The Story of a Play

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"No, not now," said Maxwell, in a tone that said, "I haven't the heart
for it."

They sat awhile without speaking, and then she ventured, "Brice, I have
an idea, but I don't know what you will think of it. Why not take
Godolphin's letter on the face of it, and say that you are very sorry he
must give up the play, and that you will be greatly obliged to him if he
can suggest some other actor? That would be frank, at least."

Maxwell broke into a laugh that had some joy in it. "Do you think so? It
isn't my idea of frankness exactly."

"No, of course not. You always say what you mean, and you don't change.
That is what is so beautiful in you. You can't understand a nature that
is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow."

"Oh, I think I can," said Maxwell, with a satirical glance.

"Brice!" she softly murmured; and then she said, "Well, I don't care. He
_is_ just like a woman."

"You didn't like my saying so last night."

"That was a different thing. At any rate, it's I that say so now, and I
want you to write that to him. It will bring him back flying. Will you?"

"I'll think about it," said Maxwell; "I'm not sure that I want Godolphin
back, or not at once. It's a great relief to be rid of him, in a certain
way, though a manager might be worse slavery. Still, I think I would
like to try a manager. I have never shown this play to one, and I know
the Odeon people in Boston, and, perhaps--"

"You are saying that to comfort me."

"I wouldn't comfort you for worlds, my dear. I am saying this to
distress you. But since I have worked that love-business over, it seems
to me much less a one-part play, and if I could get a manager to take a
fancy to it I could have my own way with it much better; at least, he
wouldn't want me to take all the good things out of the other
characters' mouths and stuff them into Haxard's."

"Do you really think so?"

"I really thought so before I got Godolphin's letter. That made him seem
the one and only man for me."

"Yes," Louise assented, with a sad intelligence.

Maxwell seemed to have got some strength from confronting his calamity.
At any rate, he said, almost cheerfully, "I'll read you what I wrote
this morning," and she had to let him, though she felt that it was
taking her at a moment when her wish to console him was so great that
she would not be able to criticise him. But she found that he had done
it so well there was no need of criticism.

"You are wonderful, Brice!" she said, in a transport of adoration, which
she indulged as simply his due. "You are miraculous! Well, this is the
greatest triumph yet, even of _your_ genius. How you have seized the
whole idea! And so subtly, so delicately! And so completely disguised!
The girl acts just as a girl _would_ have acted. How could you know it?"

"Perhaps I've seen it," he suggested, demurely.

"No, no, you _didn't_ see it! That is the amusing part of it. You were
as blind as a bat all the time, and you never had the least suspicion;
you've told me so."

"Well, then, I've seen it retrospectively."

"Perhaps that way. But I don't believe you've seen it at all. You've
divined it; and that's where your genius is worth all the experience in
the world. The girl is twice as good as the man, and you never
experienced a girl's feelings or motives. You divined them. It's pure
inspiration. It's the prophet in you!"

"You'll be stoning me next," said Maxwell. "I don't think the man is so
very bad, even if I didn't divine him."

"Yes, for a poor creature of experience and knowledge, he will do very
well. But he doesn't compare with the girl."

"I hadn't so good a model."

She hugged him for saying that. "You pay the prettiest compliments in
the world, even if you don't pick up handkerchiefs."

Their joy in the triumph of his art was unalloyed by the hope of
anything outside of it, of any sort of honor or profit from it, though
they could not keep the thought of these out very long.

"Yes," she said, after one of the delicious silences that divided their
moments of exaltation. "There won't be any trouble about getting your
play taken, _now_."

After supper they strolled down for the sunset and twilight on the
rocks. There, as the dusk deepened, she put her wrap over his shoulders
as well as her own, and pulled it together in front of them both. "I am
not going to have you taking cold, now, when you need all your health
for your work more than ever. That love-business seems to me perfect
just as it is, but I know you won't be satisfied till you have put the
very last touch on it."

"Yes, I see all sorts of things I can do to it. Louise!"

"Well, what?"

