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 manager met him with "Ah, I'm glad you came soon. These things fade
out of one's mind so, and I really want to talk about your play. I've
been very much interested in it."
Maxwell could only bow his head and murmur something about being very
glad, very, very glad, with a stupid iteration.
"I suppose you know, as well as I do, that it's two plays, and that it's
only half as good as if it were one."
The manager wheeled around from his table, and looked keenly at the
author, who contrived to say, "I think I know what you mean."
"You've got the making of the prettiest kind of little comedy in it, and
you've got the making of a very strong tragedy. But I don't think your
oil and water mix, exactly," said Grayson.
"You think the interest of the love-business will detract from the
interest of the homicide's fate?"
"And vice versa. Excuse me for asking something that I can very well
understand your not wanting to tell till I had read your play. Isn't
this the piece Godolphin has been trying out West?"
"Yes, it is," said Maxwell. "I thought it might prejudice you against
it, if--"
"Oh, that's all right. Why have you taken it from him?"
Maxwell felt that he could make up for his want of earlier frankness
now. "I didn't take it from him; he gave it back to me."
He sketched the history of his relation to the actor, and the manager
said, with smiling relish, "Just like him, just like Godolphin." Then
he added, "I'll tell you, and you mustn't take it amiss. Godolphin may
not know just why he gave the piece up, and he probably thinks it's
something altogether different, but you may depend upon it the trouble
was your trying to ride two horses in it. Didn't you feel that it was a
mistake yourself?"
"I felt it so strongly at one time that I decided to develop the
love-business into a play by itself and let the other go for some other
time. My wife and I talked it over. We even discussed it with Godolphin.
He wanted to do Atland. But we all backed out simultaneously, and went
back to the play as it stood."
"Godolphin saw he couldn't make enough of Atland," said the manager, as
if he were saying it to himself. "Well, you may be sure he feels now
that the character which most appeals to the public in the play is
Salome."
"He felt that before."
"And he was right. Now, I will tell you what you have got to do. You
have either got to separate the love-business from the rest of the play
and develop it into a comedy by itself--"
"That would mean a great deal of work, and I am rather sick of the whole
thing."
"Or," the manager went on without minding Maxwell, "you have got to cut
the part of Salome, and subordinate it entirely to Haxard"--Maxwell made
a movement of impatience and refusal, and the manager finished--"or else
you have got to treat it frankly as the leading part in the piece, and
get it into the hands of some leading actress."
"Do you mean," the author asked, "that you--or any manager--would take
it if that were done?"
Grayson looked a little unhappy. "No, that isn't what I mean, exactly. I
mean that as it stands, no manager would risk it, and that as soon as an
actor had read it, he would see, as Godolphin must have seen from the
start, that Haxard was a subordinate part. What you want to do is to get
it in the hands of some woman who wants to star, and would take the road
with it." The manager expatiated at some length on the point, and then
he stopped, and sat silent, as if he had done with the subject.
Maxwell perceived that the time had come for him to get up and go away.
"I'm greatly obliged to you for all your kindness, Mr. Grayson, and I
won't abuse your patience any further. You've been awfully good to me,
and--" He faltered, in a dejection which he could not control. Against
all reason, he had hoped that the manager would have taken his piece
just as it stood, and apparently he would not have taken it in any
event.
"You mustn't speak of that," said the manager. "I wish you would let me
see anything else you do. There's a great deal that's good in this
piece, and I believe that a woman who would make it her battle-horse
could make it go."
Maxwell asked, with melancholy scorn, "But you don't happen to know any
leading lady who is looking round for a battle-horse?"
The manager seemed trying to think. "Yes, I do. You wouldn't like her
altogether, and I don't say she would be the ideal Salome, but she would
be, in her way, effective; and I know that she wants very much to get a
play. She hasn't been doing anything for a year or two but getting
married and divorced, but she made a very good start. She used to call
herself Yolande Havisham; I don't suppose it was her name; and she had a
good deal of success in the West; I don't think she's ever appeared in
New York. I believe she was of quite a good Southern family; the
Southerners all are; and I hear she has money."
"Godolphin mentioned a Southern girl for the part," said Maxwell. "I
wonder if--"
"Very likely it's the same one. She does emotional leads. She and
Godolphin played together in California, I believe. I was trying to
think of her married name--or her unmarried name--"
Some one knocked at the door, and the young man put his head in, with
what Maxwell fancied a preconcerted effect, and gave the manager a card.
