The Story of a Play

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"It _may_ be so, dramatically. But theatrically, it detracts from him.
Haxard must be the central figure in the eye of the audience from first
to last."

Maxwell mused for a moment of discouragement. They were always coming
back to that; very likely Godolphin was right; but Maxwell did not know
just how to subdue the character of Salome so as to make her less
interesting. "Do you think that was what gave you bad houses in
Chicago--the double interest, or the weakened interest in Haxard?"

"I think so," said Godolphin.

"Were the houses bad--comparatively?"

Godolphin took a little note-book out of his breast-pocket. "Here are my
dates. I opened the first night, the tenth of November, with Haxard, but
we papered the house thoroughly, and we made a good show to the public
and the press. There were four hundred and fifty dollars in it. The next
night there were three hundred; the next night, two eighty; Wednesday
matinee, less than two hundred. That night we put on 'Virginius,' and
played to eight hundred dollars; Thursday night, with the 'Lady of
Lyons,' we had eleven hundred; Friday night, we gave the 'Lady' to
twelve hundred; Saturday afternoon with the same piece, we took in
eleven hundred and fifty; Saturday night, with 'Ingomar,' we had
fifteen hundred dollars in the house, and a hundred people standing."
Maxwell listened with a drooping head; he was bitterly mortified. "But
it was too late then," said Godolphin, with a sigh, as he shut his hook.

"Do you mean," demanded Maxwell, "that my piece had crippled you so
that--that--"

"I didn't say that, Mr. Maxwell. I never meant to let you see the
figures. But you asked me."

"Oh, you're quite right," said Maxwell. He thought how he had blamed the
actor, in his impatience with him, for not playing his piece
oftener--and called him fool and thought him knave for not doing it all
the time, as Godolphin had so lavishly promised to do. He caught at a
straw to save himself from sinking with shame. "But the houses, were
they so bad everywhere?"

Godolphin checked himself in a movement to take out his note-book again;
Maxwell had given him such an imploring glance. "They were pretty poor
everywhere. But it's been a bad season with a good many people."

"No, no," cried Maxwell. "You did very well with the other plays,
Godolphin. Why do you want to touch the thing again? It's been ruinous
to you so far. Give it up! Come! I can't let you have it!"

Godolphin laughed, and all his beautiful white teeth shone. There was a
rich, wholesome red in his smoothly shaven cheeks; he was a real
pleasure to the eye. "I believe it would go better in New York. I'm not
afraid to try it. You mustn't take away my last chance of retrieving the
season. Hair of the dog, you know. Have you seen Grayson lately?"

"Yes, I saw him this afternoon. It was he that told me you were in
town."

"Ah, yes."

"And Godolphin, I've got it on my conscience, if you do take the play,
to tell you that I offered it to Grayson, and he refused it. I think you
ought to know that; it's only fair; and for the matter of that, it's
been kicking round all the theatres in New York."

"Dear boy!" said Godolphin, caressingly, and with a smile that was like
a benediction, "that doesn't make the least difference."

"Well, I wished you to know," said Maxwell, with a great load off his
mind.

"Yes, I understand that. Will you drink anything, or smoke anything?
Or--I forgot! I hate all that, too. But you'll join me in a cup of tea
downstairs?" They descended to the smoking-room below, and Godolphin
ordered the tea, and went on talking with a gay irrelevance till it
came. Then he said, as he poured out the two cups of it: "The fact is,
Grayson is going in with me, if I do your piece." This was news to
Maxwell, and yet he was somehow not surprised at it. "I dare say he told
you?"

"No, he didn't give me any hint of it. He simply told me that you were
in town, and where you were."

"Ah, that was like Grayson. Queer fish."

"But I'm mighty glad to know it. You can make it go, together, if any
power on earth can do it; and if it fails," Maxwell added, "I shall have
the satisfaction of ruining some one else this time."

"Well, Grayson has made nearly as bad a mess of it as I have, this
season," said Godolphin. "He's got to take off that thing he has going
now, and it's a question of what he shall put on. It will be an
experiment with Haxard, but I believe it will be a successful
experiment. I have every confidence in that play." Godolphin looked up,
his lips set convincingly, and with the air of a man who had stood
unfalteringly by his opinion from the first. "Now, if you will excuse
me, I will tell you what I think ought to be done to it."

"By all means," said Maxwell; "I shall be glad to do anything you wish,
or that I can."

