The Story of a Play

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"Yes, it would," he owned.

He looked very unhappy about it, and she rose to her feet, as if to give
it more serious attention. "Brice, I want your play to be thoroughly
honest and true from beginning to end, and not to have any sort of
catchpenny effectivism in it. You have planned it so nobly that I can't
bear to have you lower the standard the least bit; and I think the
honest and true way is to let the love-business be a pleasant fact in
the case, as it might very well be. Those things _do_ keep going on in
life alongside of the greatest misery, the greatest unhappiness."

"Well," said Maxwell, "I guess you are right about the love-business.
I'll treat it frankly for what it is, a fact in the case. That will be
the right way, and that will be the strong way. It will be like life. I
don't know that you are bound to relate things strictly to each other in
art, any more than they are related in life. There are all sorts of
incidents and interests playing round every great event that seem to
have no more relation to it than the rings of Saturn have to Saturn.
They form the atmosphere of it. If I can let Haxard's wretchedness be
seen at last through the atmosphere of his daughter's happiness!"

"Yes," she said, "that will be quite enough." She knew that they had
talked up to the moment when he could best begin to work, and now left
him to himself.

Within a week he got the rehabilitated love-business in place, and the
play ready to show to Godolphin again. He had managed to hold the actor
off in the meantime, but now he returned in full force, with suggestions
and misgivings which had first to be cleared away before he could give a
clear mind to what Maxwell had done. Then Maxwell could see that he was
somehow disappointed, for he began to talk as if there were no
understanding between them for his taking the play. He praised it
warmly, but he said that it would be hard to find a woman to do the
part of Salome.

"That is the principal part in the piece now, you know," he added.

"I don't see how," Maxwell protested. "It seems to me that her character
throws Haxard's into greater relief than before, and gives it more
prominence."

"You've made the love-business too strong, I think. I supposed you would
have something light and graceful to occupy the house in the suspense
between the points in Haxard's case. If I were to do him, I should be
afraid that people would come back from Salome to him with more or less
of an effort, I don't say they would, but that's the way it strikes me
now; perhaps some one else would look at it quite differently."

"Then, as it is, you don't want it?"

"I don't say that. But it seems to me that Salome is the principal
figure now. I think that's a mistake."

"If it's a fact, it's a mistake. I don't want to have it so," said
Maxwell, and he made such effort as he could to swallow his disgust.

Godolphin asked, after a while, "In that last scene between her and her
father, and in fact in all the scenes between them, couldn't you give
more of the strong speeches to him? She's a great creation now, but
isn't she too great for Atland?"

"I've kept Atland under, purposely, because the part is necessarily a
negative one, and because I didn't want him to compete with Haxard at
all."

"Yes, that is all right; but as it is, _she_ competes with Haxard."

After Godolphin had gone, Louise came down, and found Maxwell in a
dreary muse over his manuscript. He looked up at her with a lack-lustre
eye, and said, "Godolphin is jealous of Salome now. What he really wants
is a five-act monologue that will keep him on the stage all the time. He
thinks that as it is, she will take all the attention from him."

Louise appeared to reflect. "Well, isn't there something in that?"

"Good heavens! I should think you were going to play Haxard, too!"

"No; but of course you can't have two characters of equal importance in
your play. Some one has to be first, and Godolphin doesn't want an
actress taking all the honors away from him."

"Then why did you pretend to like the way I had done it," Maxwell
demanded, angrily, "if you think she will take the honors from him?"

"I didn't say that I did. All that I want is that you should ask
yourself whether she would or not."

"Are _you_ jealous of her?"

"Now, my dear, if you are going to be unreasonable, I will not talk with
you."

Nothing maddened Maxwell so much as to have his wife take this tone with
him, when he had followed her up through the sinuosities that always
began with her after a certain point. Short of that she was as frank and
candid as a man, and he understood her, but beyond that the eternal
womanly began, and he could make nothing of her. She evaded, and came
and went, and returned upon her course, and all with as good a
conscience, apparently, as if she were meeting him fairly and squarely
on the question they started with. Sometimes he doubted if she really
knew that she was behaving insincerely, or whether, if she knew it, she
could help doing it. He believed her to be a more truthful nature than
himself, and it was insufferable for her to be less so, and then accuse
him of illogicality.

"I have no wish to talk," he said, smothering his rage, and taking up a
page of manuscript.

