The Story of a Play

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Still Maxwell walked on and she continued:

"I don't know what I shall say to my family. They can never understand
such a thing, never! Papa couldn't conceive of giving a promise and not
keeping it, much less giving a promise just for the _pleasure_ of
breaking it. What shall I tell them, Brice? I can't bear to say that
Godolphin is going to make your play over, unless I can say at the same
time that you've absolutely forbidden him to do so. That's why I wanted
you to telegraph. I wanted to say you had telegraphed."

Maxwell stopped in his walk and gazed at her, but she could feel that he
did not see her, and she said:

"I don't know that it's actually necessary for me to say anything at
present. I can show them the notices, or that article alone. It's worth
all the rest put together, and then we can wait, and see if we hear
anything more from Godolphin. But now I don't want you to lose any more
time. You must write to him at once, and absolutely forbid him to touch
your play. Will you?"

Her husband returned from his wanderings of mind and body, and as he
dropped upon the lounge at her side, he said, gently, "No, I don't think
I'll write at all, Louise."

"Not write at all! Then you're going to let him tamper with that
beautiful work of yours?"

"I'm going to wait till I hear from him again. Godolphin is a good
fellow--"

"Oh!"

"And he won't be guilty of doing me injustice. Besides," and here
Maxwell broke off with a laugh that had some gayety in it, "he couldn't.
Godolphin is a fine actor, and he's going to be a great one, but his
gifts are not in the line of literature."

"I should think not!"

"He couldn't change the piece any more than if he couldn't read or
write. And if he could, when it came to touching it, I don't believe he
would, because the fact would remind him that it wasn't fair. He has to
realize things in the objective way before he can realize them at all.
That's the stage. If they can have an operator climbing a real
telegraph-pole to tap the wire and telegraph the girl he loves that he
is dead, so that she can marry his rich rival and go to Europe and
cultivate her gift for sculpture, they feel that they have got real
life."

Louise would not be amused, or laugh with her husband at this. "Then
what in the world does Godolphin mean?" she demanded.

"Why, being interpreted out of actor's parlance, he means that he wishes
he could talk the play over with me again and be persuaded that he is
wrong about it."

"I must say," Louise remarked, after a moment for mastering the
philosophy of this, "that you take it very strangely, Brice."

"I've thought it out," said Maxwell.

"And what are you going to do?"

"I am going to wait the turn of events. My faith in Godolphin is
unshaken--such as it is."

"And what is going to be our attitude in regard to it?"

"Attitude? With whom?"

"With our friends. Suppose they ask us about the play, and how it is
getting along. And my family?"

"I don't think it will be necessary to take any attitude. They can think
what they like. Let them wait the turn of events, too. If we can stand
it, they can."

"No, Brice," said his wife. "That won't do. We might be silently patient
ourselves, but if we left them to believe that it was all going well, we
should be living a lie."

"What an extraordinary idea!"

"I've told papa and mamma--we've both told them, though I did the
talking, you can say--that the play was a splendid success, and
Godolphin was going to give it seven or eight times a week; and now if
it's a failure--"

"It _isn't_ a failure!" Maxwell retorted, as if hurt by the notion.

"No matter! If he's only going to play it once a fortnight or so, and is
going to tinker it up to suit himself without saying by-your-leave to
you, I say we're occupying a false position, and that's what I mean by
living a lie."

Maxwell looked at her in that bewilderment which he was beginning to
feel at the contradictions of her character. She sometimes told outright
little fibs which astonished him; society fibs she did not mind at all;
but when it came to people's erroneously inferring this or that from her
actions, she had a yearning for the explicit truth that nothing else
could appease. He, on the contrary, was indifferent to what people
thought, if he had not openly misled them. Let them think this, or let
them think that; it was altogether their affair, and he did not hold
himself responsible; but he was ill at ease with any conventional lie on
his conscience. He hated to have his wife say to people, as he sometimes
overheard her saying, that he was out, when she knew he had run
upstairs with his writing to escape them; she contended that it was no
harm, since it deceived nobody.

Now he said, "Aren't you rather unnecessarily complex?"

