The Story of a Play

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But she returned from this flight into the future, and her husband's
part in it, to the present and her own first duty in regard to him; and
it appeared to her, that this was to look carefully after his health in
the strain put upon it, and to nourish him for the struggle before him.
It was to be not with one manager only, but many managers, probably, and
possibly with all the managers in New York. That was what he had said
it would be before he gave up, and she remembered how flushed and
excited he looked when he said it, and though she did not believe he
would get back for lunch--the manager might ask him to read his play to
him, so that he could get just the author's notion--she tried to think
out the very most nourishing lunch she could for him. Oysters were in
season, and they were very nourishing, but they had already had them for
breakfast, and beefsteak was very good, but he hated it. Perhaps chops
would do, or, better still, mushrooms on toast, only they were not in
the market at that time of year. She dismissed a stewed squab, and
questioned a sweetbread, and wondered if there were not some kind of
game. In the end she decided to leave it to the provision man, and she
lost no time after she reached her decision in going out to consult him.
He was a bland, soothing German, and it was a pleasure to talk with him,
because he brought her married name into every sentence, and said, "No,
Mrs. Maxwell;" "Yes, Mrs. Maxwell;" "I send it right in, Mrs. Maxwell."
She went over his whole list of provisions with him, and let him
persuade her that a small fillet was the best she could offer a person
whose frame needed nourishing, while at the same time his appetite
needed coaxing. She allowed him to add a can of mushrooms, as the right
thing to go with it, and some salad; and then while he put the order up
she stood reproaching herself for it, since it formed no fit lunch, and
was both expensive and commonplace.

She was roused from her daze, when she was going to countermand the
whole stupid order by the man's saying: "What can I do for you this
morning, Mrs. Harley?" and she turned round to find at her elbow the
smouldering-eyed woman of the bathing-beach. She lifted her heavy lids
and gave Louise a dull glance, which she let a sudden recognition burn
through for a moment and then quenched. But in that moment the two women
sealed a dislike that had been merely potential before. Their look said
for each that the other was by nature, tradition, and aspiration
whatever was most detestable in their sex.

Mrs. Harley, whoever she was, under a name that Louise electrically
decided to be fictitious, seemed unable to find her voice at first in
their mutual defiance, and she made a pretence of letting her strange
eyes rove about the shop before she answered. Her presence was so
repugnant to Louise that she turned abruptly and hurried out of the
place without returning the good-morning which the German sent after
her with the usual addition of her name. She resented it now, for if it
was not tantamount to an introduction to that creature, it was making
her known to her, and Louise wished to have no closer acquaintance with
her than their common humanity involved. It seemed too odious to have
been again made aware that they were inhabitants of the same planet, and
the anger that heaved within her went out in a wild flash of resentment
towards her husband for having forever fixed that woman in her
consciousness with a phrase. If it had not been for that, she would not
have thought twice of her when they first saw her, and she would not
have known her when they met again, and at the worst would merely have
been harassed with a vague resemblance which would never have been
verified.

She had climbed the stairs to their apartment on the fourth floor, when
she felt the need to see more, know more, of this hateful being so
strong upon her, that she stopped with her latch-key in her door and
went down again. She did not formulate her intention, but she meant to
hurry back to the provision store, with the pretext of changing her
order, and follow the woman wherever she went, until she found out where
she lived; and she did not feel, as a man would, the disgrace of
dogging her steps in that way so much as she felt a fatal dread of her.
If she should be gone by the time Louise got back to the shop, she would
ask the provision man about her, and find out in that way. She stayed a
little while to rehearse the terms of her inquiry, and while she
lingered the woman herself came round the corner of the avenue and
mounted the steps where Louise stood and, with an air of custom, went on
upstairs to the second floor, where Louise heard her putting a latch-key
into the door, which then closed after her.

XIII.

Maxwell went to a manager whom he had once met in Boston, where they had
been apparently acceptable to each other in a long talk they had about
the drama. The manager showed himself a shrewd and rather remorseless
man of business in all that he said of the theatre, but he spoke as
generously and reverently of the drama as Maxwell felt, and they parted
with a laughing promise to do something for it yet. In fact, if it had
not been for the chances that threw him into Godolphin's hand
afterwards, he would have gone to this manager with his play in the
first place, and he went to him now, as soon as he was out of
Godolphin's hands, not merely because he was the only manager he knew in
the city, but because he believed in him as much as his rather sceptical
temper permitted him to believe in any one, and because he believed he
would give him at least an intelligent audience.