"Of course," she went on, as if there had been no break in their good
feeling, "I know what a goose Godolphin is, and I don't wonder you're
vexed with him, but you know very well that I have nothing but the good
of the play in view as a work of art, and I should say that if you
couldn't keep Salome from rivalling Haxard in the interest of the
spectator, you had better go back to the idea of making two plays of it.
I think that the 'Second Chapter' would be a very good thing to begin
with."

"Why, good heavens! you said just the contrary when we decided to drop
it."

"Yes, but that was when I thought you would be able to subdue Salome."

"There never was any question of subduing Salome; it was a question of
subduing Atland!"

"It's the same thing; keeping the love-business in the background."

"I give it up!" Maxwell flung down his manuscript in sign of doing so.
"The whole thing is a mess, and you seem to delight in tormenting me
about it. How am I to give the love-business charm, and yet keep it in
the background?"

"I should think you could."

"How?"

"Well, I was afraid you would give Salome too much prominence."

"Didn't you know whether I had done so or not? You knew what I had done
before Godolphin came!"

"If Godolphin thinks she is too prominent, you ought to trust his
instinct."

Maxwell would not answer her. He went out, and she saw him strolling
down the path to the rocks. She took the manuscript and began to read it
over.

He did not come back, and when she was ready to go to supper she had to
go down to the rocks for him. His angry fit seemed to have passed, but
he looked abjectly sad, and her heart ached at sight of him. She said,
cheerfully, "I have been reading that love-business over again, Brice,
and I don't find it so far out as I was afraid it was. Salome is a
little too _prononcee_, but you can easily mend that. She is a
delightful character, and you have given her charm--too much charm. I
don't believe there's a truer woman in the whole range of the drama. She
is perfect, and that is why I think you can afford to keep her back a
little in the passages with Haxard. Of course, Godolphin wants to shine
there. You needn't give him her speeches, but you can put them somewhere
else, in some of the scenes with Atland; it won't make any difference
how much she outshines _him_, poor fellow."

He would not be entreated at once, but after letting her talk on to much
the same effect for awhile, he said, "I will see what can be done with
it. At present I am sick of the whole thing."

"Yes, just drop it for the present," she said. "I'm hungry, aren't you?"

"I didn't know it was time."

She was very tender with him, walking up to the hotel, and all that
evening she kept him amused, so that he would not want to look at his
manuscript. She used him, as a wife is apt to use her husband when he is
fretted and not very well, as if he were her little boy, and she did
this so sweetly that Maxwell could not resent it.

The next morning she let him go to his play again, and work all the
morning. He ended about noon, and told her he had done what she wanted
done to the love-business, he thought, but he would not show it to her,
for he said he was tired of it, and would have to go over it with
Godolphin, at any rate, when he came in the afternoon. They went to the
beach, but the person with the smouldering eyes failed to appear, and in
fact they did not see her again at Magnolia, and they decided that she
must have been passing a few days at one of the other hotels, and gone
away.

Godolphin arrived in the sunniest good-humor, as if he had never had any
thought of relinquishing the play, and he professed himself delighted
with the changes Maxwell had made in the love-business. He said the
character of Salome had the true proportion to all the rest now; and
Maxwell understood that he would not be jealous of the actress who
played the part, or feel her a dangerous rival in the public favor. He
approved of the transposition of the speeches that Maxwell had made, or
at least he no longer openly coveted them for Haxard.

What was more important to Maxwell was that Louise seemed finally
contented with the part, too, and said that now, no matter what
Godolphin wanted, she would never let it be touched again. "I am glad
you have got that 'impassioned' rubbish out. I never thought that was in
character with Salome."

The artistic consciousness of Maxwell, which caught all the fine
reluctances and all the delicate feminine preferences of his wife, was
like a subtle web woven around him, and took everything, without his
willing it, from within him as well as from without, and held it
inexorably for future use. He knew the source of the impassioned rubbish
which had displeased his wife; and he had felt while he was employing it
that he was working in a commoner material than the rest of Salome's
character; but he had experimented with it in the hope that she might
not notice it. The fact that she had instantly noticed it, and had
generalized the dislike which she only betrayed at last, after she had
punished him sufficiently, remained in the meshes of the net he wore
about his mind, as something of value, which he could employ to
exquisite effect if he could once find a scheme fit for it.