"Don't you see that the love-business is the play now? I have got to
throw away all the sin-interest, all the Haxard situation, or keep them
together as they are, and write a new play altogether, with the light,
semi-comic motive of the love-business for the motive of the whole. It's
out of tone with Haxard's tragedy, and it can't be brought into keeping
with it. The sin-interest will kill the love-business, or the
love-business will kill the sin-interest. Don't you see?"

"Why, of course! You must make this light affair now, and when it's
opened the way for you with the public you can bring out the old play,"
she assented, and it instantly became the old play in both their minds;
it became almost the superannuated play. They talked it over in this new
aspect, and then they went back to the cottage, to look at the new play
as it shadowed itself forth in the sketch Maxwell had made. He read the
sketch to her again, and they saw how it could be easily expanded to
three or four acts, and made to fill the stage and the evening.

"And it will be the most original thing that ever was!" she exulted.

"I don't think there's been anything exactly like it before," he
allowed.

From time to time they spoke to each other in the night, and she asked
if he were asleep, and he if she were asleep, and then they began to
talk of the play again. Towards morning they drowsed a little, but at
their time of life the loss of a night's sleep means nothing, and they
rose as glad as they had lain down.

"I'll tell you, Brice," she said, the first thing, "you must have it
that they have been engaged, and you can call the play 'The Second
Chapter,' or something more alliterative. Don't you think that would be
a good name?"

"It would make the fortune of any play," he answered, "let alone a play
of such merit as this."

"Well, then, sha'n't you always say that I did something towards it?"

"I shall say you did everything towards it. You originated the idea, and
named it, and I simply acted as your amanuensis, as it were, and wrote
it out mostly from your dictation. It shall go on the bills, 'The Second
Chapter,' a demi-semi-serious comedy by Mrs. Louise Hilary Maxwell--in
letters half a foot high--and by B. Maxwell--in very small lower case,
that can't be read without the aid of a microscope."

"Oh, Brice! If you make him talk that way to her, it will be perfectly
killing."

"I dare say the audience will find it so."

They were so late at breakfast, and sat there so long talking, for
Maxwell said he did not feel like going to work quite so promptly as
usual, that it was quite ten o'clock when they came out of the
dining-room, and then they stayed awhile gossiping with people on the
piazza of the hotel before they went back to their cottage. When they
came round the corner in sight of it they saw the figure of a man pacing
back and forth on the veranda, with his head dropped forward, and
swinging a stick thoughtfully behind him. Louise pulled Maxwell
convulsively to a halt, for the man was Godolphin.

"What do you suppose it means?" she gasped.

"I suppose he will tell us," said Maxwell, dryly. "Don't stop and stare
at him. He has got eyes all over him, and he's clothed with
self-consciousness as with a garment, and I don't choose to let him
think that his being here is the least important or surprising."

"No, of course not. That would be ridiculous," and she would have liked
to pause for a moment's worship of her husband's sense, which appeared
to her almost as great as his genius. But it seemed to her an
inordinately long time before they reached the cottage-gate, and
Godolphin came half-way down the walk to meet them.

He bowed seriously to her, and then said, with dignity, to her husband,
"Mr. Maxwell, I feel that I owe you an apology--or an explanation,
rather--for the abrupt note I sent you yesterday. I wish to assure you
that I had no feeling in the matter, and that I am quite sincere in my
offer of my services."

"Why, you're very good, Mr. Godolphin," said Maxwell. "I knew that I
could fully rely on your kind offer. Won't you come in?" He offered the
actor his hand, and they moved together towards the cottage; Louise had
at once gone before, but not so far as to be out of hearing.

"Why, thank you, I _will_ sit down a moment. I found the walk over
rather fatiguing. It's going to be a hot day." He passed his
handkerchief across his forehead, and insisted upon placing a chair for
Mrs. Maxwell before he could be made to sit down, though she said that
she was going indoors, and would not sit. "You understand, of course,
Mr. Maxwell, that I should still like to have your play, if it could be
made what I want?"

Maxwell would not meet his wife's eye in answering. "Oh, yes; the only
question with me is, whether I can make it what you want. That has been
the trouble all along. I know that the love-business in the play, as it
stood, was inadequate. But yesterday, just before I got your note, I had
been working it over in a perfectly new shape. I wish, if you have a
quarter of an hour to throw away, you'd let me show you what I've
written. Perhaps you can advise me."