The man in the box-office, where he stood in the glow of an electric
light at midday, recovered himself from the disappointment he suffered
when Maxwell asked for the manager instead of a seat for the night's
performance. He owned that the manager was in his room, but said he was
very much engaged, and he was hardly moved from this conviction by
Maxwell's urgence that he should send in his card; perhaps something in
Maxwell's tone and face as of authority prevailed with him; perhaps it
was the title of the Boston _Abstract_, which Maxwell wrote under his
name, to recall himself better to the manager's memory. The answer was a
good while getting back; people came in and bought tickets and went
away, while Maxwell hung about the vestibule of the theatre and studied
the bill of the play which formed its present attraction, but at last
the man in the box-office put his face sidewise to the semi-circular
opening above the glass-framed plan of seats and, after he had
identified Maxwell, said, "Mr. Grayson would like to see you." At the
same time the swinging doors of the theatre opened, and a young man came
out, to whom the other added, indicating Maxwell, "This is the
gentleman;" and the young man held the door open for him to pass in, and
then went swiftly before him into the theatre, and led the way around
the orchestra circle to a little door that opened in the wall beside
one of the boxes. There was a rehearsal going on in the glare of some
grouped incandescent bulbs on the stage, and people moving about in top
hats and bonnets and other every-day outside gear, which Maxwell lost
sight of in his progress through the wings and past a rough brick wall
before he arrived at another door down some winding stairs in the depths
of the building. His guide knocked at it, and when an answering voice
said, "Come in!" he left Maxwell to go in alone. The manager had risen
from his chair at his table, and stood, holding out his hand, with a
smile of kindly enough welcome. He said, "I've just made you out, Mr.
Maxwell. Do you come as a friendly interviewer, or as a deadly
dramatist!"

"As both or as neither, whichever you like," said Maxwell, and he gladly
took the manager's hand, and then took the chair which he cleared of
some prompt-books for him to sit down in.

"I hadn't forgotten the pleasant talk I had with you in Boston, you
see," the manager began again, "but I had forgotten whom I had it with."

"I can't say I had even done that," Maxwell answered, and this seemed to
please the manager.

"Well, that counts you one," he said. "You noticed that we have put on
'Engaged?' We've made a failure of the piece we began with; it's several
pieces now. _Couldn't_ you do something like 'Engaged?'"

"I wish I could! But I'm afraid Gilbert is the only man living who can
do anything like 'Engaged.' My hand is too heavy for that kind."

"Well, the heavy hand is not so bad if it hits hard enough," said the
manager, who had a face of lively intelligence and an air of wary
kindliness. He looked fifty, but this was partly the effect of overwork.
There was something of the Jew, something of the Irishman, in his
visage; but he was neither; he was a Yankee, from Maine, with a Boston
training in his business. "What have you got?" he asked, for Maxwell's
play was evident.

"Something I've been at work on for a year, more or less." Maxwell
sketched the plot of his play, and the manager seemed interested.

"Rather Ibsenish, isn't it?" he suggested at the end.

The time had passed with Maxwell when he wished to have this said of his
play, not because he did not admire Ibsen, but because he preferred the
recognition of the original quality of his work. "I don't know that it
is, very. Perhaps--if one didn't like it."

"Oh, I don't know that I should dislike it for its Ibsenism. The time
of that sort of thing may be coming. You never can be sure, in this
business, when the time of anything is coming. I've always thought that
a naturalized Ibsenism wouldn't be so bad for our stage. You don't want
to be quite so bleak, you know, as the real Norwegian Ibsen."

"I've tried not to be very bleak, because I thought it wasn't in the
scheme," said Maxwell.

"I don't understand that it ends well?"

"Unless you consider the implicated marriage of the young people a good
ending. Haxard himself, of course, is past all surgery. But the thing
isn't pessimistic, as I understand, for its doctrine is that harm comes
only from doing wrong."

