The Story of a Play

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At this suggestion Mrs. Maxwell was too indignant to speak; her husband
merely said, with his cold smile, "Yes; but I don't see what it would
have to do with the rest of the play."

"You could have it," said Godolphin, "that he was married to a Mexican
during his Texas episode, and this girl was their daughter." Maxwell
still smiled, and Godolphin deferred to his wife: "But perhaps Mrs.
Maxwell would object to the skirt-dance?"

"Oh, no," she answered, ironically, "I shouldn't mind having it, with
Carmencita in society for a precedent. But," she added, "the incident
seems so out of keeping with the action and the temperament of the play,
and everything. If I were to see such a thing on the stage, merely as an
impartial spectator, I should feel insulted."

Godolphin flushed. "I don't see where the insult would come in. You
mightn't like it, but it would be like anything else in a play that you
were not personally concerned in."

"No, excuse me, Mr. Godolphin. I think the audience is as much concerned
in the play as the actor or the author, and if either of these fails in
the ideal, or does a bit of clap-trap when they have wrought the
audience up in expectation of something noble, then they insult the
audience--or all the better part of it."

"The better part of the audience never fills the house," said the actor.

"Very well. I hope my husband will never write for the worse part."

"And I hope I shall never play to it," Godolphin returned, and he looked
hurt at the insinuation of her words.

"It isn't a question of all that," Maxwell interposed, with a worried
glance at his wife. "Mr. Godolphin has merely suggested something that
can be taken into the general account; we needn't decide it now. By the
way," he said to the actor, "have you thought over that point about
changing Haxard's crime, or the quality of it? I think it had better not
be an intentional murder; that would kill the audience's sympathy with
him from the start, don't you think? We had better have it what they
call a rencontre down there, where two gentlemen propose to kill each
other on sight. Greenshaw's hold on him would be that he was the only
witness of the fight, and that he could testify to a wilful murder if he
chose. Haxard's real crime must be the killing of Greenshaw."

"Yes," said Godolphin, and he entered into the discussion of the effect
this point would have with the play. Mrs. Maxwell was too much vexed to
forgive him for making the suggestion which he had already dropped, and
she left the room for fear she should not be able to govern herself at
the sight of her husband condescending to temporize with him. She
thought that Maxwell's willingness to temporize, even when it involved
no insincerity, was a defect in his character; she had always thought
that, and it was one of the things that she meant to guard him against
with all the strength of her zeal for his better self. When Godolphin
was gone at last, she lost no time in coming back to Maxwell, where he
sat with the manuscript of his play before him, apparently lost in some
tangle of it. She told him abruptly that she did not understand how, if
he respected himself, if he respected his own genius, he could consider
such an idea as Godolphin's skirt-dance for an instant.

"Did I consider it?" he asked.

"You made him think so."

"Well," returned Maxwell, and at her reproachful look he added,
"Godolphin never thought I was considering it. He has too much sense,
and he would be astonished and disgusted if I took him in earnest and
did what he wanted. A lot of actors get round him over there, and they
fill him up with all sorts of stage notions, and what he wants of me is
that I shall empty him of them and yet not put him to shame about them.
But if you keep on in that way you took with him he'll throw me over."

"Well, let him!" cried Mrs. Maxwell. "There are twenty other actors who
would jump at the chance to get such a play."

"Don't you believe it, my dear. Actors don't jump at plays, and
Godolphin is the one man for me. He's young, and has the friendly
regard from the public that a young artist has, and yet he isn't
identified with any part in particular, and he will throw all his force
into creating this, as he calls it."

"I can't bear to have him use that word, Brice. _You_ created it."

"The word doesn't matter. It's merely a technical phrase. I shouldn't
know where to turn if he gave it up."

"Pshaw! You could go to a manager."

"Thank you; I prefer an actor. Now, Louise, you must not be so abrupt
with Godolphin when he comes out with those things."

"I can't help it, dearest. They are insulting to you, and insulting to
common-sense. It's a kindness to let him know how they would strike the
public. I don't pretend to be more than the average public."

"He doesn't feel it a kindness the way you put it."

"Then you don't like me to be sincere with him! Perhaps you don't like
me to be sincere with _you_ about your play?"

"Be as sincere with me as you like. But this--this is a matter of
business, and I'd rather you wouldn't."

"Rather I wouldn't say anything at all?" demanded Louise.

"I didn't say so, and you know I didn't; but if you can't get on without
ruffling Godolphin, why, perhaps--"

"Very well, then, I'll leave the room the next time he comes. That will
be perfectly simple; and it will be perfectly simple to do as most other
people would--not concern myself with the play in any way from this out.
I dare say you would prefer that, too, though I didn't quite expect it
to come to that before our honeymoon was out."