He said, "All right; bring him round," and he added to Maxwell, "Shall I
send your play--"
"No, no, I will take it," and Maxwell carried it away with a heavier
heart than he had even when he got it back from Godolphin. He did not
know how to begin again, and he had to go home and take counsel with his
wife as to the next step.
He could not bear to tell her of his disappointment, and it was harder
still to tell her of the kind of hope the manager had held out to him.
He revolved a compromise in his mind, and when they sat down together he
did not mean to conceal anything, but only to postpone something; he did
not clearly know why. He told her the alternatives the manager had
suggested, and she agreed with him they were all impossible.
"Besides," she said, "he doesn't promise to take the play, even if you
do everything to a 't.' Did he ask you to lunch again?"
"No, that seemed altogether a thing of the past."
"Well, let us have ours, and then we can go into the Park, and forget
all about it for a while, and perhaps something new will suggest
itself."
That was what they did, but nothing new suggested itself. They came home
fretted with their futile talk. There seemed nothing for Maxwell to do
but to begin the next day with some other manager.
They found a note from Grayson waiting Maxwell. "Well, you open it," he
said, listlessly, to his wife, and in fact he felt himself at that
moment physically unable to cope with the task, and he dreaded any
fluctuation of emotion that would follow, even if it were a joyous one.
"What does this mean, Brice?" demanded his wife, with a terrible
provisionality in her tone, as she stretched out the letter to him, and
stood before him where he lounged in the cushioned window-seat.
Grayson had written: "If you care to submit your play to Yolande
Havisham, you can easily do so. I find that her address is the same as
yours. Her name is Harley. But I was mistaken about the divorce. It was
a death."
Maxwell lay stupidly holding the note before him.
"Will you tell me what it means?" his wife repeated. "Or why you didn't
tell me before, if you meant to give your play to that creature?"
"I don't mean to give it to her," said Maxwell, doggedly. "I never did,
for an instant. As for not telling you that Grayson had suggested
it--well, perhaps I wished to spare myself a scene like the present."
"Do you think I will believe you?"
"I don't think you will insult me. Why shouldn't you believe I am
telling you the truth?"
"Because--because you didn't tell me at once."
"That is nonsense, and you know it. If I wanted to keep this from you,
it was to spare you the annoyance I can't help now, and because the
thing was settled in my mind as soon as Grayson proposed it."
"Then, why has he written to you about it?"
"I suppose I didn't say it was settled."
"Suppose? Don't you _know_ whether you did?"
"Come, now, Louise! I am not on the witness-stand, and I won't be
cross-questioned. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What is the
matter with you? Am I to blame because a man who doesn't imagine your
dislike of a woman that you never spoke to suggests her taking part in a
play that she probably wouldn't look at? You're preposterous! Try to
have a little common-sense!" These appeals seemed to have a certain
effect with his wife; she looked daunted; but Maxwell had the misfortune
to add, "One would think you were jealous of the woman."
"_Now_ you are insulting _me_!" she cried. "But it's a part of the
vulgarity of the whole business. Actors, authors, managers, you're all
alike."
Maxwell got very pale. "Look out, Louise!" he warned her.
"I _won't_ look out. If you had any delicacy, the least delicacy in the
world, you could imagine how a woman who had given the most sacred
feelings of her nature to you for your selfish art would loathe to be
represented by such a creature as that, and still not be jealous of her,
as you call it! But I am justly punished! I might have expected it."
The maid appeared at the door and said something, which neither of them
could make out at once, but which proved to be the question whether Mrs.
Maxwell had ordered the dinner.
"No, I will go--I was just going out for it," said Louise. She had in
fact not taken off her hat or gloves since she came in from her walk,
and she now turned and swept out of the room without looking at her
husband. He longed to detain her, to speak some kindly or clarifying
word, to set himself right with her, to set her right with herself; but
the rage was so hot in his heart that he could not. She came back to the
door a moment, and looked in. "_I_ will do _my_ duty."
"It's rather late," he sneered, "but if you're very conscientious, I
dare say we shall have dinner at the usual time."
He did not leave the window-seat, and it was as if the door had only
just clashed to after her when there came a repeated and violent ringing
at the bell, so that he jumped up himself, to answer it, without waiting
for the maid.