The manager laughed. "Oh, the average public would consider that _very_
pessimistic. They want no harm to come even from doing wrong. They want
the drama to get round it, somehow. If you could show that Divine
Providence forgets wrong-doing altogether in certain cases, you would
make the fortune of your piece. Come, why couldn't you try something of
that kind? It would be the greatest comfort to all the sinners in front,
for every last man of them--or woman--would think she was the one who
was going to get away."

"I might come up to that, later," said Maxwell, willing to take the
humorous view of the matter, if it would please the manager and smooth
the way for the consideration of his work; but, more obscurely, he was
impatient, and sorry to have found him in so philosophical a mood.

The manager was like the man of any other trade; he liked to talk of his
business, and this morning he talked of it a long time, and to an effect
that Maxwell must have found useful if he had not been so bent upon
getting to his manuscript that he had no mind for generalities. At last
the manager said, abruptly, "You want me to read your play?"

"Very much," Maxwell answered, and he promptly put the packet he had
brought into the manager's extended hand.

He not only took it, but he untied it, and even glanced at the first few
pages. "All right," he said, "I'll read it, and let you hear from me as
soon as I can. Your address--oh, it's on the wrapper, here. By-the-way,
why shouldn't you lunch with me? We'll go over to the Players' Club."

Maxwell flushed with eager joy; then he faltered.

"I should like to do it immensely. But I'm afraid--I'm afraid Mrs.
Maxwell will be waiting for me."

"Oh, all right; some other time," answered the manager; and then Maxwell
was vexed that he had offered any excuse, for he thought it would have
been very pleasant and perhaps useful for him to lunch at the Players'.
But the manager did not urge him. He only said, as he led the way to the
stage-door, "I didn't know there was a Mrs. Maxwell."

"She's happened since we met," said Maxwell, blushing with fond pride.
"We're such a small family that we like to get together at lunch," he
added.

"Oh, yes, I can understand that stage of it," said the manager.
"By-the-way, are you still connected with the _Abstract_? I noticed the
name on your card."

"Not quite in the old way. But," and with the words a purpose formed
itself in Maxwell's mind, "they've asked me to write their New York
letter."

"Well, drop in now and then. I may have something for you." The manager
shook hands with him cordially, and Maxwell opened the door and found
himself in the street.

He was so little conscious of the transit homeward that he seemed to
find himself the next moment with Louise in their little parlor. He
remembered afterwards that there was something strange in her manner
towards him at first, but, before he could feel presently cognizant of
it, this wore off in the interest of what he had to tell.

"The sum of it all," he ended his account of the interview with the
manager, "is that he's taken the thing to read, and that he's to let me
hear from him when he's read it. When that will be nobody knows, and I
should be the last to ask. But he seemed interested in my sketch of it,
and he had an intelligence about it that was consoling. And it was a
great comfort, after Godolphin, and Godolphin's pyrotechnics, to have
him take it in a hard, business way. He made no sort of promises, and he
held out no sort of hopes; he didn't commit himself in any sort of way,
and he can't break his word, for he hasn't given it. I wish, now, that I
had never let Godolphin have the play back after he first renounced it;
I should have saved a great deal of time and wear and tear of feelings.
Yes, if I had taken your advice then--"

At this generous tribute to her wisdom, all that was reluctant ceased
from Louise's manner and behavior. She put her arm around his neck and
protested. "No, no! I can't let you say that, Brice! You were right
about that, as you are about everything. If you hadn't had this
experience with Godolphin, you wouldn't have known how to appreciate Mr.
Grayson's reception of you, and you might have been unreasonable. I can
see now that it's all been for the best, and that we needed just this
discipline to prepare us for prosperity. But I guess Godolphin will
wish, when he hears that Mr. Grayson has taken your piece, and is going
to bring it out at the Argosy, here--"

"Oh, good heavens! Do give those poor chickens a chance to get out of
the shell this time, my dear!"

"Well, I know it vexes you, and I know it's silly; but still I feel sure
that Mr. Grayson will take it. You don't mind that, do you?"

"Not if you don't say it. I want you to realize that the chances are
altogether against it. He was civil, because I think he rather liked me
personally--"

"Of _course_ he did!"

"Oh!"

"Well, never mind. Personally--"

"And I don't suppose it did me any harm with him to suppose that I still
had a newspaper connection. I put Boston _Abstract_ on my card--for
purposes of identification, as the editors say--because I was writing
for it when I met him in Boston."