"Oh, now, my dear!"

"You know it's so. But I can do it! I might have expected it from a man
who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a fool--"
Her tears came and her words stopped.

Maxwell leaned forward with his thin face between his hands. This made
him miserable, personally, but he was not so miserable but his artistic
consciousness could take note of the situation as a very good one, and
one that might be used effectively on the stage. He analyzed it
perfectly in that unhappy moment. She was jealous of his work, which she
had tolerated only while she could share it, and if she could not share
it, while some other was suffered to do so, it would be cruel for her.
But he knew that he could not offer any open concession now without
making bad worse, and he must wait till the right time for it came. He
had so far divined her, without formulating her, that he knew she would
be humiliated by anything immediate or explicit, but would later accept
a tacit repentance from him; and he instinctively forebore.

III.

For the present in her resentment of his willingness to abase his genius
before Godolphin, or even to hold it in abeyance, Mrs. Maxwell would not
walk to supper with her husband in the usual way, touching his shoulder
with hers from time to time, and making herself seem a little lower in
stature by taking the downward slope of the path leading from their
cottage to the hotel. But the necessity of appearing before the people
at their table on as perfect terms with him as ever had the effect that
conduct often has on feeling, and she took his arm in going back to
their cottage, and leaned tenderly upon him.

Their cottage was one of the farthest from the hotel, and the smallest
and quietest. In fact there was yet no one in it but themselves, and
they dwelt there in an image of home, with the sole use of the veranda
and the parlor, where Maxwell had his manuscripts spread about on the
table as if he owned the place. A chambermaid came over from the hotel
in the morning to put the cottage in order, and then they could be quite
alone there for the rest of the day.

"Shall I light the lamp for you, Brice?" his wife asked, as they mounted
the veranda steps.

"No," he said, "let us sit out here," and they took the arm-chairs that
stood on the porch, and swung to and fro in silence for a little while.
The sea came and went among the rocks below, marking its course in the
deepening twilight with a white rope of foam, and raving huskily to
itself, with now and then the long plunge of some heavier surge against
the bowlders, and a hoarse shout. The Portland boat swam by in the
offing, a glitter of irregular lights, and the lamps on the different
points of the Cape blinked as they revolved in their towers. "This is
the kind of thing you can get only in a novel," said Maxwell, musingly.
"You couldn't possibly give the feeling of it in a play."

"Couldn't you give the feeling of the people looking at it?" suggested
his wife, and she put out her hand to lay it on his.

"Yes, you could do that," he assented, with pleasure in her notion; "and
that would be better. I suppose that is what would be aimed at in a
description of the scene, which would be tiresome if it didn't give the
feeling of the spectator."

"And Godolphin would say that if you let the carpenter have something to
do he would give the scene itself, and you could have the effect of it
at first hand."

Maxwell laughed. "I wonder how much they believe in those contrivances
of the carpenter themselves. They have really so little to do with the
dramatic intention; but they have been multiplied so since the stage
began to make the plays that the actors are always wanting them in. I
believe the time will come when the dramatist will avoid the occasion or
the pretext for them."

"That will be after Godolphin's time," said Mrs. Maxwell.

"Well, I don't know," returned Maxwell. "If Godolphin should happen to
imagine doing without them he would go all lengths."

"Or if you imagined it and let him suppose he had. He never imagines
anything of himself."

"No, he doesn't. And yet how perfectly he grasps the notion of the thing
when it is done! It is very different from literature, acting is. And
yet literature is only the representation of life."

"Well, acting is the representation of life at second-hand, then, and it
ought to be willing to subordinate itself. What I can't bear in
Godolphin is his setting himself up to be your artistic equal. He is no
more an artist than the canvas is that the artist paints a picture on."

Maxwell laughed. "Don't tell him so; he won't like it."

"I will tell him so some day, whether he likes it or not."

"No, you mustn't; for it isn't true. He's just as much an artist in his
way as I am in mine, and, so far as the public is concerned, he has
given more proofs."

"Oh, _his_ public!"

"It won't do to despise any public, even the theatre-going public."
Maxwell added the last words with a faint sigh.

"It's always second-rate," said his wife, passionately. "Third-rate,
fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were
writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be really
addressing refined people."

"It kills me to have you say that, Louise."

"Well, I won't. But don't you see, then, that you must stand up for art
all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will
refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I
can't endure to have you even seem to give way to Godolphin."