"No, I'm not. And I shall tell papa as soon as I see him just how the
case stands. Why, it would be dreadful if we let him believe it was all
going well, and perhaps tell others that it was, and we knew all the
time that it wasn't. He would hate that, and he wouldn't like us for
letting him."

"Hadn't you better give the thing a chance to go right? There hasn't
been time yet."

"No, dearest, I feel that since I've bragged so to papa, I ought to eat
humble-pie before him as soon as possible."

"Yes. Why should you make me eat it, too?"

"I can't help that; I would if I could. But, unfortunately, we are one."

"And you seem to be the one. Suppose I should ask you not to eat
humble-pie before your father?"

"Then, of course, I should do as you asked. But I hope you won't."

Maxwell did not say anything, and she went on, tenderly, entreatingly,
"And I hope you'll never allow me to deceive myself about anything you
do. I should resent it a great deal more than if you had positively
deceived me. Will you promise me, if anything sad or bad happens, that
you don't want me to know because it will make me unhappy or
disagreeable, you'll tell me at once?"

"It won't be necessary. You'll find it out."

"No, do be serious, dearest. _I_ am _very_ serious. Will you?"

"What is the use of asking such a thing as that? It seems to me that
I've invited you to a full share of the shame and sorrow that Godolphin
has brought upon me."

"Yes, you have," said Louise, thoughtfully. "And you may be sure that I
appreciate it. Don't you like to have me share it?"

"Well, I don't know. I might like to get at it first myself."

"Ah, you didn't like my opening Godolphin's letter when it came!"

"I shouldn't mind, now, if you would answer it."

"I shall be only too glad to answer it, if you will let me answer it as
it deserves."

"That needs reflection."

X.

The weather grew rough early in September, and all at once, all in a
moment, as it were, the pretty watering-place lost its air of summer
gayety. The sky had an inner gray in its blue; the sea looked cold. A
few hardy bathers braved it out on select days in the surf, but they
were purple and red when they ran up to the bath-houses, and they came
out wrinkled, and hurried to their hotels, where there began to be a
smell of steam-heat and a snapping of radiators in the halls. The barges
went away laden to the stations, and came back empty, except at night,
when they brought over the few and fewer husbands whose wives were
staying down simply because they hated to go up and begin the social
life of the winter. The people who had thronged the grassy-bordered
paths of the village dwindled in number; the riding and driving on the
roads was less and less; the native life showed itself more in the
sparsity of the sojourners. The sweet fern in the open fields, and the
brakes and blackberry-vines among the bowlders, were blighted with the
cold wind; even the sea-weed swaying at the foot of the rocks seemed to
feel a sharper chill than that of the brine. A storm came, and strewed
the beach with kelp, and blew over half the bath-houses; and then the
hardiest lingerer ceased to talk of staying through October. There began
to be rumors at the Maxwells' hotel that it would close before the month
was out; some ladies pressed the landlord for the truth, and he
confessed that he expected to shut the house by the 25th. This spread
dismay; but certain of the boarders said they would go to the other
hotels, which were to keep open till October. The dependent cottages had
been mostly emptied before; those who remained in them, if they did not
go away, came into the hotel. The Maxwells themselves did this at last,
for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the
blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it,
so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it
all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two
or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the
evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions there came,
if not friendship, an intensification of acquaintance, such as is
imaginable of a company of cultured castaways. Ladies who were not quite
socially certain of one another in town gossiped fearlessly together;
there was whist among the men; more than once it happened that a young
girl played or sang by request, and not, as so often happens where a
hotel is full, against the general desire. It came once to a wish that
Mr. Maxwell would read something from his play; but no one had the
courage to ask him. In society he was rather severe with women, and his
wife was not sorry for that; she made herself all the more approachable
because of it. But she discouraged the hope of anything like reading
from him; she even feigned that he might not like to do it without
consulting Mr. Godolphin, and if she did not live a lie concerning the
status of his play, she did not scruple to tell one, now and then.

