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
Louise laughed out her secure delight. "If the public could only know
why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the
play."
Maxwell laughed, too. "Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like
that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday
edition of the _Events_!"
Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell's acquaintance, who stood to Louise for
all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. "Don't!" she
shrieked.
Maxwell went on. "He would have both our portraits in, and your father's
and mother's, and my mother's; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue,
and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of
art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly
gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it." He
laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.
"I know what you're thinking of now," said his wife.
"What?"
"Whether you couldn't use _our_ affair in the play?"
"You're a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn't do."
"Stuff! It _will_ do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I
shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the
cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on
the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your
succeeding on lines that had never been tried before."
"Generous girl!" He bent over--he had not to bend far--and kissed her.
Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in
his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: "I
could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I'll just take
a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually
reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a
howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I
have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't
matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in
love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at
least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be
vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again."
"That's what I did," said his wife, "and you hadn't offered yourself
either."
Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. "You
wouldn't like me to use that point, then?"
"What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world
knew it."
"Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it
could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work
farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just
take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her
all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts
of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out
about her father's crime, and then--" He stopped again with a certain
air of distaste.
"That would be rather romantic, wouldn't it?" his wife asked.
"That was what I was thinking," he answered. "It would be confoundedly
romantic."
"Well, I'll tell you," said Louise; "you could have them squabbling all
the way through, and doing hateful things to one another."
"That would give it the cast of comedy."
"Well?"
"And that wouldn't do either."
"Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation
in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!"
"Oh yes, I know that--"
"And it would be very effective to leave the impression of their
happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on
their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal of your Haxard
death-scene."
"Godolphin wouldn't stand that. He wants the gloom of Haxard's death to
remain in unrelieved inkiness at the end. He wants the people to go
away thinking of Godolphin, and how well he did the last gasp. He
wouldn't stand any love business there. He would rather not have any in
the play."
"Very well, if you're going to be a slave to Godolphin--"
"I'm not going to be a slave to Godolphin, and if I can see my way to
make the right use of such a passage at the close I'll do it even if it
kills the play or Godolphin."
"Now you're shouting," said Louise. She liked to use a bit of slang when
it was perfectly safe--as in very good company, or among those she
loved; at other times she scrupulously shunned it.
"But I can do it somehow," Maxwell mused aloud. "Now I have the right
idea, I can make it take any shape or color I want. It's magnificent!"
"And who thought of it?" she demanded.
"Who? Why, _I_ thought of it myself."
"Oh, you little wretch!" she cried, in utter fondness, and she ran at
him and drove him into a corner. "Now, say that again and I'll tickle
you."
"No, no, no!" he laughed, and he fought away the pokes and thrusts she
was aiming at him. "We both thought of it together. It was mind
transference!"
She dropped her hands with an instant interest in the psychological
phenomena. "Wasn't it strange? Or, no, it wasn't, either! If our lives
are so united in everything, the wonder is that we don't think more
things and say more things together. But now I want you to own, Brice,
that I was the first to speak about your using our situation!"
"Yes, you were, and I was the first to think of it. But that's perfectly
natural. You always speak of things before you think, and I always think
of things before I speak."
"Well, I don't care," said Louise, by no means displeased with the
formulation. "I shall always say it was perfectly miraculous. And I want
you to give me credit for letting you have the idea after you had
thought of it."
"Yes, there's nothing mean about you, Louise, as Pinney would say. By
Jove, I'll bring Pinney in! I'll have Pinney interview Haxard concerning
Greenshaw's disappearance."
"Very well, then, if you bring Pinney in, you will leave me out," said
Louise. "I won't be in the same play with Pinney."
"Well, I won't bring Pinney in, then," said Maxwell. "I prefer you to
Pinney--in a play. But I have got to have in an interviewer. It will be
splendid on the stage, and I'll be the first to have him." He went and
sat down at his table.
"You're not going to work any more to-night!" his wife protested.