"Why, I shall be delighted to be of any sort of use, Mr. Maxwell," said
Godolphin, with softened state; and he threw himself back in his chair
with an air of eager readiness.

"I will get your manuscript, Brice," said Louise, at a motion her
husband made to rise. She ran in and brought it out, and then went away
again. She wished to remain somewhere within earshot, but, upon the
whole, she decided against it, and went upstairs, where she kept herself
from eavesdropping by talking with the chambermaid, who had come over
from the hotel.

V.

Louise did not come down till she heard Godolphin walking away on the
plank. She said to herself that she had shipwrecked her husband once by
putting in her oar, and she was not going to do it again. When the
actor's footfalls died out in the distance she descended to the parlor,
where she found Maxwell over his manuscript at the table.

She had to call to him, "Well?" before he seemed aware of her presence.

Even then he did not look round, but he said, "Godolphin wants to play
Atland."

"The lover?"

"Yes. He thinks he sees his part in it."

"And do you?"

"How do I know?"

"Well, I am glad I let him get safely away before I came back, for I
certainly couldn't have held in when he proposed that, if I had been
here. I don't understand you, Brice! Why do you have anything more to
do with him? Why do you let him touch the new play? Was he ever of the
least use with the old one?"

Maxwell lay back in his chair with a laugh. "Not the least in the
world." The realization of the fact amused him more and more. "I was
just thinking how everything he ever got me to do to it," he looked down
at the manuscript, "was false and wrong. They talk about a knowledge of
the stage as if the stage were a difficult science, instead of a very
simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities any one
can seize at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is
clap-trap, pure and simple. They brag of its resources, and tell you the
carpenter can do anything you want nowadays, but if you attempt anything
outside of their tradition they are frightened. They think that their
exits and their entrances are great matters, and that they must come on
with such a speech, and go off with such another; but it is not of the
least consequence how they come or go if they have something interesting
to say or do."

"Why don't you say these things to Godolphin?"

"I do, and worse. He admits their truth with a candor and an
intelligence that are dismaying. He has a perfect conception of
Atland's part, and he probably will play it in a way to set your teeth
on edge."

"Why do you let him? Why don't you keep your play and offer it to a
manager or some actor who will know how to do it?" demanded Louise, with
sorrowful submission.

"Godolphin will know how to do it, even if he isn't able to. And,
besides, I should be a fool to fling him away for any sort of promising
uncertainty."

"He was willing to fling you away!"

"Yes, but I'm not so important to him as he is to me. He's the best I
can do for the present. It's a compromise all the way through--a cursed
spite from beginning to end. Your own words don't represent your ideas,
and the more conscience you put into the work the further you get from
what you thought it would be. Then comes the actor with the infernal
chemistry of his personality. He imagines the thing perfectly, not as
you imagined it, but as you wrote it, and then he is no more able to
play it as he imagined it than you were to write it as you imagined it.
What the public finally gets is something three times removed from the
truth that was first in the dramatist's mind. But I'm very lucky to have
Godolphin back again."

"I hope you're not going to let him see that you think so."

"Oh, no! I'm going to keep him in a suppliant attitude throughout, and
I'm going to let you come in and tame his spirit, if he--kicks."

"Don't be vulgar, Brice," said Louise, and she laughed rather forlornly.
"I don't see how you have the heart to joke, if you think it's so bad as
you say."

"I haven't. I'm joking without any heart." He stood up. "Let us go and
take a bath."

She glanced at him with a swift inventory of his fagged looks, and said,
"Indeed, you shall not take a bath this morning. You couldn't react
against it. You won't, will you?"

"No, I'll only lie on the sand, if you can pick me out a good warm spot,
and watch you."

"I shall not bathe, either."

"Well, then, I'll watch the other women." He put out his hand and took
hers.

She felt his touch very cold. "You are excited I can see. I wish--"

"What? That I was not an intending dramatist?"

"That you didn't have such excitements in your life. They will kill
you."

"They are all that will keep me alive."

