Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  Evidently he informed his company of players that he’d been in consultation with me. When I came downstairs I found Emma just entering the house and plainly fresh from stage carpentry; she had sawdust on her dress and a curl of wood-shaving in her hair. ‘I’m proud of you!’ she cried. ‘Irvie says you agreed with him on all the points he consulted you about.’

  ‘He what, Emma?’

  ‘Consulted you about’, she said. ‘I think it’s just darling, and so are you!’

  I didn’t explain to her that he hadn’t consulted me. In fact, she didn’t give me the opportunity. She was finding life and the world so excitingly beautiful that she was embracing even an uncle.

  Chapter Five

  THE PEASES’ NO-STYLED brick house, like my own of the same groping decade, was a product of the early twentieth century when the larger migrations out of down-town crowding and smoke began in most of our active cities. It was Will Pease’s father who built their house; and other families of that generation (my own) came one after another to build and live in the neighbourhood. So, in this more amply spaced ‘residence section’, old intimacies were continued and, later, repeated among the children and grandchildren of the nineteenth century’s ‘prominent citizens’. Of this expanded group of several hundred people, the Pease family and its connections were the central cluster.

  This wasn’t the result of conspicuous wealth or fashionableness; other families surpassed them in both and the Peases weren’t ambitious that way. They were important because Will Pease and his father, and his grandfather, too — a genial greybeard in black broadcloth, well-remembered from my boyhood — had always been known for their good will, good judgement and unalterable principles. They were kind, responsible men, respected for their abilities and loved for their charity of mind and of purse. Of all the Peases the present head of the family, Will, was the modest and worthy topmost; and if our big town recognized any one person as its ‘principal citizen’, that person was he. Add that if any one house was the special dispenser of hospitality and friendly discourse his was, and the stir made by his young son’s play becomes comprehensible as fanfare attending a distinguished event.

  .. Shaded by old forest trees behind the Peases’ tennis court, there stood a spacious brick stable. Will’s father had pioneered into this bosky region without an automobile and before the close of the horse-and-buggy age; but Will had built a garage closer to the house and more convenient of access. Now the long-vacant stable resounded to hammer and saw, as the exertions of the cast of ‘As If He Didn’t Know’ and a pair of hired carpenters re-shaped the whole ground floor, ‘carriage-house’, box-stalls and all, into a recognizably modernist theatre — designed by Irving Millerwood Pease, so stated in the printed programme.

  Luck in weather was with Irvie. There was never a balmier coolness under a clear moon than on the night in the last week of that June when Harriet and I crossed through the shrubberies of our own back yard and followed a path to the Peases’ drive. There we joined a scattered procession of our friends, relatives and acquaintances, moved with them toward a roseate effulgence among the big trees. It defined itself neatly as we passed beyond intervening foliage and saw the fiery lettering: ‘NEW CIVIC THEATRE’.

  ‘Irvie’s done just everything!’ Harriet said, exhilarated but nervous. ‘Think of his having even that neon sign over the old carriage-house doors. Really now, you’ll have to admit that’s wonderful. I do hope she won’t forget any of her lines; she’s so excited I don’t know what she’ll do! She wouldn’t eat a thing, just rushed over here at six o’clock to begin being made up. Think of her trying to look like Mary Reame’s mother!’

  ‘She won’t, Harriet. If she wears that grey wig she’ll look a lot older than Mrs. Reame. When girls under twenty make themselves up to look forty they—’

  Harriet, of course, wasn’t listening. She made a dart away from me and caught at the arm of a friend. ‘Carrie Reame! Isn’t it exciting? I know your Mary’ll be perfectly splendid. We’re all so delighted she’s playing “Nora”. Emma says “Nora’s” a perfectly Ibsenesque part. Doesn’t Mary love it?’

  ‘Wild over it!’ Mrs. Reame laughed. ‘Of course it’s rather short for a leading part, especially in her scenes with the hero, and she’s worried over what to do with her hands during his longer speeches; but she adores every word of the play. She thinks the audience is going to find it marvellous.’

  ‘So does Emma — too marvellous for words!’