In the meantime it would be hard to say whether Godolphin continued more
a sorrow or a joy to Maxwell, who was by no means always of the same
mind about him. He told his wife sometimes, when she was pitying him,
that it was a good discipline for him to work with such a man, for it
taught him a great deal about himself, if it did not teach him much
else. He said that it tamed his overweening pride to find that there was
artistic ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike
literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary
intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty,
but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage
that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three
places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and
maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath
to give up, though when he was instructed as to their true meaning, he
saw how he could get a better effect out of it. He had an excellent
intelligence, but this was employed so entirely in the study of
impression that significance was often a secondary matter with him. He
had not much humor, and Maxwell doubted if he felt it much in others,
but he told a funny story admirably, and did character-stuff, as he
called it, with the subtlest sense; he had begun in sketches of the
variety type. Sometimes Maxwell thought him very well versed in the
history and theory of the drama; but there were other times when his
ignorance seemed almost creative in that direction. He had apparently no
feeling for values; he would want a good effect used, without regard to
the havoc it made of the whole picture, though doubtless if it could
have been realized to him, he would have abhorred it as thoroughly as
Maxwell himself. He would come over from Manchester one day with a
notion for the play so bad that it almost made Maxwell shed tears; and
the next with something so good that Maxwell marvelled at it; but
Godolphin seemed to value the one no more than the other. He was a
creature of moods the most extreme; his faith in Maxwell was as
profound as his abysmal distrust of him; and his frank and open nature
was full of suspicion. He was like a child in the simplicity of his
selfishness, as far as his art was concerned, but in all matters aside
from it he was chaotically generous. His formlessness was sometimes
almost distracting; he presented himself to the author's imagination as
mere human material, waiting to be moulded in this shape or that. From
day to day, from week to week, Maxwell lived in a superficial
uncertainty whether Godolphin had really taken his play, or would ever
produce it; yet at the bottom of his heart he confided in the promises
which the actor lavished upon him in both the written and the spoken
word. They had an agreement carefully drawn up as to all the business
between them, but he knew that Godolphin would not be held by any clause
of it that he wished to break; he did not believe that Godolphin
understood what it bound him to, either when he signed it or afterward;
but he was sure that he would do not only what was right, but what was
noble, if he could be taken at the right moment. Upon the whole, he
liked him; in a curious sort, he respected and honored him; and he
defended him against Mrs. Maxwell when she said Godolphin was wearing
her husband's life out, and that if he made the play as greatly
successful as "Hamlet," or the "Trip to Chinatown," he would not be
worth what it cost them both in time and temper.

They lost a good deal of time and temper with the play, which was almost
a conjugal affair with them, and the struggle to keep up a show of gay
leisure before the summering world up and down the coast told upon Mrs.
Maxwell's nerves. She did not mind the people in the hotel so much; they
were very nice, but she did not know many of them, and she could not
care for them as she did for her friends who came up from Beverly Farms
and over from Manchester. She hated to call Maxwell from his work at
such times, not only because she pitied him, but because he came to help
her receive her friends with such an air of gloomy absence and open
reluctance; and she had hated still worse to say he was busy with his
play, the play he was writing for Mr. Godolphin. Her friends were
apparently unable to imagine anyone writing a play so seriously, and
they were unable to imagine Mr. Godolphin at all, for they had never
heard of him; the splendor of his unknown name took them more than
anything else. As for getting Maxwell to return their visits with her,
when men had come with the ladies who called upon her, she could only
manage it if he was so fagged with working at his play that he was too
weak to resist her will, and even then he had to be torn from it almost
by main force. He behaved so badly in the discharge of some of these
duties to society, and was, to her eye at least, so bored and worried by
them that she found it hard to forgive him, and made him suffer for it
on the way home till she relented at the sight of his thin face, the
face that she loved, that she had thought the world well lost for. After
the third or fourth time she made him go with her she gave it up and
went alone, though she was aware that it might look as if they were not
on good terms. She only obliged him after that to go with her to her
father's, where she would not allow any shadow of suspicion to fall upon
their happiness, and where his absent-mindedness would be accounted for.
Her mother seemed to understand it better than her father, who, she
could see, sometimes inwardly resented it as neglect. She also exacted
of Maxwell that he should not sit silent through a whole meal at the
hotel, and that, if he did not or could not talk, he should keep looking
at her, and smiling and nodding, now and then. If he would remember to
do this she would do all the talking herself. Sometimes he did not
remember, and then she trod on his foot in vain.

The droll side of the case often presented itself for her relief, and,
after all, she knew beforehand that this was the manner of man she was
marrying, and she was glad to marry him. She was happier than she had
ever dreamed of being. She was one of those women who live so largely in
their sympathies that if these were employed she had no thought of
herself, and not to have any thought of one's self is to be blessed.
Maxwell had no thought of anything but his work, and that made his
bliss; if she could have no thought but of him in his work, she could
feel herself in Heaven with him.