That is, she would say it was going beyond their expectations, and this
was not so fabulous as it might seem, for their expectations were not so
high as they had been, and Godolphin was really playing the piece once
or twice a week. They heard no more from him by letter, for Maxwell had
decided that it would be better not to answer his missive from Midland;
but he was pretty faithful in sending the newspaper notices whenever he
played, and so they knew that he had not abandoned it. They did not know
whether he had carried out his threat of overhauling it; and Maxwell
chose to remain in ignorance of the fact till Godolphin himself should
speak again. Unless he demanded the play back he was really helpless,
and he was not ready to do that, for he hoped that when the actor
brought it on to New York he could talk with him about it, and come to
some understanding. He had not his wife's belief in the perfection of
the piece; it might very well have proved weak in places, and after his
first indignation at the notion of Godolphin's revising it, he was
willing to do what he could to meet his wishes. He did not so much care
what shape it had in these remote theatres of the West; the real test
was New York, and there it should appear only as he wished.

It was a comfort to his wife when he took this stand, and she vowed him
to keep it; she would have made him go down on his knees and hold up his
right hand, which was her notion of the way an oath was taken in court,
but she did not think he would do it, and he might refuse to seal any
vow at all if she urged it.

In the meanwhile she was not without other consolations. At her
insistence he wrote to the newspaper which had printed the Ibsen crank's
article on the play, and said how much pleasure it had given him, and
begged his thanks to the author. They got a very pretty letter back from
him, adding some praises of the piece which he said he had kept out of
print because he did not want to seem too gushing about it; and he
ventured some wary censures of the acting, which he said he had
preferred not to criticise openly, since the drama was far more
important to him than the theatre. He believed that Mr. Godolphin had a
perfect conception of the part of Haxard, and a thorough respect for the
piece, but his training had been altogether in the romantic school; he
was working out of it, but he was not able at once to simplify himself.
This was in fact the fault of the whole company. The girl who did Salome
had moments of charming reality, but she too suffered from her
tradition, and the rest went from bad to worse. He thought that they
would all do better as they familiarized themselves with the piece, and
he deeply regretted that Mr. Godolphin had been able to give it only
once in Midland.

At this Mrs. Maxwell's wounds inwardly bled afresh, and she came little
short of bedewing the kind letter with her tears. She made Maxwell
answer it at once, and she would not let him deprecate the writer's
worship of him as the first American dramatist to attempt something in
the spirit of the great modern masters abroad. She contended that it
would be as false to refuse this tribute as to accept one that was not
due him, and there could be no doubt but it was fully and richly
merited. The critic wrote again in response to Maxwell, and they
exchanged three or four letters.

What was even more to Louise was the admirable behavior of her father
when she went to eat humble-pie before him. He laughed at the notion of
Godolphin's meddling with the play, and scolded her for not taking her
husband's view of the case, which he found entirely reasonable, and the
only reasonable view of it. He argued that Godolphin simply chose to
assert in that way a claim to joint authorship, which he had all along
probably believed he had, and he approved of Maxwell's letting him have
his head in the matter, so far as the West was concerned. If he
attempted to give it with any alterations of his own in the East, there
would be time enough to stop him. Louise seized the occasion to confirm
herself in her faith that her father admired Maxwell's genius as much as
she did herself; and she tried to remember just the words he used in
praising it, so that she could repeat them to Maxwell. She also
committed to memory his declaration that the very fact of Godolphin's
playing the piece every now and then was proof positive that he would be
very reluctant to part with it, if it came to that. This seemed to her
very important, and she could hardly put up with Maxwell's sardonic
doubt of it.

Before they left Magnolia there came a letter from Godolphin himself,
wholly different in tone from his earlier letter. He said nothing now of
overhauling the piece, which he felt was gradually making its way. He
was playing it at various one-night stands in the Northwest, preparatory
to bringing it to Chicago and putting it on for a week, and he asked if
Maxwell could not come out and see it there. He believed they were all
gradually getting down to it, and the author's presence at the
rehearsals would be invaluable. He felt more and more that they had a
fortune in it, and it only needed careful working to realize a bonanza.
He renewed his promises, in view of his success so far, to play it
exclusively if the triumph could be clinched by a week's run in such a
place as Chicago. He wrote from Grand Rapids, and asked Maxwell to reply
to him at Oshkosh.