"Your wife--your wife!" panted the bell-boy, who stood there. "She's
hurt herself, and she's fainted."
"My wife? Where--how?" He ran down stairs after the boy, and in the
hallway on the ground floor he found Louise stretched upon the marble
pavement, with her head in the lap of a woman, who was chafing her
hands. He needed no look at this woman's face to be sure that it was the
woman of his wife's abhorrence, and he felt quite as sure that it was
the actress Yolande Havisham, from the effective drama of her
self-possession.
"Don't be frightened. Your wife turned her foot on the steps here. I
was coming into the house, and caught her from falling. It's only a
swoon." She spoke with the pseudo-English accent of the stage, but with
a Southern slip upon the vowels here and there. "Get some water,
please."
The hall-boy came running up the back stairs with some that he had gone
to get, and the woman bade Maxwell sprinkle his wife's face. But he
said: "No--you," and he stooped and took his wife's head into his own
hands, so that she might not come to in the lap of Mrs. Harley; in the
midst of his dismay he reflected how much she would hate that. He could
hardly keep himself from being repellant and resentful towards the
woman. In his remorse for quarrelling with Louise, it was the least
reparation he could offer her. Mrs. Harley, if it were she, seemed not
to notice his rudeness. She sprinkled Louise's face, and wiped her
forehead with the handkerchief she dipped in the water; but this did not
bring her out of her faint, and Maxwell began to think she was dead, and
to feel that he was a murderer. With a strange aesthetic vigilance he
took note of his sensations for use in revising Haxard.
The janitor of the building had somehow arrived, and Mrs. Harley said:
"I will go for a doctor, if you can get her up to your apartment;" and
she left Louise with the two men.
The janitor, a burly Irishman, lifted her in his arms, and carried her
up the three flights of steps; Maxwell followed, haggardly, helplessly.
On her own bed, Louise revived, and said: "My shoe--Oh, get it off!"
The doctor came a few minutes later, but Mrs. Harley did not appear with
him as Maxwell had dreaded she would. He decided that Mrs. Maxwell had
strained, not sprained, her ankle, and he explained how the difference
was all the difference in the world, as he bound the ankle up with a
long ribbon of india-rubber, and issued directions for care and quiet.
He left them there, and Maxwell heard him below in parley, apparently
with the actress at her door. Louise lay with her head on her husband's
arm, and held his other hand tight in hers, while he knelt by the bed.
The bliss of repentance and mutual forgiveness filled both their hearts,
while she told him how she had hurt herself.
"I had got down to the last step, and I was putting my foot to the
pavement, and I thought, Now I am going to turn my ankle. Wasn't it
strange? And I turned it. How did you get me upstairs?"
"The janitor carried you."
"How lucky he happened to be there! I suppose the hall-boy kept me from
falling--poor little fellow! You must give him some money. How did you
find out about me?"
"He ran up to tell," Maxwell said this, and then he hesitated. "I guess
you had better know all about it. Can you bear something disagreeable,
or would you rather wait--"
"No, no, tell me now! I can't bear to wait. What is it?"
"It wasn't the hall-boy that caught you. It was that--woman."
He felt her neck and hand grow rigid, but he went on, and told her all
about it. At the end some quiet tears came into her eyes. "Well, then,
we must be civil to her. I am glad you told me at once, Brice!" She
pulled his head down and kissed him, and he was glad, too.
XV.
Louise sent Maxwell down to Mrs. Harley's apartment to thank her, and
tell her how slight the accident was; and while he was gone she
abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from
blood-poisoning, and her husband's early marriage with the actress, who
then appeared in all his plays, though they were not happy together. Her
own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy
out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came
back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so
as to give the woman a notion that he was not suffered to stay longer.
He explained that he had found her gloved and bonneted to go out, and
that he had not stayed for fear of keeping her. She had introduced him
to her mother, who was civil about Louise's accident, and they had both
begged him to let them do anything they could for her. He made his
observations, and when Louise, after a moment, asked him about them, he
said they affected him as severally typifying the Old South and the New
South. They had a photograph over the mantel, thrown up large, of an
officer in Confederate uniform. Otherwise the room had nothing personal
in it; he suspected the apartment of having been taken furnished, like
their own. Louise asked if he should say they were ladies, and he
answered that he thought they were.