VII.

July and August went by, and it was time for Godolphin to take the road
again. By this time Maxwell's play was in as perfect form as it could be
until it was tried upon the stage and then overhauled for repairs.
Godolphin had decided to try it first in Toronto, where he was going to
open, and then to give it in the West as often as he could. If it did as
well as he expected he would bring it on for a run in New York about the
middle of December. He would want Maxwell at the rehearsals there, but
for the present he said he preferred to stage-manage it himself; they
had talked it up so fully that he had all the author's intentions in
mind.

He came over from Manchester the day before his vacation ended to take
leave of the Maxwells. He was in great spirits with the play, but he
confessed to a misgiving in regard to the lady whom he had secured for
the part of Salome. He said there was only one woman he ever saw fit to
do that part, but when he named the actress the Maxwells had to say
they had never heard of her before. "She is a Southerner. She is very
well known in the West," Godolphin said.

Louise asked if she had ever played in Boston, and when he said she had
not, Louise said "Oh!"

Maxwell trembled, but Godolphin seemed to find nothing latent in his
wife's offensive tone, and after a little further talk they all parted
on the friendliest terms. The Maxwells did not hear from him for a
fortnight, though he was to have tried the play in Toronto at least a
week earlier. Then there came a telegram from Midland:

"_Tried play here last night. Went like wildfire.
Will write._
GODOLPHIN.

The message meant success, and the Maxwells walked the air. The
production of the piece was mentioned in the Associated Press despatches
to the Boston papers, and though Mrs. Maxwell studied these in vain for
some verbal corroboration of Godolphin's jubilant message, she did not
lose faith in it, nor allow her husband to do so. In fact, while they
waited for Godolphin's promised letter, they made use of their leisure
to count the chickens which had begun to hatch. The actor had agreed to
pay the author at the rate of five dollars an act for each performance
of the play, and as it was five acts long a simple feat of arithmetic
showed that the nightly gain from it would be twenty-five dollars, and
that if it ran every night and two afternoons, for matinees, the weekly
return from it would be two hundred dollars. Besides this, Godolphin had
once said, in a moment of high content with the piece, that if it went
as he expected it to go he would pay Maxwell over and above this
twenty-five dollars a performance five per cent. of the net receipts
whenever these passed one thousand dollars. His promise had not been put
in writing, and Maxwell had said at the time that he should be satisfied
with his five dollars an act, but he had told his wife of it, and they
had both agreed that Godolphin would keep it. They now took it into the
account in summing up their gains, and Mrs. Maxwell thought it
reasonable to figure at least twenty-five dollars more from it for each
time the play was given; but as this brought the weekly sum up to four
hundred dollars, she so far yielded to her husband as to scale the total
at three hundred dollars, though she said it was absurd to put it at any
such figure. She refused, at any rate, to estimate their earnings from
the season at less than fifteen thousand dollars. It was useless for
Maxwell to urge that Godolphin had other pieces in his repertory,
things that had made his reputation, and that he would naturally want to
give sometimes. She asked him whether Godolphin himself had not
voluntarily said that if the piece went as he expected he would play
nothing else as long as he lived, like Jefferson with Rip Van Winkle;
and here, she said, it had already, by his own showing, gone at once
like wildfire. When Maxwell pleaded that they did not know what wildfire
meant she declared that it meant an overwhelming house and unbridled
rapture in the audience; it meant an instant and lasting triumph for the
play. She began to praise Godolphin, or, at least, to own herself
mistaken in some of her decrials of him. She could not be kept from
bubbling over to two or three ladies at the hotel, where it was quickly
known what an immense success the first performance of Maxwell's play
had been. He was put to shame by several asking him when they were to
have it in Boston, but his wife had no embarrassment in answering that
it would probably be kept the whole winter in New York, and not come to
Boston till some time in the early spring.

She was resolved, now, that he should drive over to Beverly Farms with
her, and tell her father and mother about the success of the play. She
had instantly telegraphed them on getting Godolphin's despatch, and she
began to call out to her father as soon as she got inside the house, and
saw him coming down the stairs in the hall, "_Now_, what do you say,
papa? Isn't it glorious? Didn't I tell you it would be the greatest
success? Did you ever hear anything like it? Where's mamma? If she
shouldn't be at home, I don't know what I shall do!"

