my mind."
"Well, I want that play. That's settled. I can't do anything with it
this winter, but I should like to open with it next fall. Do you think
you could have it ready by the end of July?"
II.
They sat down and began to talk times and terms. They parted with a
perfect understanding, and Maxwell was almost as much deceived as the
actor himself. He went home full of gay hopes to begin work on the play
at once, and to realize the character of Haxard with the personality of
the actor in his eye. He heard nothing from him till the following
spring, when the actor wrote with all the ardor of their parting moment,
to say that he was coming East for the summer, and meant to settle down
in the region of Boston somewhere, so that they could meet constantly
and make the play what they both wanted. He said nothing to account for
his long silence, and he seemed so little aware of it that Maxwell might
very well have taken it for a simple fidelity to the understanding
between them, too unconscious to protest itself. He answered discreetly,
and said that he expected to pass the summer on the coast somewhere, but
was not yet quite certain where he should be; that he had not forgotten
their interview, and should still be glad to let him have the play if he
fancied it. Between this time and the time when the actor appeared in
person, he sent Maxwell several short notes, and two or three telegrams,
sufficiently relevant but not very necessary, and when his engagement
ended in the West, a fortnight after Maxwell was married, he telegraphed
again and then came through without a stop from Denver, where the
combination broke up, to Manchester-by-the-Sea. He joined the little
colony of actors which summers there, and began to play tennis and golf,
and to fish and to sail, almost without a moment's delay. He was not
very fond of any of these things, and in fact he was fond only of one
thing in the world, which was the stage; but he had a theory that they
were recreation, and that if he went in for them he was building himself
up for the season, which began early in September; he had appropriate
costumes for all of them, and no one dressed the part more perfectly in
tennis or golf or sailing or fishing. He believed that he ought to read
up in the summer, too, and he had the very best of the recent books, in
fiction and criticism, and the new drama. He had all of the translations
of Ibsen, and several of Maeterlinck's plays in French; he read a good
deal in his books, and he lent them about in the hotel even more. Among
the ladies there he had the repute of a very modern intellect, and of a
person you would never take for an actor, from his tastes. What his
tastes would have been if you had taken him for an actor, they could not
have said, perhaps, but probably something vicious, and he had not a
vice. He did not smoke, and he did not so much as drink tea or coffee;
he had cocoa for breakfast, and at lunch a glass of milk, with water at
dinner. He had a tint like the rose, and when he smiled or laughed,
which was often, from a constitutional amiability and a perfect
digestion, his teeth showed white and regular, and an innocent dimple
punctured either cheek. His name was Godolphin, for he had instinctively
felt that in choosing a name he might as well take a handsome one while
he was about it, and that if he became Godolphin there was no reason why
he should not become Launcelot, too. He did not put on these splendors
from any foible, but from a professional sense of their value in the
bills; and he was not personally characterized by them. As Launcelot
Godolphin he was simpler than he would have been with a simpler name,
and it was his ideal to be modest in everything that personally belonged
to him. He studied an unprofessional walk, and a very colloquial tone
in speaking. He was of course clean-shaven, but during the summer he let
his mustache grow, though he was aware that he looked better without it.
He was tall, and he carried himself with the vigor of his perfect
health; but on the stage he looked less than his real size, like a
perfectly proportioned edifice.
Godolphin wanted the Maxwells to come to his hotel in Manchester, but
there were several reasons for their not doing this; the one Maxwell
alleged was that they could not afford it. They had settled for the
summer, when they got home after their brief wedding journey, at a much
cheaper house in Magnolia, and the actor and the author were then only
three miles apart, which Mrs. Maxwell thought was quite near enough. "As
it is," she said, "I'm only afraid he'll be with you every moment with
his suggestions, and won't let you have any chance to work out your own
conceptions."
Godolphin had not failed to notify the public through the press that Mr.
Brice Maxwell had severed his connection with the Boston _Abstract_, for
the purpose of devoting himself to a new play for Mr. Launcelot
Godolphin, and he thought it would have been an effective touch if it
could have been truthfully reported that Mr. Godolphin and Mr. Maxwell
might be seen almost any day swinging over the roads together in the
neighborhood of Manchester, blind and deaf to all the passing, in their
discussion of the play, which they might almost be said to be
collaborating. But failing Maxwell's consent to anything of the sort,
Godolphin did the swinging over the roads himself, so far as the roads
lay between Manchester and Magnolia. He began by coming in the forenoon,
when he broke Maxwell up fearfully, but he was retarded by a waning of
his own ideal in the matter, and finally got to arriving at that hour in
the afternoon when Maxwell could be found revising his morning's work,
or lying at his wife's feet on the rocks, and now and then irrelevantly
bringing up a knotty point in the character or action for her criticism.
For these excursions Godolphin had equipped himself with a gray corduroy
sack and knickerbockers, and a stick which he cut from the alder
thicket; he wore russet shoes of ample tread, and very thick-ribbed
stockings, which became his stalwart calves.
Nothing could be handsomer than the whole effect he made in this
costume, and his honest face was a pleasure to look at, though its
intelligence was of a kind so wholly different from the intelligence of
Maxwell's face, that Mrs. Maxwell always had a struggle with herself
before she could allow that it was intelligence at all. He was very
polite to her; he always brought her flowers, and he opened doors, and
put down windows, and leaped to his feet for every imaginable occasion
of hers, in a way that Maxwell never did, and somehow a way that the
polite men of her world did not, either. She had to school herself to
believe him a gentleman, and she would not accept a certain vivid
cleanliness he had as at all aristocratic; she said it was too fresh,
and he ought to have carried a warning placard of "Paint." She found
that Godolphin had one great and constant merit: he believed in
Maxwell's genius as devoutly as she did herself. This did not prevent
him from coming every day with proposals for changes in the play, more
or less structural. At one time he wished the action laid in some other
country and epoch, so as to bring in more costume and give the carpenter
something to do; he feared that the severity of the _mise en scene_
would ruin the piece. At another time he wanted lines taken out of the
speeches of the inferior characters and put into his own, to fatten the
part, as he explained. At other times he wished to have paraphrases of
passages that he had brought down the house with in other plays written
into this; or scenes transposed, so that he would make a more effective
entrance here or there. There was no end to his inventions for spoiling
the simplicity and truthfulness of Maxwell's piece, which he yet
respected for the virtues in it, and hoped the greatest things from.
One afternoon he arrived with a scheme for a very up-to-date scene in
the last act; have it a supper instead of a dinner, and then have a
skirt-dancer introduced, as society people had been having Carmencita.
"When Haxard dies, you know," he explained, "it would be tremendously
effective to have the woman catch him in her arms, and she would be a
splendid piece of color in the picture, with Haxard's head lying in her
lap, as the curtain comes down with a run."
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15