  Harriet fluttered back to me as we turned pink with our near approach to the neon light. Then we passed the portal of the ‘New Civic Theatre’ and were within the somewhat odorously new-painted auditorium, which was already half-filled and murmurous with congenial chatter. ‘A hundred and eighty invitations’, Harriet said, as we found seats among cousins of ours. ‘Irvie’s worked so hard, I do hope they’ll all come.’ They all did, almost. By eight o’clock, the initial dramatic moment, all but three or four of the hired chairs were occupied, and, looking about me, I saw no face that wasn’t amiably expectant. Two of those faces were, indeed, touchingly so, I thought, as I caught a glimpse of them between intervening heads. The shining eyes and flushed cheeks of Will and Evelyn Pease betokened a tender pride already too effervescent to be decorously concealed.

  Three formal resounding knocks behind the scenes brought the proper hush upon the spectators; chords from a piano were heard, accompanying a young male voice, and, when the yellow denim curtains had yielded to insistence and jerked apart, an interior ‘set’ was disclosed wherein I recognized several articles of furniture of my own. More conspicuous, however, was Evelyn Pease’s piano at which Irvie sat playing rather sparsely and singing a song to Mary Reame. (Words and music by Irving Millerwood Pease, the programme imparted in an asterisked note.)

  Mary, as ‘Nora’, was a pretty picture in pink organdie; but probably only the eyes of her immediate family lingered upon her. Irvie was all in white with a red rose in his buttonhole; his voice, not large, was a tenor with the unforgettable vibrancy that stirs the heart; and the song, though completely of that beginning of the ‘crooning’ epoch, was as honeyed as its title: ‘My Apple Blossom, You’.

  Inconsistently, just after the song, Irvie, as ‘Abercrombie Brown’, began to deride ‘Nora’ for being a creature of the sentimental era— ‘a mere saccharine echo of the Gay Nineties’ he called her, presumably because he perceived that she’d fallen in love with him while he sang.

  ‘Did you ever see anything so artistic?’ the woman in front of me leaned back to whisper to Harriet. ‘I mean the way Irvie checked the applause after his song — just the slightest movement of his hand. If he weren’t really an artist he’d have wanted it. My Tommy’s got only a bit-part and he’s scared to death; but Irvie’s as cool as cool! I do hope these people appreciate what he’s giving them.’

  She needn’t have worried about that; old Joe Erb hadn’t come, and, in the audience of this overwhelmingly One boy play, I was, all by myself, the whole of the cold hearted minority. Like many another actor Irvie seemed to feel that the presence of an audience demanded from him a sonorous and yet elegant artificiality. Thus voice became richly musical and his pronunciation execrable. He’d blur one r, burr the next, and what he did to short as and broad a’s made my head swim, for cursed with a sensitive ear. Once he said, ‘I asked you not to ask me to ask that of myself’; I’ll swear that was the ‘line’ and how he spoke it. While he talked and talked and talked, his posture never failed in picturesqueness — as when he stood framed in a rear doorway and took the rose from his buttonhole to toss it scornfully to ‘Nora’.

  Most of the time he had his fellow-actors’ backs or profiles to the audience while he held the centre of the stage, a process notoriously damaging to any dramatic simulation of reality. Altogether I thought that seldom in amateur theatricals, and even in the saddest professional experiences of my own theatrical past, had I seen worse acting.

  The play itself, as I’d already gathered, was
of an old vintage frequently rediscovered by the young; it was Bernard Shaw filtered down to platitudinous lees. Nothing was plausible; nothing could be believed. No group of human beings in the world would have stood about a room, motionless and dumb, to be as incessantly scored upon, victoriously insulted and mocked as were the subordinates in this play — all except ‘Abercrombie Brown’ himself being of course subordinates. The meekest of stodgy souls would have ganged up on ‘Abercrombie Brown’ and thrown him out long before the end of the first act.

  By that time I was myself too drearily an old stodgy soul to be amused — and yet, round about me, were a hundred and eighty people, more than half of them of mature age, all listening submissively. Submissive? They sat entranced, many of them leaning forward, hanging upon every word from the stage; and, when the pair of curtains twitched to a juncture, closing the act, the ‘New Civic Theatre’ resounded. Old Janet Millerwood could be heard shouting ‘Brava! Brava!’ through an uproar of applause that was unmistakably spontaneous and genuine.

  Chapter Six

  THE DEMONSTRATION SWELLED until Irving Millerwood Pease had twice stepped forth between the curtains and twice gravely bowed with the reticence appropriate to an artist who receives impersonally a tribute to his art.