"You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He's far more
manageable than I expected him to be. It's quite pathetic how docile he
is, how perfectly ductile! But it won't do to browbeat him when he comes
over here a little out of shape. He's a curious creature," Maxwell went
on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with
difficulty. "I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could
he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to
perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin's mind is for
the serious drama." Maxwell laughed. "All his artistic instincts are in
solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate
them, or to give them any positive character. He's like a woman!"

"Thank you," said Mrs. Maxwell.

"Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness
of a woman."

"Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said
about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you."

"Oh, I don't believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went
out."

Mrs. Maxwell sighed. "Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient,
you are good. You are better than I am."

"I don't see the sequence exactly," said Maxwell.

They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious
thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach
him with an equal inconsequence. "I don't know whether I could write a
novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It
stands on its own feet. It doesn't have to be pushed along, or pulled
along, as the novel does."

"Yes, of course, it's grand. That's the reason I can't bear to have you
do anything unworthy of it."

"I know, Louise," he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak
for a little while.

He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a
sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really
were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play.
But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity
of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every
kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've
known what it is to kill."

"I felt once as if I had killed _you_," she said, and then he knew that
she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual
fascination for them both. "But I never hated you."

"No; I did the hating," he returned, lightly.

"Ah, don't say so, dear," she entreated, half in earnest.

"Well, have it all to yourself, then," he said; and he rose and went
indoors, and lighted the lamp, and she saw him get out the manuscript of
his play, while she sat still, recalling the time when she had tried to
dismiss him from her thoughts upon a theory of his unworthiness. He had
not yet spoken of love to her then, but she felt as if she had refused
to listen to him, and her remorse kept his image before her in an
attitude of pathetic entreaty for at least a hearing. She knew that she
had given him reason, if she had not given him courage, to believe that
she cared for him; but he was too proud to renew the tacit approaches
from which she had so abruptly retreated, and she had to invite them
from him.

When she began to do this with the arts so imperceptible to the
single-mindedness of a man, she was not yet sure whether she could
endure to live with him or not; she was merely sure that she could not
live without him, or, to be more specific, without his genius, which she
believed no one else appreciated as she did. She believed that she
understood his character better than any one else, and would know how to
supplement it with her own. She had no ambition herself, but she could
lend him a more telescopic vision in his, and keep his aims high, if his
self-concentration ever made him short-sighted. He would write plays
because he could not help it, but she would inspire him to write them
with the lofty sense of duty she would have felt in writing them if she
had his gifts.

She was as happy in their engagement and as unhappy as girls usually are
during their courtship. It is the convention to regard those days as
very joyous, but probably no woman who was honest about the fact would
say that they were so from her own experience. Louise found them full of
excitement and an interest from which she relaxed at times with such a
sense of having strained forward to their end that she had a cold
reluctance from Maxwell, and though she never dreamed of giving him up
again, she sometimes wished she had never seen him. She was eager to
have it all over, and be married and out of the way, for one thing
because she knew that Maxwell could never be assimilated to her
circumstance, and she should have no rest till she was assimilated to
his. When it came to the dinners and lunches, which the Hilary kinship
and friendship made in honor of her engagement, she found that Maxwell
actually thought she could make excuse of his work to go without him,
and she had to be painfully explicit before she could persuade him that
this would not do at all. He was not timid about meeting her friends, as
he might very well have been; but, in comparison with his work, he
apparently held them of little moment, and at last he yielded to her
wishes rather than her reasons. He made no pretence of liking those
people, but he gave them no more offence than might have been expected.
Among the Hilary cousins there were several clever women, who enjoyed
the quality of Maxwell's somewhat cold, sarcastic humor, and there were
several men who recognized his ability, though none of them liked him
any better than he liked them. He had a way of regarding them all at
first as of no interest, and then, if something kindled his imagination
from them, of showing a sudden technical curiosity, which made the
ladies, at least, feel as if he were dealing with them as so much
material. They professed to think that it was only a question of time
when they should all reappear in dramatic form, unless Louise should
detect them in the manuscript before they were put upon the stage and
forbid his using them. If it were to be done before marriage they were
not sure that she would do it, or could do it, for it was plain to be
seen that she was perfectly infatuated with him. The faults they found
in him were those of manner mostly, and they perceived that these were
such as passion might forgive to his other qualities. There were some
who said that they envied her for being so much in love with him, but
these were not many; and some did not find him good-looking, or see what
could have taken her with him.