"Tell him you'll come, of course," said his wife.

Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't mean this any more than he meant to
revise the thing himself. He probably finds that he can't do that, and
wants me to do it. But if I did it he might take it off after the first
night in Chicago if the notices were unfavorable."

"But they won't be," she argued. "I _know_ they won't."

"I should simply break him up from the form he's got into, if I went to
the rehearsals. He must keep on doing it in his own way till he comes to
New York."

"But think of the effect it will have in New York if you should happen
to make it go in Chicago."

"It won't have the slightest effect. When he brings it East, it will
have to make its way just as if it had never been played anywhere
before."

A bright thought occurred to Louise. "Then tell him that if he will
bring it on to Boston you will superintend all the rehearsals. And I
will go with you to them."

Maxwell only laughed at this. "Boston wouldn't serve any better than
Chicago, as far as New York is concerned. We shall have to build a
success from the ground up there, if we get one. It might run a whole
winter in Boston, and then we should probably begin with half a house in
New York, or a third. The only advantage of trying it anywhere before,
is that the actors will be warm in their parts. Besides, do you suppose
Godolphin could get a theatre in Boston out of the order of his
engagement there next spring?"

"Why not?"

"Simply because every night at every house is taken six months
beforehand."

"Who would ever have dreamt," said Louise, ruefully, "that simply
writing a play would involve any one in all these exasperating business
details."

"Nobody can get free of business," Maxwell returned.

"Then I will tell you," she brightened up to say. "Why not sell him the
piece outright, and wash your hands of it?"

"Because he wouldn't buy it outright, and if I washed my hands of it he
could do what he pleased with it. If he couldn't tinker it up himself he
could hire some one else to do it, and that would be worse yet."

"Well, then, the only thing for us to do is to go on to New York, and
wait there till Godolphin comes. I suppose papa and mamma would like to
have us stay through October with them in Boston, but I don't see much
sense in that, and I don't choose to have the air of living on them. I
want to present an unbroken front of independence from the beginning, as
far as inquiring friends are concerned; and in New York we shall be so
lost to sight that nobody will know how we are living. You can work at
your new play while we're waiting, and we can feel that the onset in the
battle of life has sounded."

Maxwell laughed, as she meant him, at the mock heroics of her phrase,
and she pulled off his hat, and rubbed his hair round on his skull in
exultation at having arrived at some clear understanding. "I wouldn't
have hair like silk," she jeered.

"And I wouldn't have hair like corn-silk," he returned. "At least not on
my own head."

"Yes, it _is_ coarse. And it's yours quite as much as mine," she said,
thoughtfully. "We _do_ belong to each other utterly, don't we? I never
thought of it in that light before. And now our life has gone into your
work, already! I can't tell you, Brice, how sweet it is to think of that
love-business being our own! I shall be so proud of it on the stage! But
as long as we live no one but ourselves must know anything about it. Do
you suppose they will?" she asked, in sudden dismay.

He smiled. "Should you care?"

She reflected a moment. "No!" she shouted, boldly. "What difference?"

"Godolphin would pay any sum for the privilege of using the fact as an
advertisement. If he could put it into Pinney's hands, and give him
_carte blanche_, to work in all the romance he liked--"

"Brice!" she shrieked.

"Well, we needn't give it away, and if _we_ don't, nobody else will."

"No, and we must always keep it sacredly secret. Promise me one thing!"

"Twenty!"

"That you will let me hold your hand all through the first performance
of that part. Will you?"

"Why, we shall be set up like two brazen images in a box for all the
first-nighters to stare at and the society reporters to describe. What
would society journalism say to your holding my hand throughout the
tender passages? It would be onto something personal in them in an
instant."

"No; now I will show you how we will do." They were sitting in a nook of
the rocks, in the pallor of the late September sunshine, with their
backs against a warm bowlder. "Now give me your hand."

"Why, you've got hold of it already."

"Oh yes, so I have! Well, I'll just grasp it in mine firmly, and let
them both rest on your knee, so; and fling the edge of whatever I'm
wearing on my shoulders over them, or my mantle, if it's hanging on the
back of the chair, so"--she flung the edge of her shawl over their
clasped hands to illustrate--"and nobody will suspect the least thing.
Suppose the sea was the audience--a sea of faces you know; would any one
dream down there that I was squeezing your hand at all the important
moments, or you squeezing mine?"