"No, just jot down a note or two, to clinch that idea of ours in the
right shape." He dashed off a few lines with pencil in his play at
several points, and then he said: "There! I guess I shall get some bones
into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it." He
looked up and met his wife's adoring eyes.
"You're wonderful, Brice!" she said.
"Well, don't tell me so," he returned, "or it might spoil me. Now I
wouldn't tell you how good you were, on any account."
"Oh yes, do, dearest!" she entreated, and a mist came into her eyes. "I
don't think you praise me enough."
"How much ought I to praise you?"
"You ought to say that you think I'll never be a hinderance to you."
"Let me see," he said, and he pretended to reflect. "How would it do to
say that if I ever come to anything worth while, it'll be because you
made me?"
"Oh, Brice! But would it be true?" She dropped on her knees at his side.
"Well, I don't know. Let's hope it would," and with these words he
laughed again and put his arms round her. Presently she felt his arm
relax, and she knew that he had ceased to think about her and was
thinking about his play again.
She pulled away, and "Well?" she asked.
He laughed at being found out so instantly. "That was a mighty good
thing your father said when you went to tell him of our engagement."
"It was _very_ good. But if you think I'm going to let you use _that_
you're very much mistaken. No, Brice! Don't you touch papa. He wouldn't
like it; he wouldn't understand it. Why, what a perfect cormorant you
are!"
They laughed over his voracity, and he promised it should be held in
check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked
so effectively into the play.
The next morning Louise said to her husband: "I can see, Brice, that you
are full of the notion of changing that love business, and if I stay
round I shall simply bother. I'm going down to lunch with papa and
mamma, and get back here in the afternoon, just in time to madden
Godolphin with my meddling."
She caught the first train after breakfast, and in fifteen minutes she
was at Beverly Farms. She walked over to her father's cottage, where she
found him smoking his cigar on the veranda.
He was alone; he said her mother had gone to Boston for the day; and he
asked: "Did you walk from the station? Why didn't you come back in the
carriage? It had just been there with your mother."
"I didn't see it. Besides, I might not have taken it if I had. As the
wife of a struggling young playwright, I should have probably thought it
unbecoming to drive. But the struggle is practically over, you'll be
happy to know."
"What? Has he given it up?" asked her father.
"Given it up! He's just got a new light on his love business!"
"I thought his love business had gone pretty well with him," said
Hilary, with a lingering grudge in his humor.
"This is another love business!" Louise exclaimed. "The love business in
the play. Brice has always been so disgusted with it that he hasn't
known what to do. But last night we thought it out together, and I've
left him this morning getting his hero and heroine to stand on their
legs without being held up. Do you want to know about it?"
"I think I can get on without," said Hilary.
Louise laughed joyously. "Well, you wouldn't understand what a triumph
it was if I told you. I suppose, papa, you've no idea how Philistine you
are. But you're nothing to mamma!"
"I dare say," said Hilary, sulkily. But she looked at him with eyes
beaming with gayety, and he could see that she was happy, and he was
glad at heart. "When does Maxwell expect to have his play done?" he
relented so far as to ask.
"Why, it's done now, and has been for a month, in one sense, and it
isn't done at all in another. He has to keep working it over, and he has
to keep fighting Godolphin's inspirations. He comes over from Manchester
with a fresh lot every afternoon."
"I dare say Maxwell will be able to hold his own," said Hilary, but not
so much proudly as dolefully.
She knew he was braving it out about the theatre, and that secretly he
thought it undignified, and even disreputable, to be connected with it,
or to be in such close relations with an actor as Maxwell seemed to be
with this fellow who talked of taking his play. Hilary could go back
very easily to the time in Boston when the theatres were not allowed
open on Saturday night, lest they should profane the approaching
Sabbath, and when you would no more have seen an actor in society than
an elephant. He had not yet got used to meeting them, and he always felt
his difference, though he considered himself a very liberal man, and was
fond of the theatre--from the front.