Godolphin poured out a cloudy volume of suggestion, with nothing clear
in it but the belief that the part of Haxard ought to be fattened. He
recurred to all the structural impossibilities that he had ever desired,
and there was hardly a point in the piece that he did not want changed.
At the end he said: "But all these things are of no consequence,
comparatively speaking. What we need is a woman who can take the part of
Salome, and play it with all the feminine charm that you've given it,
and yet keep it strictly in the background, or thoroughly subordinated
to the interest of Haxard."

For all that Godolphin seemed to have learned from his experience with
the play, Maxwell might well have thought they were still talking of it
at Magnolia. It was a great relief to his prepossessions in the form of
conclusions to have Grayson appear, with the air of looking for some
one, and of finding the object of his search in Godolphin. He said he
was glad to see Maxwell, too, and they went on talking of the play. From
the talk of the other two Maxwell perceived that the purpose of doing
his play had already gone far with them; but they still spoke of it as
something that would be very good if the interest could be unified in
it. Suddenly the manager broke out: "Look here, Godolphin! I have an
idea! Why not frankly accept the inevitable! I don't believe Mr. Maxwell
can make the play different from what it is, structurally, and I don't
believe the character of Salome can be subdued or subordinated. Then why
not play Salome as strongly as possible, and trust to her strength to
enhance Haxard's effect, instead of weakening it?"

Godolphin smiled towards Maxwell: "That was your idea."

"Yes," said Maxwell, and he kept himself from falling on Grayson's neck
for joy.

"It might do," the actor assented with smiling eagerness and tolerant
superiority. "But whom could you get for such a Salome as that?"

"Well, there's only one woman for it," said Grayson.

"Yolande Havisham?"

The name made Maxwell's heart stop. He started forward to say that Mrs.
Harley could not have the part, when the manager said: "And we couldn't
get her. Sterne has engaged her to star in his combination. By the way,
he was looking for you to-day, Mr. Maxwell."

"I missed him," answered Maxwell, with immense relief. "But I should not
have let him have the piece while I had the slightest hope of your
taking it."

Neither the manager nor the actor was perhaps greatly moved by his
generous preference, though they both politely professed to be so. They
went on to canvass the qualities and reputations of all the other
actresses attainable, and always came back to Yolande Havisham, who was
unattainable; Sterne would never give her up in the world, even if she
were willing to give up the chance he was offering her. But she was the
one woman who could do Salome.

They decided that they must try to get Miss Pettrell, who had played the
part with Godolphin, and who had done it with refinement, if not with
any great force. When they had talked to this conclusion, Grayson
proposed getting something to eat, and the others refused, but they went
into the dining-room with him, where he showed Maxwell the tankards of
the members hanging on the walls over their tables--Booth's tankard,
Salvini's, Irving's, Jefferson's. He was surprised that Maxwell was not
a member of the Players, and said that he must be; it was the only club
for him, if he was going to write for the stage. He came out with them
and pointed out several artists whose fame Maxwell knew, and half a
dozen literary men, among them certain playwrights; they were all
smoking, and the place was blue with the fumes of their cigars. The
actors were coming in from the theatres for supper, and Maxwell found
himself with his friends in a group with a charming old comedian who was
telling brief, vivid little stories, and sketching character, with
illustrations from his delightful art. He was not swagger, like some of
the younger men who stood about with their bell-crowned hats on, before
they went into supper; and two or three other elderly actors who sat
round him and took their turn in the anecdote and mimicry looked, with
their smooth-shaven faces, like old-fashioned ministers. Godolphin, who
was like a youthful priest, began to tell stories, too; and he told very
good ones admirably, but without appearing to feel their quality, though
he laughed loudly at them with the rest.

When Maxwell refused every one's wish to have him eat or drink
something, and said good-night, Grayson had already gone in to his
supper, and Godolphin rose and smiled so fondly upon him that Maxwell
felt as if the actor had blessed him. But he was less sure than in the
beginning of the evening that the play was again in Godolphin's hands;
and he had to confirm himself from his wife's acceptance of the facts in
the belief that it was really so.

XXI.

Louise asked Maxwell, as soon as they had established their joint faith,
whom Godolphin was going to get to play Salome, and he said that Grayson
would like to re-engage Miss Pettrell, though he had a theory that the
piece would be strengthened, and the effect of Haxard enhanced, if they
could have a more powerful Salome.