Maxwell showed himself ignorant of the observances in every way, and if
Louise had not rather loved him the more for what he made her suffer
because of them, she must certainly have given him up at times. He had
never, to her thinking, known how to put a note properly on paper; his
letters were perfectly fascinating, but they lacked a final charm in
being often written on one side of half-sheets, and numbered in the
upper right-hand corner, like printer's copy. She had to tell him that
he must bring his mother to call upon her; and then he was so long
doing it that Louise imagined a timidity in his mother which he was too
proud to own, and made her own mother go with her to see Mrs. Maxwell in
the house which she partly let out in lodgings on a very modest street.
It really did not matter about any of those things though, and she and
Maxwell's mother got on very well after the first plunge, though the
country doctor's widow was distinctly a country person, with the narrow
social horizons of a villager whose knowledge of the city was confined
to the compass of her courageous ventures in it.

To her own mother Louise feigned to see nothing repulsive in the
humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had
been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and
tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented
acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell's.
Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she
was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs.
Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she did
not rub it into Louise, which would have done no good, she did rub it
into Louise's father, though that could hardly have been said to do any
good either. Her report of the whole affair made him writhe, but when
she had made him writhe enough she began to admit some extenuating
circumstances. If Mrs. Maxwell was a country person, she was not
foolish. She did not chant, in a vain attempt to be genteel in her
speech; she did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary's graciousness, and
she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully
managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was
any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs.
Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to
herself as any overweening pride she might have had in her son's choice.

Mrs. Hilary did not like her daughter's choice, but she had at last
reached such resignation concerning it as the friends of a hopeless
invalid may feel when the worst comes. She had tried to stop the affair
when there was some hope or some use in trying, and now she determined
to make the best of it. The worst was that Maxwell was undoubtedly of
different origin and breeding, and he would always, in society, subject
Louise to a consciousness of his difference if he did nothing more. But
when you had said this, you seemed to have said all there was to say
against him. The more the Hilarys learned about the young fellow the
more reason they had to respect him. His life, on its level, was
blameless. Every one who knew him spoke well of him, and those who knew
him best spoke enthusiastically; he had believers in his talent and in
his character. In a society so barometrical as ours, even in a city
where it was the least barometrical, the obstacles to the acceptance of
Maxwell were mainly subjective. They were formed not so much of what
people would say as of what Mrs. Hilary felt they had a right to say,
and, in view of the necessities of the case, she found herself realizing
that if they did not say anything to her it would be much as if they had
not said anything at all. She dealt with the fact before her frankly,
and in the duties which it laid upon her she began to like Maxwell
before Hilary did. Not that Hilary disliked him, but there was something
in the young fellow taking his daughter away from him, in that cool
matter-of-fact way, as if it were quite in the course of nature that he
should, instead of being abashed and overwhelmed by his good fortune,
which left Hilary with a misgiving lest he might realize it less and
less as time went on.

Hilary had no definite ambition for her in marriage, but his vague
dreams for her were not of a young man who meant to leave off being a
newspaper writer to become a writer of plays. He instinctively wished
her to be of his own order of things; and it had pleased him when he
heard from his wife's report that Louise had seen the folly of her fancy
for the young journalist whom a series of accidents had involved with
their lives, and had decided to give him up. When the girl decided
again, more tacitly, that she could not give him up, Hilary submitted,
as he would have submitted to anything she wished. To his simple
idolatry of her she was too good for anything on earth, and if he were
to lose her, he found that after all he had no great choice in the
matter. As soon as her marriage appeared inevitable, he agreed with his
wife that their daughter must never have any unhappiness of their
making; and they let her reverse without a word the purpose of going to
spend the winter abroad which they had formed at her wish when she
renounced Maxwell.

All this was still recent in point of time, and though marriage had
remanded it to an infinite distance apparently with the young people, it
had not yet taken away the importance or the charm of the facts and the
feelings that had seemed the whole of life before marriage. When Louise
turned from her retrospect she went in through the window that opened on
the veranda and stood beside her husband, where he sat with his
manuscript before him, frowning at it in the lamplight that made her
blink a little after the dark outside. She put her hand on his head, and
carried it down his cheek over his mouth, so that he might kiss its
palm.

"Going to work much longer, little man?" she asked, and she kissed the
top of his head in her turn. It always amused her to find how smooth and
soft his hair was. He flung his pen away and threw himself back in his
chair. "Oh, it's that infernal love business!" he said.

She sat down and let her hands fall on her lap. "Why, what makes it so
hard?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems as if I were _fighting_ it, as the
actors say, all the way. It doesn't go of itself at all. It's forced,
from the beginning."

"Why do you have it in, then?"

"I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has
to be in every life. Godolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him
about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn't
do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of
love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish
there hadn't. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded
fools don't know what to do with their love."

"They might get married with it," Louise suggested.

"I don't believe they have sense enough to think of that," said her
husband. "The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to
imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with
all his might."

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