"Oh, well, as long as you're not writing for it now, I don't care. I
want you to devote yourself entirely to the drama, Brice."

"Yes, that's all very well. But I think I shall do Ricker's letters for
him this winter at least. I was thinking of it on the way down. It'll be
work, but it'll be money, too, and if I have something coming in I
sha'n't feel as if I were ruined every time my play gets back from a
manager."

"Mr. Grayson will take it!"

"Now, Louise, if you say that, you will simply drive me to despair, for
I shall know how you will feel when he doesn't--"

"No, I shall not feel so; and you will see. But if you don't let me hope
for you--"

"You know I can't stand hoping. The only safe way is to look for the
worst, and if anything better happens it is so much pure gain. If we
hadn't been so eager to pin our faith to Godolphin--"

"How much better off should we have been? What have we lost by it?" she
challenged him.

He broke off with a laugh. "We have lost the pins. Well, hope away! But,
remember, you take the whole responsibility." Maxwell pulled out his
watch. "Isn't lunch nearly ready? This prosperity is making me hungry,
and it seems about a year since breakfast."

"I'll see what's keeping it," said Louise, and she ran out to the
kitchen with a sudden fear in her heart. She knew that she had meant to
countermand her order for the fillet and mushrooms, and she thought that
she had forgotten to order anything else for lunch. She found the cook
just serving it up, because such a dish as that took more time than an
ordinary lunch, and the things had come late. Louise said, Yes, she
understood that; and went back to Maxwell, whom she found walking up and
down the room in a famine very uncommon for him. She felt the motherly
joy a woman has in being able to appease the hunger of the man she
loves, and now she was glad that she had not postponed the fillet till
dinner as she had thought of doing. Everything was turning out so
entirely for the best that she was beginning to experience some revival
of an ancestral faith in Providence in a heart individually agnostic,
and she was piously happy when Maxwell said at sight of the lunch,
"Isn't this rather prophetic? If it isn't that, it's telepathic. I
sha'n't regret now that I didn't go with Grayson to lunch at the
Players' Club."

"Did he ask you to do that?"

Maxwell nodded with his mouth full.

A sudden misgiving smote her. "Oh, Brice, you ought to have gone! Why
didn't you go?"

"It must have been a deep subconsciousness of the fillet and mushrooms.
Or perhaps I didn't quite like to think of your lunching alone."

"Oh, you dear, faithful little soul!" she cried. The tears came into her
eyes, and she ran round the table to kiss him several times on the top
of his head.

He kept on eating as well as he could, and when she got back to her
place, "Of course, it would have been a good thing for me to go to the
Players'," he teased, "for it would have pleased Grayson, and I should
probably have met some other actors and managers there, and made
interest with them provisionally for my play, if he shouldn't happen to
want it."

"Oh, I know it," she moaned. "You have ruined yourself for me. I'm not
worth it. No, I'm not! Now, I want you to promise, dearest, that you'll
never mind me again, but lunch or dine, or breakfast, or sup whenever
anybody asks you?"

"Well, I can't promise all that, quite."

"I mean, when the play is at stake."

"Oh, in that case, yes."

"What in the world did you say to Mr. Grayson?"

"Very much what I have said to you: that I hated to leave you to lunch
alone here."

"Oh, didn't he think it very silly?" she entreated, fondly. "Don't you
think he'll laugh at you for it!"

"Very likely. But he won't like me the less for it. Men are glad of
marital devotion in other men; they feel that it acts as a sort of
dispensation for them."

"You oughtn't to waste those things on me," she said, humbly. "You ought
to keep them for your plays."

"Oh, they're not wasted, exactly. I can use them over again. I can say
much better things than that with a pen in my hand."

She hardly heard him. She felt a keen remorse for something she had
meant to do and to say when he came home. Now she put it far from her;
she thought she ought not to keep even an extinct suspicion in her heart
against him, and she asked, "Brice, did you know that woman was living
in this house?"

"What woman?"

Louise was ashamed to say anything about the smouldering eyes. "That
woman on the bathing-beach at Magnolia--the one I met the other day."

He said, dryly: "She seems to be pursuing us. How did you find it out?"