They went down to the beach, and walked back and forth on its curve
several times before they dropped in the sand at a discreet distance
from several groups of hotel acquaintance. People were coming and going
from the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind
them, with its tufts of coarse silvery-green grasses. The Maxwells bowed
to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes
to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five
young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were passing ball near
them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a
crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot. Dogs ran barking
vaguely about, and children with wooden shovels screamed at their play.
Far off shimmered the sea, of one pale blue with the sky. The rooks were
black at either end of the beach; a line of sail-boats and dories swung
across its crescent beyond the bathers, who bobbed up and down in the
surf, or showed a head here and there outside of it.

"What a singular spectacle," said Maxwell. "The casting off of the
conventional in sea-bathing always seems to me like the effect of those
dreams where we appear in society insufficiently dressed, and wonder
whether we can make it go."

"Yes, isn't it?" His wife tried to cover all the propositions with one
loosely fitting assent.

"I'm surprised," Maxwell went on, "that some realistic wretch hasn't put
this sort of thing on the stage. It would be tremendously effective; if
he made it realistic enough it would be attacked by the press as
improper and would fill the house. Couldn't we work a sea-bathing scene
into the 'Second Chapter'? It would make the fortune of the play, and it
would give Godolphin a chance to show his noble frame in something like
the majesty of nature. Godolphin would like nothing better. We could
have Atland rescue Salome, and Godolphin could flop round among the
canvas breakers for ten minutes, and come on for a recall with the
heroine, both dripping real water all over the stage."

"Don't be disgusting, Brice," said his wife, absently. She had her head
half turned from him, watching a lady who had just come out of her
bath-house and was passing very near them on her way to the water.
Maxwell felt the inattention in his wife's tone and looked up.

The bather returned their joint gaze steadily from eyes that seemed, as
Maxwell said, to smoulder under their long lashes, and to question her
effect upon them in a way that he was some time finding a phrase for.
He was tormented to make out whether she were a large person or not;
without her draperies he could not tell. But she moved with splendid
freedom, and her beauty expressed a maturity of experience beyond her
years; she looked young, and yet she looked as if she had been taking
care of herself a good while. She was certainly very handsome, Louise
owned to herself, as the lady quickened her pace, and finally ran down
to the water and plunged into a breaker that rolled in at the right
moment in uncommon volume.

"Well?" she asked her husband, whose eyes had gone with hers.

"We ought to have clapped."

"Do you think she is an actress?"

"I don't know. I never saw her before. She seemed to turn the sunshine
into lime-light as she passed. Why! that's rather pretty, isn't it? And
it's a verse. I wonder what it is about these people. The best of them
have nothing of the stage in them--at least, the men haven't. I'm not
sure, though, that the women haven't. There are lots of women off the
stage who are actresses, but they don't seem so. They're personal; this
one was impersonal. She didn't seem to regard me as a man; she regarded
me as a house. Did you feel that?"

"Yes, that was it, I suppose. But she regarded you more than she did me,
I think."

"Why, of course. You were only a matinee."

They sat half an hour longer in the sand, and then he complained that
the wind blew all the warmth out of him as fast as the sun shone it into
him. She felt his hand next her and found it still cold; after a glance
round she furtively felt his forehead.

"You're still thinking," she sighed. "Come! We must go back."

"Yes. That girl won't be out of the water for half an hour yet; and we
couldn't wait to see her clothed and in her right mind afterwards."

"What makes you think she's a girl?" asked his wife, as they moved
slowly off.

He did not seem to have heard her question. He said, "I don't believe I
can make the new play go, Louise; I haven't the strength for it. There's
too much good stuff in Haxard; I can't throw away what I've done on it."

"That is just what I was thinking, Brice! It would be too bad to lose
that. The love-business as you've remodeled it is all very well. But it
_is_ light; it's comedy; and Haxard is such splendid tragedy. I want
you to make your first impression in that. You can do comedy afterwards;
but if you did comedy first, the public would never think your tragedy
was serious."

"Yes, there's a law in that. A clown mustn't prophesy. If a prophet
chooses to joke, now and then, all well and good. I couldn't begin now
and expand that love-business into a whole play. It must remain an
episode, and Godolphin must take it or leave it. Of course he'll want
Atland emaciated to fatten Haxard, as he calls it. But Atland doesn't
amount to much, as it is, and I don't believe I could make him; it's
essentially a passive part; Salome must make the chief effect in that
business, and I think I'll have her a little more serious, too. It'll be
more in keeping with the rest."