"Of course," she said, and she added, with a wide sweep of censure:
"They get engaged to four or five men at a time, down there. Well," she
sighed, "you mustn't stay in here with me, dear. Go to your writing."
"I was thinking whether you couldn't come out and lie on the lounge. I
hate to leave you alone in here."
"No, the doctor said to be perfectly quiet. Perhaps I can, to-morrow, if
it doesn't swell up any worse."
She kept her hold of his hand, which he had laid in hers, and he sat
down beside the bed, in the chair he had left there. He did not speak,
and after a while she asked, "What are you thinking of?"
"Oh, nothing. The confounded play, I suppose."
"You're disappointed at Grayson's not taking it."
"One is always a fool."
"Yes," said Louise, with a catching of the breath. She gripped his hand
hard, and said, as well as she could in keeping back the tears, "Well, I
will never stand in your way, Brice. You may do
anything--_anything_--with it that you think best."
"I shall never do anything you don't like," he answered, and he leaned
over and kissed her, and at this her passion burst in a violent sobbing,
and when she could speak she made him solemnly promise that he would not
regard her in the least, but would do whatever was wisest and best with
the play, for otherwise she should never be happy again.
As she could not come out to join him at dinner, he brought a little
table to the bedside, and put his plate on it, and ate his dinner there
with her. She gave him some attractive morsels off her own plate, which
he had first insisted on bestowing upon her. They had such a gay evening
that the future brightened again, and they arranged for Maxwell to take
his play down-town the next day, and not lose a moment in trying to
place it with some manager.
It all left him very wakeful, for his head began to work upon this
scheme and that. When he went to lock the outer door for the night, the
sight of his overcoat hanging in the hall made him think of a
theatrical newspaper he had bought coming home, at a certain corner of
Broadway, where numbers of smooth-shaven, handsome men, and women with
dark eyes and champagned hair were lounging and passing. He had got it
on the desperate chance that it might suggest something useful to him.
He now took it out of his coat-pocket, and began to look its
advertisements over in the light of his study lamp, partly because he
was curious about it, and partly because he knew that he should begin to
revise his play otherwise, and then he should not sleep all night.
In several pages of the paper ladies with flowery and alliterative names
and pseudonyms proclaimed themselves in large letters, and in smaller
type the parts they were presently playing in different combinations;
others gave addresses and announced that they were At Liberty, or
specified the kinds of roles they were accustomed to fill, as Leads or
Heavies, Dancing Soubrettes and Boys; Leads, Emotional and Juvenile;
Heavy or Juvenile or Emotional Leads. There were gentlemen seeking
engagements who were Artistic Whistling Soloists, Magicians, Leading
Men, Leading Heavies, Singing and Dancing Comedians, and there were both
ladies and gentlemen who were now Starring in this play or that, but
were open to offers later. A teacher of stage dancing promised
instruction in skirt and serpentine dancing, as well as high kicking,
front and back, the backward bend, side practice, toe-practice, and all
novelties. Dramatic authors had their cards among the rest, and one poor
fellow, as if he had not the heart to name himself, advertised a play to
be heard of at the office of the newspaper. Whatever related to the
theatre was there, in bizarre solidarity, which was droll enough to
Maxwell in one way. But he hated to be mixed up with all that, and he
perceived that he must be mixed up with it more and more, if he wrote
for the theatre. Whether he liked it or not, he was part of the thing
which in its entirety meant high-kicking and toe-practice, as well as
the expression of the most mystical passions of the heart. There was an
austerity in him which the fact offended, and he did what he could to
appease this austerity by reflecting that it was the drama and never the
theatre that he loved; but for the time this was useless. He saw that if
he wrote dramas he could not hold aloof from the theatre, nor from
actors and actresses--heavies and juveniles, and emotionals and
soubrettes. He must know them, and more intimately; and at first he must
be subject to them, however he mastered them at last; he must flatter
their oddities and indulge their caprices. His experience with
Godolphin had taught him that, and his experience with Godolphin in the
construction of his play could be nothing to what he must undergo at
rehearsals and in the effort to adapt his work to a company. He reminded
himself that Shakespeare even must have undergone all that. But this did
not console him. He was himself, and what another, the greatest, had
suffered would not save him. Besides, it was not the drama merely that
Maxwell loved; it was not making plays alone; it was causing the life
that he had known to speak from the stage, and to teach there its
serious and important lesson. In the last analysis he was a moralist,
and more a moralist than he imagined. To enforce, in the vividest and
most palpable form, what he had thought true, it might be worth while to
endure all the trials that he must; but at that moment he did not think
so; and he did not dare submit his misgiving to his wife.