He asked now, "What sort of chap is he, really?" meaning Godolphin, and
Louise did her best to reassure him. She told him Godolphin was young
and enthusiastic; and he had an ideal of the drama; and he believed in
Brice; and he had been two seasons with Booth and Barrett; and now he
had made his way on the Pacific Coast, and wanted a play that he could
take the road with. She parroted those phrases, which made her father's
flesh creep, and she laughed when she saw it creeping, for sympathy; her
own had crept first.
"Well," he said, at last, "he won't expect you and Maxwell to take the
road too with it?"
"Oh no, we shall only be with him in New York. He won't put the play on
there first; they usually try a new play in the country."
"Oh, do they?" said Hilary, with a sense that his daughter's knowledge
of the fact was disgraceful to her.
"Yes. Shall I tell you what they call that? Trying it on a dog!" she
shrieked, and Hilary had to laugh, too. "It's dreadful," she went on.
"Then, if it doesn't kill the dog, Godolphin will bring it to New York,
and put it on for a run--a week or a month--as long as his money holds
out. If he believes in it, he'll fight it." Her father looked at her for
explanation, and she said, with a gleeful perception of his suffering,
"He'll keep it on if he has to play to paper every night. That is, to
free tickets."
"Oh!" said Hilary. "And are you to be there the whole time with him?"
"Why, not necessarily. But Brice will have to be there for the
rehearsals; and if we are going to live in New York--"
Hilary sighed. "I wish Maxwell was going on with his newspaper work; I
might be of use to him in that line, if he were looking forward to an
interest in a newspaper; but I couldn't buy him a theatre, you know."
Louise laughed. "He wouldn't let you buy him anything, papa; Brice is
awfully proud. Now, I'll tell you, if you want to know, just how we
expect to manage in New York; Brice and I have been talking it all
over; and it's all going to be done on that thousand dollars he saved up
from his newspaper work, and we're not going to touch a cent of my money
till that is gone. Don't you call that pretty business-like?"
"Very," said Hilary, and he listened with apparent acquiescence to the
details of a life which he divined that Maxwell had planned from his own
simple experience. He did not like the notion of it for his daughter,
but he could not help himself, and it was a consolation to see that she
was in love with it.
She went back from it to the play itself, and told her father that now
Maxwell had got the greatest love business for it that there ever was.
She would not explain just what it was, she said, because her father
would get a wrong notion of it if she did. "But I have a great mind to
tell you something else," she said, "if you think you can behave
sensibly about it, papa. Do you suppose you can?"
Hilary said he would try, and she went on: "It's part of the happiness
of having got hold of the right kind of love business now, and I don't
know but it unconsciously suggested it to both of us, for we both
thought of the right thing at the same time; but in the beginning you
couldn't have told it from a quarrel." Her father started, and Louise
began to laugh. "Yes, we had quite a little tiff, just like _real_
married people, about my satirizing one of Godolphin's inspirations to
his face, and wounding his feelings. Brice is so cautious and so
gingerly with him; and he was vexed with me, and told me he wished I
wouldn't do it; and that vexed me, and I said I wouldn't have anything
to do with his play after this; and I didn't speak to him again till
after supper. I said he was self-centred, and he _is_. He's always
thinking about his play and its chances; and I suppose I would rather
have had him think more about me now and then. But I've discovered a way
now, and I believe it will serve the same purpose. I'm going to enter so
fully into his work that I shall be part of it; and when he is thinking
of that he will be thinking of me without knowing it. Now, you wouldn't
say there was anything in that to cry about, would you? and yet you see
I'm at it!" and with this she suddenly dropped her face on her father's
shoulder.
Hilary groaned in his despair of being able to imagine an injury
sufficiently atrocious to inflict on Maxwell for having brought this
grief upon his girl. At the sound of his groan, as if she perfectly
interpreted his meaning in it, she broke from a sob into a laugh. "Will
you never," she said, dashing away the tears, "learn to let me cry,
simply because I am a goose, papa, and a goose must weep without reason,
because she feels like it? I won't have you thinking that I am not the
happiest person in the world; and I was, even when I was suffering so
because I had to punish Brice for telling me I had done wrong. And if
you think I'm not, I will never tell you anything more, for I see you
can't be trusted. Will you?"