"Mr. Ray told me at lunch," said Louise, impartially but with an air of
relief, "that in all the love-making she was delightful; but when it
came to the tragedy, she wasn't there."

"Grayson seemed to think that if she could be properly rehearsed, she
could be brought up to it," Maxwell interposed.

"Mr. Ray said she was certainly very refined, and her Salome was always
a lady. And that is the essential thing," Louise added, decisively. "I
don't at all agree with Mr. Grayson about having Salome played so
powerfully. I think Mr. Godolphin is right."

"For Heaven's sake don't tell him so!" said Maxwell. "We have had
trouble enough to get him under."

"Indeed, I shall tell him so! I think he ought to know how we feel."

"_We?_" repeated Maxwell.

"Yes. What we want for Salome is sweetness and delicacy and refinement;
for she has to do rather a bold thing, and yet keep herself a lady."

"Well, it may be too late to talk of Miss Pettrell now," said Maxwell.
"Your favorite Godolphin parted enemies with her."

"Oh, stage enemies! Mr. Grayson can get her, and he must."

"I'll tell him what your orders are," said Maxwell.

The next day he saw the manager, but nothing had been done, and the
affair seemed to be hanging fire again. In the evening, while he was
talking it over with his wife in a discouragement which they could not
shake off, a messenger came to him with a letter from the Argosy
Theatre, which he tore nervously open.

"What is it, dear?" asked his wife, tenderly. "Another disappointment?"

"Not exactly," he returned, with a husky voice, and after a moment of
faltering he gave her the letter. It was from Grayson, and it was to the
effect that he had seen Sterne, and that Sterne had agreed to a
proposition he had made him, to take Maxwell's play on the road, if it
succeeded, and in view of this had agreed to let Yolande Havisham take
the part of Salome.

Godolphin was going to get all his old company together as far as
possible, with the exception of Miss Pettrell, and there was to be
little or no delay, because the actors had mostly got back to New York,
and were ready to renew their engagements. That no time might be lost,
Grayson asked Maxwell to come the next morning and read the piece to
such of them as he could get together in the Argosy greenroom, and give
them his sense of it.

Louise handed him back the letter, and said, with dangerous calm: "You
might save still more time by going down to Mrs. Harley's apartment and
reading it to her at once." Maxwell was miserably silent, and she
pursued: "May I ask whether you knew they were going to try to get her?"

"No," said Maxwell.

"Was there anything said about her?"

"Yes, there was, last night. But both Grayson and Godolphin regarded it
as impossible to get her."

"Why didn't you tell me that they would like to get her?"

"You knew it, already. And I thought, as they both had given up the hope
of getting her, I wouldn't mention the subject. It's always been a very
disagreeable one."

"Yes." Louise sat quiet, and then she said: "What a long misery your
play has been to me!"

"You haven't helped make it any great joy to me," said Maxwell,
bitterly.

She began to weep, silently, and he stood looking down at her in utter
wretchedness. "Well," he said at last, "what shall I do about it?"

Louise wiped her tears, and cleared up cold, as we say of the weather.
She rose, as if to leave the room, and said, haughtily: "You shall do as
you think best for yourself. You must let them have the play, and let
them choose whom they think best for the part. But you can't expect me
to come to see it."

"Then that unsays all the rest. If you don't come to see it, I sha'n't,
and I shall not let them have the piece. That is all. Louise," he
entreated, after these first desperate words, "_can't_ we grapple with
this infernal nightmare, so as to get it into the light, somehow, and
see what it really is? How can it matter to you who plays the part? Why
do you care whether Miss Pettrell or Mrs. Harley does it?"

"Why do you ask such a thing as that?" she returned, in the same hard
frost. "You know where the idea of the character came from, and why it
was sacred to me. Or perhaps you forget!"

"No, I don't forget. But try--can't you try?--to specify just why you
object to Mrs. Harley?"

"You have your theory. You said I was jealous of her."

"I didn't mean it. I never believed that."

"Then I can't explain. If you don't understand, after all that's been
said, what is the use of talking? I'm tired of it!"

She went into her room, and he sank into the chair before his desk and
sat there, thinking. When she came back, after a while, he did not look
round at her, and she spoke to the back of his head. "Should you have
any objection to my going home for a few days?"

"No," he returned.

"I know papa would like to have me, and I think you would be less
hampered in what you will have to do now if I'm not here."

"You're very considerate. But if that's what you are going for, you
might as well stay. I'm not going to do anything whatever."