They had now been six months married, and if he had allowed himself to
face the fact he must have owned that, though they loved each other so
truly, and he had known moments of exquisite, of incredible rapture, he
had been as little happy as in any half-year he had lived. He never
formulated his wife's character, or defined the precise relation she
bore to his life; if he could have been challenged to do so, he would
have said that she was the whole of life to him, and that she was the
most delightful woman in the world.
He tasted to its last sweetness the love of loving her and of being
loved by her. At the same time there was an obscure stress upon him
which he did not trace to her at once; a trouble in his thoughts which,
if he could have seen it clearly, he would have recognized for a lurking
anxiety concerning how she would take the events of their life as they
came. Without realizing it, for his mind was mostly on his work, and it
was only in some dim recess of his spirit that the struggle took place,
he was perpetually striving to adjust himself to the unexpected, or
rather the unpredictable.
But when he was most afraid of her harassing uncertainty of emotion or
action he was aware of her fixed loyalty to him; and perhaps it was the
final effect with himself that he dreaded. Should he always be able to
bear and forbear, as he felt she would, with all her variableness and
turning? The question did not put itself in words, and neither did his
conviction that his relation to the theatre was doubled in difficulty
through her. But he perceived that she had no love for the drama, and
only a love for his love of it; and sometimes he vaguely suspected that
if he had been in business she would have been as fond of business as
she was of the drama. He never perhaps comprehended her ideal, and how
it could include an explicit and somewhat noisy devotion to the aims of
his ambition, because it was his, and a patronizing reservation in
regard to the ambition itself. But this was quite possible with Louise,
just as it was possible for her to have had a humble personal joy in
giving herself to him, while she had a distinct social sense of the
sacrifice she had made in marrying him. In herself she looked up to him;
as her father's and mother's daughter, as the child of her circumstance,
there is no doubt she looked down upon him. But neither of these
attitudes held in their common life. Love may or may not level ranks,
but marriage unquestionably does, and is the one form of absolute
equality. The Maxwells did not take themselves or each other
objectively; they loved and hated, they made war and made peace, without
any sense of the difference or desert that might have been apparent to
the spectators.
Maxwell had never been so near the standpoint of the impartial observer
as now when he confronted the question of what he should do, with a
heart twice burdened by the question whether his wife would not make it
hard for him to do it, whatever it was. He thought, with dark
foreboding, of the difficulties he should have to smooth out for her if
it ever came to a production of the piece. The best thing that could
happen, perhaps, would be its rejection, final and total, by all
possible managers and actors; for she would detest any one who took the
part of Salome, and would hold him responsible for all she should suffer
from it.
He recurred to what he had felt so strongly himself, and what Grayson
had suggested, and thought how he could free himself from fealty to her
by cutting out the whole love-business from his play. But that would be
very hard. The thing had now knitted itself in one texture in his mind,
and though he could sever the ties that bound the parts together, it
would take from the piece the great element of charm. It was not
symmetrical as it stood, but it was not two distinct motives; the
motives had blended, and they really belonged to each other. He would
have to invent some other love-business if he cut this out, but still it
could be done. Then it suddenly flashed upon him that there was
something easier yet, and that was to abandon the notion of getting his
piece played at all, and to turn it into a novel. He could give it
narrative form without much trouble, if any, beyond that of copying it,
and it would be thought a very dramatic story. He saw instantly how he
could keep and even enhance all the charm of the love-business as it
stood, in a novel; and in his revulsion of feeling he wished to tell his
wife. He made a movement towards the door of her room, but he heard the
even breathing of her sleep, and he stopped and flung himself on the
lounge to think. It was such a happy solution of the whole affair! He
need not even cease trying it with the managers, for he could use the
copy of the play that Godolphin had returned for that, and he could use
the copy he had always kept for recasting it in narrative. By the time
that he had got his play back from the last manager he would have his
novel ready for the first publisher. In the meantime he should be
writing his letters for the _Abstract_, and not consuming all his little
savings.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 | 10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15