"I hope they wouldn't think me capable of doing anything so indelicate
as squeezing a lady's hand," said Maxwell. "I don't know what they might
think of you, though, if there was any such elaborate display of
concealment as you've got up here."

"Oh, this is merely rehearsing. Of course, I shall be more adroit, more
careless, when I really come to it. But what I mean is that when we
first see it together, the love-business, I shall want to feel that you
are feeling every instant just as I do. Will you?"

"I don't see any great objection to that. We shall both be feeling very
anxious about the play, if that's what you mean."

"That's what I mean in one sense," Louise allowed. "Sha'n't you be very
anxious to see how they have imagined Salome and Atland?"

"Not so anxious as about how Godolphin has 'created' Haxard."

"I care nothing about that. But if the woman who does _me_ is vulgar, or
underbred, or the least bit coarse, and doesn't keep the character just
as sweet and delicate as you imagined it, I don't know what I shall do
to her."

"Nothing violent, I hope," Maxwell suggested languidly.

"I am not so sure," said Louise. "It's a dreadfully intimate affair with
me, and if I didn't like it I should hiss, anyway."

Maxwell laughed long and loud. "What a delightful thing that would be
for society journalism. 'At one point the wife of the author was
apparently unable to control her emotions, and she was heard to express
her disapprobation by a prolonged sibilation. All eyes were turned upon
the box where she sat with her husband, their hands clasped under the
edge of her mantle.' No, you mustn't hiss, my dear; but if you find
Salome getting too much for you you can throw a dynamite bomb at the
young woman who is doing her. I dare say we shall want to blow up the
whole theatre before the play is over."

"Oh, I don't believe we shall. I know the piece will go splendidly if
the love-business is well done. But you can understand, can't you, just
how I feel about Salome?"

"I think I can, and I am perfectly sure that you will be bitterly
disappointed in her, no matter how she's done, unless you do her
yourself."

"I wish I could!"

"Then the other people might be disappointed."

XI.

The Maxwells went to New York early in October, and took a little
furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets
among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the
outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the
Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and
day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were
strong, and they soon ceased to take note of the uproar, even when the
windows were open.

The weather was charming, as the weather of the New York October is apt
to be. The month proved much milder than September had been at Magnolia.
They were not very far from Central Park, and they went for whole
afternoons into it. They came to have such a sense of ownership in one
of the seats in the Ramble, that they felt aggrieved when they found
anybody had taken it, and they resented other people's intimacy with
the squirrels, which Louise always took a pocketful of nuts to feed; the
squirrels got a habit of climbing into her lap for them. Sometimes
Maxwell hired a boat and rowed her lazily about on the lake, while he
mused and she talked. Sometimes, to be very lavish, they took places in
the public carriage which plied on the drives of the Park, and went up
to the tennis-grounds beyond the reservoirs, and watched the players, or
the art-students sketching the autumn scenery there. They began to know,
without acquaintance, certain attached or semi-attached couples; and no
doubt they passed with these for lovers themselves, though they felt a
vast superiority to them in virtue of their married experience; they
looked upon them, though the people were sometimes their elders, as very
young things, who were in the right way, but were as yet deplorably
ignorant how happy they were going to be. They almost always walked back
from these drives, and it was not so far but they could walk over to the
North River for the sunset before their dinner, which they had late when
they did that, and earlier when they did not do it. Dinner was rather a
matter of caprice with them. Sometimes they dined at a French or Italian
_table d'hote_; sometimes they foraged for it before they came in from
their sunset, or their afternoon in the park. When dinner consisted
mainly of a steak or chops, with one of the delicious salads their
avenue abounded in, and some improvisation of potatoes, and coffee
afterward, it was very easy to get it up in half an hour. They kept one
maid, who called herself a Sweden's girl, and Louise cooked some of the
things herself. She did not cook them so well as the maid, but Maxwell
never knew what he was eating, and he thought it all alike good.

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