"Now, you mustn't talk foolishly, Brice," she said, with an air of
superior virtue mixed with a hint of martyrdom. "I won't have you doing
anything rash or boyish. You will go on and let them have your play just
the same as if I didn't exist." She somewhat marred the effect of her
self-devotion by adding: "And I shall go on just as if _it_ didn't
exist." He said nothing, and she continued: "You couldn't expect me to
take any interest in it after this, could you? Because, though I am
ready to make any sort of sacrifice for you, I think any one, I don't
care who it was, would say that was a little _too_ much. Don't you think
so yourself?"

"You are always right. I think that."

"Don't be silly. I am trying to do the best I can, and you have no right
to make it hard for me."

Maxwell wheeled round in his chair: "Then I wish you wouldn't make your
best so confoundedly disagreeable."

"Oh!" she twitted. "I see that you have made up your mind to let them
have the play, after all."

"Yes, I have," he answered, savagely.

"Perhaps you meant to do it all along?"

"Perhaps I did."

"Very well, then," said Louise. "Would you mind coming to the train with
me on your way down town to-morrow?"

"Not at all."

XXII.

In the morning neither of them recurred to what Louise had said of her
going home for a few days. She had apparently made no preparation for
the journey; but if she was better than her words in this, he was quite
as bad as his in going down town after breakfast to let Grayson have the
play, no matter whom he should get to do Salome. He did not reiterate
his purpose, but she knew from the sullen leave, or no-leave, which he
took of her, that it was fixed.

When he was gone she had what seemed to her the very worst quarter of an
hour she had ever known; but when he came back in the afternoon, looking
haggard but savage, her ordeal had long been over. She asked him quietly
if they had come to any definite conclusion about the play, and he
answered, with harsh aggression, yes, that Mrs. Harley had agreed to
take the part of Salome; Godolphin's old company had been mostly got
together, and they were to have the first rehearsal the next morning.

"Should you like me to come some time?" asked Louise.

"I should like you very much to come," said Maxwell, soberly, but with a
latent doubt of her meaning, which she perceived.

"I have been thinking," she said, "whether you would like me to call on
Mrs. Harley this evening with you?"

"What for?" he demanded, suspiciously.

"Well, I don't know. I thought it might be appropriate."

Maxwell thought a moment. "I don't think it would be expected. After
all, it isn't a personal thing," he said, with a relenting in his
defiance.

"No," said Louise.

They got through the evening without further question.

They had always had some sort of explicit making-up before, even when
they had only had a tacit falling out, but this time Louise thought
there had better be none of that. They were to rehearse the play every
day that week, and Maxwell said he must be at the theatre the next
morning at eleven. He could not make out to his wife's satisfaction
that he was of much use, but he did not try to convince her. He only
said that they referred things to him now and then, and that generally
he did not seem to know much about them. She saw that his aesthetic
honesty kept him from pretending to more than this, and she believed he
ought to have greater credit than he claimed.

Four or five days later she went with him to a rehearsal. By this time
they had got so well forward with their work at the theatre that Maxwell
said it would now be in appreciable shape; but still he warned her not
to expect too much. He never could tell her just what she wanted to know
about Mrs. Harley; all he could say was that her Salome was not ideal,
though it had strong qualities; and he did not try to keep her from
thinking it offensive; that would only have made bad worse.

It had been snowing overnight, and there was a bright glare of sunshine
on the drifts, which rendered the theatre doubly dark when they stepped
into it from the street. It was a dramatic event for Louise to enter by
the stage-door, and to find Maxwell recognized by the old man in charge
as having authority to do so; and she made as much of the strange
interior as the obscurity and her preoccupation would allow. There was
that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first
characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is
one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects
are prepared to be felt before the footlights. Nothing of the glamour of
the front is possible; there is a hard air of business in everything;
and the work that goes to the making of a play shows itself the severest
toil. Figures now came and went in the twilight beyond the reach of the
gas in the door-keeper's booth, but rapidly as if bent upon definite
errands, and with nothing of that loitering gayety which is the imagined
temperament of the stage.