"She's here," said her father, arriving at the foot of the stairs, where
Louise embraced him, and then let him shake hands with her husband.
"She's dressing. We were just going over to see you."

"Well, you've been pretty deliberate about it! Here it's after lunch,
and I telegraphed you at ten o'clock." She went on to bully her father
more and more, and to flourish Maxwell's triumph in his face. "We're
going to have three hundred dollars a week from it at the very least,
and fifteen thousand dollars for the season. What do you think of that?
Isn't that pretty good, for two people that had nothing in the world
yesterday? What do you say _now_, papa?"

There were all sorts of lurking taunts, demands, reproaches, in these
words, which both the men felt, but they smiled across her, and made as
if they were superior to her simple exultation.

"I should say you had written the play yourself, Louise," said her
father.

"No," answered her husband, "Godolphin wrote the play; or I've no doubt
he's telling the reporters so by this time."

Louise would not mind them. "Well, I don't care! I want papa to
acknowledge that I was right, for once. Anybody could believe in Brice's
genius, but I believed in his star, and I always knew that he would get
on, and I was all for his giving up his newspaper work, and devoting
himself to the drama; and now the way is open to him, and all he has got
to do is to keep on writing."

"Come now, Louise," said her husband.

"Well," her father interposed, "I'm glad of your luck, Maxwell. It isn't
in my line, exactly, but I don't believe I could be any happier, if it
were. After all, it's doing something to elevate the stage. I wish
someone would take hold of the pulpit."

Maxwell shrugged. "I'm not strong enough for that, quite. And I can't
say that I had any conscious intention to elevate the stage with my
play."

"But you had it unconsciously, Brice," said Louise, "and it can't help
having a good effect on life, too."

"It will teach people to be careful how they murder people," Maxwell
assented.

"Well, it's a great chance," said Hilary, with the will to steer a
middle course between Maxwell's modesty and Louise's overweening pride.
"There really isn't anything that people talk about more. They discuss
plays as they used to discuss sermons. If you've done a good play,
you've done a good thing."

His wife hastened to make answer for him. "He's done a _great_ play, and
there are no ifs or ans about it." She went on to celebrate Maxwell's
achievement till he was quite out of countenance, for he knew that she
was doing it mainly to rub his greatness into her father, and he had so
much of the old grudge left that he would not suffer himself to care
whether Hilary thought him great or not. It was a relief when Mrs.
Hilary came in. Louise became less defiant in her joy then, or else the
effect of it was lost in Mrs. Hilary's assumption of an entire
expectedness in the event. Her world was indeed so remote from the world
of art that she could value success in it only as it related itself to
her family, and it seemed altogether natural to her that her daughter's
husband should take its honors. She was by no means a stupid woman; for
a woman born and married to wealth, with all the advantages that go
with it, she was uncommonly intelligent; but she could not help looking
upon aesthetic honors of any sort as in questionable taste. She would
have preferred position in a son-in-law to any distinction appreciable
to the general, but wanting that it was fit he should be distinguished
in the way he chose. In her feeling it went far to redeem the drama that
it should be related to the Hilarys by marriage, and if she had put her
feeling into words, which always oversay the feelings, they would have
been to the effect that the drama had behaved very well indeed, and
deserved praise. This is what Mrs. Hilary's instinct would have said,
but, of course, her reason would have said something quite different,
and it was her reason that spoke to Maxwell, and expressed a pleasure in
his success that was very gratifying to him. He got on with her better
than with Hilary, partly because she was a woman and he was a man, and
partly because, though she had opposed his marriage with Louise more
steadily than her husband, there had been no open offence between them.
He did not easily forgive a hurt to his pride, and Hilary, with all his
good will since, and his quick repentance at the time, had never made it
quite right with Maxwell for treating him rudely once, when he came to
him so helplessly in the line of his newspaper work. They were always
civil to each other, and they would always be what is called good
friends; they had even an air of mutual understanding, as regarded
Louise and her exuberances. Still, she was so like her father in these,
and so unlike her mother, that it is probable the understanding between
Hilary and Maxwell concerning her was only the understanding of men, and
that Maxwell was really more in sympathy with Mrs. Hilary, even about
Louise, even about the world. He might have liked it as much as she, if
he had been as much of it, and he thought so well of it as a world that
he meant to conquer one of the chief places in it. In the meantime he
would have been very willing to revenge himself upon it, to satirize it,
to hurt it, to humble it--but for his own pleasure, not the world's
good.

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