"I don't see why she shouldn't be serious. There's nothing ignoble in
what she does."

"No. It can be very impassioned."

Louise thought of the smouldering eyes of that woman, and she wondered
if they were what suggested something very impassioned to Maxwell; but
with all the frankness between them, she did not ask him.

On their way to the cottage they saw one of the hotel bell-boys coming
out. "Just left a telegram in there for you," he called, as he came
towards them.

Louise began, "Oh, dear, I hope there's nothing the matter with papa! Or
your mother."

She ran forward, and Maxwell followed at his usual pace, so that she had
time to go inside and come out with the despatch before he mounted the
veranda steps.

"You open it!" she entreated, piteously, holding it towards him.

He pulled it impatiently open, and glanced at the signature. "It's from
Godolphin;" and he read, "Don't destroy old play. Keep new love-business
for episode. Will come over this afternoon." Maxwell smiled. "More mind
transference."

Louise laughed in hysterical relief. "Now you can make him do just what
you want."

VI.

Maxwell, now, at least, knew that he had got his play going in the right
direction again. He felt a fresh pleasure in returning to the old lines
after his excursion in the region of comedy, and he worked upon them
with fresh energy. He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife
had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more
effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome,
more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though
in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great
deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of
Louise. He was doubtful whether the mingling of characteristics would
not end in unreality, but she was sure it would not; she said he was so
much like a woman in the traits he had borrowed from himself that Salome
would be all the truer for being like him; or, at any rate, she would be
finer, and more ideal. She said that it was nonsense, the way people
regarded women as altogether different from men; she believed they were
very much alike; a girl was as much the daughter of her father as of her
mother; she alleged herself as proof of the fact that a girl was often a
great deal more her father's daughter, and she argued that if Maxwell
made Salome quite in his own spiritual image, no one would dream of
criticising her as unwomanly. Then he asked if he need only make Atland
in her spiritual image to have him the manliest sort of fellow. She said
that was not what she meant, and, in any case, a man could have feminine
traits, and be all the nicer for them, but, if a woman had masculine
traits, she would be disgusting. At the same time, if you drew a man
from a woman, he would be ridiculous.

"Then you want me to model Atland on myself, too," said Maxwell.

She thought a moment. "Yes, I do. If Salome is to be taken mostly from
me, I couldn't bear to have him like anybody but you. It would be
indelicate."

"Well, now, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to stand it," said
Maxwell. "I am going to make Atland like Pinney."

But she would not be turned from the serious aspect of the affair by
his joking. She asked, "Do you think it would intensify the situation if
he were not equal to her? If the spectator could be made to see that she
was throwing herself away on him, after all?"

"Wouldn't that leave the spectator a little too inconsolable? You don't
want the love-business to double the tragedy, you want to have it
relieved, don't you?"

"Yes, that is true. You must make him worth all the sacrifice. I
couldn't stand it if he wasn't."

Maxwell frowned, as he always did when he became earnest, and said with
a little sigh, "He must be passive, negative, as I said; you must simply
feel that he is _good_, and that she will be safe with him, after the
worst has happened to her father. And I must keep the interest of the
love-business light, without letting it become farcical. I must get
charm, all I can, into her character. You won't mind my getting the
charm all from you?"

"Oh, Brice, what sweet things you say to me! I wish everybody could know
how divine you are."

"The women would all be making love to me, and I should hate that. One
is quite enough."

"_Am_ I quite enough?" she entreated.

"You have been up to the present time."

"And do you think I shall always be?" She slid from her chair to her
knees on the floor beside him, where he sat at his desk, and put her
arms round him.

He did not seem to know it. "Look here, Louise, I have got to connect
this love-business with the main action of the play, somehow. It won't
do simply to have it an episode. How would it do to have Atland know all
the time that Haxard has killed Greenshaw, and be keeping it from
Salome, while she is betraying her love for him?"

"Wouldn't that be rather tawdry?" Louise let her arms slip down to her
side, and looked up at him, as she knelt.

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