Louise and Maxwell were to see Grayson first in his private office, and
while their names were taken in, the old door-keeper gave them seats on
the Mourners' Bench, a hard wooden settee in the corridor, which he said
was the place where actors wanting an engagement waited till the manager
sent word that he could see them. The manager did not make the author
and his wife wait, but came for them himself, and led the way back to
his room. When he gave them seats there, Maxwell had the pleasure of
seeing that Louise made an excellent impression with the magnate, of
whom he had never quite lost the awe we feel for the master of our
fortunes, whoever he is. He perceived that her inalienable worldly
splendor added to his own consequence, and that his wife's air of
_grande dame_ was not lost upon a man who could at least enjoy it
artistically. Grayson was very polite to her, and said hopefuller things
about the play than he had yet said to Maxwell, though he had always
been civil about its merits. He had a number of papers before him, and
he asked Louise if she had noticed their friendliness. She said, yes,
she had seen some of those things, but she had supposed they were
authorized, and she did not know how much to value them.

Grayson laughed and confessed that he did not practice any concealments
with the press when it was a question of getting something to the public
notice. "Of course," he said, "we don't want the piece to come in on
rubbers."

"What do you mean?" she demanded, with an ignorant joy in the phrase.

"That's what we call it when a thing hasn't been sufficiently heralded,
or heralded at all. We have got to look after that part of it, you
know."

"Of course, I am not complaining, though I think all that's dreadful."

The manager assented partly. Then he said: "There's something curious
about it. You may put up the whole affair yourself, and yet in what's
said you can tell whether there's a real good will that comes from the
writers themselves or not."

"And you mean that there is this mystical kindness for Mr. Maxwell's
play in the prophecies that all read so much alike to me?"

"Yes, I do," said the manager, laughing. "They like him because he's new
and young, and is making his way single-handed."

"Well," said Louise, "those seem good grounds for preference to me,
too;" and she thought how nearly they had been her own grounds for
liking Maxwell.

Grayson went with them to the stage and found her the best place to sit
and see the rehearsal. He made some one get chairs, and he sat with her
chatting while men in high hats and overcoats and women in bonnets and
fur-edged butterfly-capes came in one after another. Godolphin arrived
among the first, with an ulster which came down to where his pantaloons
were turned up above his overshoes. He caught sight of Louise, and
approached her with outstretched hand, and Grayson gave up his chair to
the actor. Godolphin was very cordial, deferentially cordial, with a
delicate vein of reminiscent comradery running through his manner. She
spoke to him of having at last got his ideal for Salome, and he said,
with a slight sigh and a sort of melancholy absence: "Yes, Miss Havisham
will do it magnificently." Then he asked, with a look of latent
significance:

"Have you ever seen her?"

Louise laughed for as darkling a reason. "Only in real life. You know we
live just over and under each other."

"Ah, true. But I meant, on the stage. She's a great artist. You know
she's the one I wanted for Salome from the start."

"Then you ought to be very happy in getting her at last."

"She will do everything for the play," sighed Godolphin. "She'll make up
for all my shortcomings."

"You won't persuade us that you have any shortcomings, Mr. Godolphin,"
said Louise. "You are Haxard, and Haxard is the play. You can't think,
Mr. Godolphin, how deeply grateful we both are to you for your
confidence in my husband's work, your sacrifices--"

"You overpay me a thousand times for everything, Mrs. Maxwell," said
the actor. "Any one might have been proud and happy to do all I've done,
and more, for such a play. I've never changed my opinion for a moment
that it was _the_ American drama. And now if Miss Havisham only turns
out to be the Salome we want!"

"If?" returned Louise, and she felt a wild joy in the word. "Why, I
thought there could be no earthly doubt about it."

"Oh, there isn't. We are all united on that point, I believe, Maxwell?"

Maxwell shrugged. "I confide in you and Mr. Grayson."

Godolphin looked at his watch. "It's eleven now, and she isn't here yet.
I would rather not have begun without her, but I think we had better not
delay any longer." He excused himself to Louise, and went and sat down
with his hat on at a small table, lit with a single electric bulb,
dropping like a luminous spider by a thread from the dark above. Other
electric bulbs were grouped before reflectors on either side of the
stage, and these shone on the actors before Godolphin. Back in the
depths of the stage, some scene-painters and carpenters were at work on
large strips of canvas lying unrolled upon the floor or stretched upon
light wooden frames. Across Godolphin's head the dim hollow of the
auditorium showed, pierced by long bars of sunlight full of dancing
motes, which slanted across its gloom from the gallery windows. Women in
long aprons were sweeping the floors and pounding the seats, and a smell
of dust from their labors mixed with the smell of paint and glue and
escaping gas which pervaded the atmosphere of the stage.

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