He said no to her rather complicated question, and he was glad to
believe that she was really as happy as she declared, for if he could
not have believed it, he would have had to fume away an intolerable deal
of exasperation. This always made him very hot and uncomfortable, and he
shrank from it, but he would have done it if it had been necessary. As
it was, he got back to his newspaper again with a sufficiently light
heart, when Louise gave him a final kiss, and went indoors and put
herself in authority for the day, and ordered what she liked for
luncheon. The maids were delighted to have her, and she had a welcome
from them all, which was full of worship for her as a bride whose
honeymoon was not yet over.
She went away before her mother got home, and she made her father own,
before she left him, that he had never had such a lovely day since he
could remember. He wanted to drive over to Magnolia with her; but she
accused him of wanting to go so that he could spy round a little, and
satisfy himself of the misery of her married life; and then he would not
insist.
IV.
Louise kept wondering, the whole way back, how Maxwell had managed the
recasting of the love-business, and she wished she had stayed with him,
so that he could have appealed to her at any moment on the points that
must have come up all the time. She ought to have coached him more fully
about it, and told him the woman's side of such a situation, as he never
could have imagined how many advances a woman can make with a man in
such an affair and the man never find it out. She had not made any
advances herself when she wished to get him back, but she had wanted to
make them; and she knew he would not have noticed it if she had done the
boldest sort of things to encourage him, to let him know that she liked
him; he was so simple, in his straightforward egotism, beside her
sinuous unselfishness.
She began to think how she was always contriving little sacrifices to
his vanity, his modesty, and he was always accepting them with a serene
ignorance of the fact that they were offered; and at this she strayed
off on a little by-way in her revery, and thought how it was his mind,
always, that charmed her; it was no ignoble fondness she felt; no poor,
grovelling pleasure in his good looks, though she had always seen that
in a refined sort he had a great deal of manly beauty. But she had held
her soul aloof from all that, and could truly say that what she adored
in him was the beauty of his talent, which he seemed no more conscious
of than of his dreamy eyes, the scornful sweetness of his mouth, the
purity of his forehead, his sensitive nostrils, his pretty, ineffective
little chin. She had studied her own looks with reference to his, and
was glad to own them in no wise comparable, though she knew she was more
graceful, and she could not help seeing that she was a little taller;
she kept this fact from herself as much as possible. Her features were
not regular, like his, but she could perceive that they had charm in
their irregularity; she could only wonder whether he thought that line
going under her chin, and suggesting a future double chin in the little
fold it made, was so very ugly. He seemed never to have thought of her
looks, and if he cared for her, it was for some other reason, just as
she cared for him. She did not know what the reason could be, but
perhaps it was her sympathy, her appreciation, her cheerfulness; Louise
believed that she had at least these small merits.
The thought of them brought her back to the play again, and to the
love-business, and she wondered how she could have failed to tell him,
when they were talking about what should bring the lovers together,
after their prefatory quarrel, that simply willing it would do it. She
knew that after she began to wish Maxwell back, she was in such a frenzy
that she believed her volition brought him back; and now she really
believed that you could hypnotize fate in some such way, and that your
longings would fulfil themselves if they were intense enough. If he
could not use that idea in this play, then he ought to use it in some
other, something psychological, symbolistic, Maeterlinckish.
She was full of it when she dismounted from the barge at the hotel and
hurried over to their cottage, and she was intolerably disappointed when
she did not find him at work in the parlor.
"Brice! Brice!" she shouted, in the security of having the whole cottage
to herself. She got no answer, and ran up to their room, overhead. He
was not there, either, and now it seemed but too probable that he had
profited by her absence to go out for a walk alone, after his writing,
and fallen from the rocks, and been killed--he was so absent-minded. She
offered a vow to Heaven that if he were restored to her she would never
leave him again, even for a half-day, as long as either of them lived.