She told him, and she added, "I think she _must_ be an actress of some
sort."

"Very likely, but I hope she won't feel obliged to call because we're
connected with the profession."

Some time afterwards Louise was stitching at a centre-piece she was
embroidering for the dining-table, and Maxwell was writing a letter for
the _Abstract_, which he was going to send to the editor with a note
telling him that if it were the sort of thing he wanted he would do the
letters for them.

"After all," she breathed, "that look of the eyes may be purely
physical."

"What look?" Maxwell asked, from the depths of his work.

She laughed in perfect content, and said: "Oh, nothing." But when he
finished his letter, and was putting it into the envelope, she asked:
"Did you tell Mr. Grayson that Godolphin had returned the play?"

"No, I didn't. That wasn't necessary at this stage of the proceedings."

"No."

XIV.

During the week that passed before Maxwell heard from the manager
concerning his play, he did another letter for the _Abstract_, and, with
a journalistic acquaintance enlarged through certain Boston men who had
found places on New York papers, familiarized himself with New York ways
and means of getting news. He visited what is called the Coast, a series
of points where the latest intelligence grows in hotel bars and lobbies
of a favorable exposure, and is nurtured by clerks and barkeepers
skilled in its culture, and by inveterate gossips of their acquaintance;
but he found this sort of stuff generally telegraphed on by the
Associated Press before he reached it, and he preferred to make his
letter a lively comment on events, rather than a report of them. The
editor of the _Abstract_ seemed to prefer this, too. He wrote Maxwell
some excellent criticism, and invited him to appeal to the better rather
than the worse curiosity of his readers, to remember that this was the
principle of the _Abstract_ in its home conduct. Maxwell showed the
letter to his wife, and she approved of it all so heartily that she
would have liked to answer it herself. "Of course, Brice," she said,
"it's _you_ he wants, more than your news. Any wretched reporter could
give him that, but you are the one man in the world who can give him
your mind about it."

"Why not say universe?" returned Maxwell, but though he mocked her he
was glad to believe she was right, and he was proud of her faith in him.

In another way this was put to proof more than once during the week, for
Louise seemed fated to meet Mrs. Harley on the common stairs now when
she went out or came in. It was very strange that after living with her
a whole month in the house and not seeing her, she should now be seeing
her so much. Mostly she was alone, but sometimes she was with an elderly
woman, whom Louise decided at one time to be her mother, and at another
time to be a professional companion. The first time she met them
together she was sure that Mrs. Harley indicated her to the chaperon,
and that she remembered her from Magnolia, but she never looked at
Louise, any more than Louise looked at her, after that.

She wondered if Maxwell ever met her, but she was ashamed to ask him,
and he did not mention her. Only once when they were together did they
happen to encounter her, and then he said, quite simply, "I think she's
certainly an actress. That public look of the eyes is unmistakable.
Emotional parts, I should say."

Louise forced herself to suggest, "You might get her to let you do a
play for her."

"I doubt if I could do anything unwholesome enough for her."

At last the summons they were expecting from Grayson came, just after
they had made up their minds to wait another week for it.

Louise had taken the letter from the maid, and she handed it to Maxwell
with a gasp at sight of the Argosy theatre address printed in the corner
of the envelope. "I know it's a refusal."

"If you think that will make it an acceptance," he had the hardihood to
answer, "it won't. I've tried that sort of thing too often;" and he tore
open the letter.

It was neither a refusal nor an acceptance, and their hopes soared
again, hers visibly, his secretly, to find it a friendly confession that
the manager had not found time to read the play until the night before,
and a request that Maxwell would drop in any day between twelve and one,
which was rather a leisure time with him, and talk it over.

"Don't lose an instant, dear!" she adjured him.

"It's only nine o'clock," he answered, "and I shall have to lose several
instants."

"That is so," she lamented; and then they began to canvas the probable
intention of the manager's note. She held out passionately to the end
for the most encouraging interpretation of it, but she did not feel that
it would have any malign effect upon the fact for him to say, "Oh, it's
just a way of letting me down easy," and it clearly gave him great heart
to say so.

When he went off to meet his fate, she watched him, trembling, from the
window; as she saw him mounting the elevated steps, she wondered at his
courage; she had given him all her own.

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