In reward for this she saw him coming from the direction of the beach,
where nothing worse could have befallen him than a chill from the water,
if the wind was off shore and he had been taking a bath.
She had not put off her hat yet, and she went out to meet him; she could
not kiss him at once, if she went to meet him, but she could wait till
she got back to the cottage, and then kiss him. It would be a trial to
wait, but it would be a trial to wait for him to come in, and he might
stroll off somewhere else, unless she went to him. As they approached
each other she studied his face for some sign of satisfaction with his
morning's work. It lighted up at sight of her, but there remained an
inner dark in it to her eye.
"What is the matter?" she asked, as she put her hand through his arm,
and hung forward upon it so that she could look up into his face. "How
did you get on with the love-business?"
"Oh, I think I've got that all right," he answered, with a certain
reservation. "I've merely blocked it out, of course."
"So that you can show it to Godolphin?"
"I guess so."
"I see that you're not sure of it. We must go over it before he comes.
He hasn't been here yet?"
"Not yet."
"Why are you so quiet, Brice? Is anything the matter? You look tired."
"I'm not particularly tired."
"Then you are worried. What is it?"
"Oh, you would have to know, sooner or later." He took a letter from his
pocket and gave it to her. "It came just after I had finished my
morning's work."
She pulled it out of the envelope and read:
"MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, Friday.
"DEAR SIR: I beg leave to relinquish any claim that you may
feel I have established to the play you have in hand. As it now stands,
I do not see my part in it, and I can imagine why you should be
reluctant to make further changes in it, in order to meet my
requirements.
"If I can be of any service to you in placing the piece, I shall be glad
to have you make use of me.
"Yours truly,
"LAUNCELOT GODOLPHIN."
"You blame _me_!" she said, after a blinding moment, in which the letter
darkened before her eyes, and she tottered in her walk. She gave it back
to him as she spoke.
"What a passion you have for blaming!" he answered, coldly. "If I fixed
the blame on you it wouldn't help."
"No," Louise meekly assented, and they walked along towards their
cottage. They hardly spoke again before they reached it and went in.
Then she asked, "Did you expect anything like this from the way he
parted with you yesterday?"
Maxwell gave a bitter laugh. "From the way we parted yesterday I was
expecting him early this afternoon, with the world in the palm of his
hand, to lay it at my feet. He all but fell upon my neck when he left
me. I suppose his not actually doing it was an actor's intimation that
we were to see each other no more."
"I wish you had nothing to do with actors!" said Louise.
"_They_ appear to have nothing to do with me," said Maxwell. "It comes
to the same thing."
They reached the cottage, and sat down in the little parlor where she
had left him so hopefully at work in the morning, where they had talked
his play over so jubilantly the night before.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, after an abysmal interval.
"Nothing. What is there to do?"
"You have a right to an explanation; you ought to demand it."
"I don't need any explanation. The case is perfectly clear. Godolphin
doesn't want my play. That is all."
"Oh, Brice!" she lamented. "I am so dreadfully sorry, and I know it was
my fault. Why don't you let me write to him, and explain--"
Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't want any explanation. He doesn't
want the play, even. We must make up our minds to that, and let him go.
Now we can try it with your managers."
Louise felt keenly the unkindness of his calling them her managers, but
she was glad to have him unkind to her; deep within her Unitarianism she
had the Puritan joy in suffering for a sin; her treatment of
Godolphin's suggestion of a skirt-dance, while very righteous in itself,
was a sin against her husband's interest, and she would rather he were
unkind to her than not. The sooner she was punished for it and done with
it, the better; in her unscientific conception of life, the consequences
of a sin ended with its punishment. If Maxwell had upbraided her with
the bitterness she merited, it would have been to her as if it were all
right again with Godolphin. His failure to do so left the injury
unrepaired, and she would have to do something. "I suppose you don't
care to let me see what you've written to-day?"
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15