  The woman in front of me, Ella Pease Martin, a widowed relative of Harriet’s and mine, squirmed round, tilted her chair backward and seized Harriet’s hand rapturously. ‘Isn’t it just beyond words!’ she cried. ‘Could anybody believe he’s still only a boy in college? I thought my Tommy did awfully well, too, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have known he was scared, would you?’

  ‘No, not the least bit.’ Harriet was ecstatically responsive. ‘Of course some New York manager’ll gobble this up. It’s ‘way beyond the professional plays being put on nowadays; but I do hope Irvie won’t decide to be an actor. He must just write, write, write! Weren’t you astonished to see how almost middle-aged Emma really did make herself look? Of course she had only the one line in this act; but I do think—’

  I got up and went outdoors to smoke. Other people were standing about under the moonlit trees, similarly taking advantage of the intermission, and I heard them murmuring to one another adjectives of delight. Wondering what was the matter with me — grotesquely critical of a boy’s show in a barn — I kept away from them, and did again, half an hour later, after Irvie’d been brought out four times at the conclusion of the second act.

  It was the final act that brought me my two surprises. The first was Edgar Semple, who hadn’t made his appearance in the play until then, though ‘Abercrombie Brown’ had several times satirically referred to the tinsel soul of ‘Octavius Thompson’, the banker, ‘Nora’s’ father. Edgar now came upon the stage as ‘Octavius Thompson’, and for the first time that evening there seemed to be a convincingly actual, quiet-spoken, unstuffed person in this play.

  His ‘make-up’ as a middle-aged stoutish business man was so real that I’d hardly have known him, and he made everything that he did and said seem what we call ‘natural’. I thought it fortunate for the almost operatic Irvie that this excellent actor hadn’t appeared earlier in the piece, and, when the star negligently knocked him down in the top moment of the climax, my perverted sympathies were all with the fallen banker.

  I had my second surprise a few moments later when Irvie began his soliloquy in the suddenly darkened modernistic woodland that was the ‘set’ for that act. Instead of using the end he’d originally written for the play—’

  ‘Abercrombie Brown’s’ summing up everything except himself as a mess and ‘just laughing and laughing at life and the world’— ‘the author had switched to Edgar Semple’s suggestion. The soliloquy, avoiding its original self-celebration, dealt with ‘Abercrombie Brown’s’ discovery that all through the play he’d been not a heroic intellect mocking fools but a vainglorious ass.

  In his talk with me Irvie’d dismissed this idea, and it must have been hard for him to swallow; but, though the swallowing took time, he had done it. He’d been able to perceive the placative value of Edgar’s substitute finale. It appeared to belittle the hero; but it didn’t. It really enhanced him by making him humanly likeable.

  I thought that even this doting audience might have tired somewhat of the inexhaustible rightness and too-conscious superiority of’Abercrombie Brown’; but ‘Abercrombie Brown’ now, at last, appeared as capable of modesty. In Edgar’s version ‘Abercrombie Brown’ found himself in the end to have been a consistent bungler, the one wrong-headed fool among the estimable fellow-mortals he’d been deriding. When the pink light from the reflector broke the darkness, its shaft fell not upon Irvie standing elevated and with outstretched arms laughing as from the mountain. On the contrary he was using the rock as a desk, and a pad of scratch-paper, brought from his coat-pocket, for the writing of notes of apology to all the other people in the play. Finally, as a personal touch, and stepping humorously out of character, he wrote and read an apology to the members of the audience, asking their pardon for all the nonsense they’d been inveigled into hearing from a young man who didn’t know any better.

  The hit was palpable. Irvie’s whimsically engaging smile and deprecatory little bow, as he rose and spoke these last words directly across the footlights, captivated everybody. I, too, was a victim of that charm and found myself applauding till the palms of my hands burned.

  The curtains did not close. Irvie bowed and bowed; then stepped into the woodland wings and brought forth lovely Mary Reame. They took two ‘calls’ together, and after that Irvie summoned his whole company, stood at the centre of the line of triumphant young people in the warm glow of footlights, and laughingly shared his honours. It was a pretty sight, and Emma’s happy-face — the happiest of all, I thought — made me wonder again, and with a pang, what the devil I’d been doing inside myself all evening, demanding a masterpiece! The end of the play, in fact, was of its small kind almost that and I could have cheered Irvie for it — until I remembered that it was Edgar Semple’s.

  There were ‘refreshments’ outdoors; candle-lit white tables were set in the moonlight under the trees and coloured waiters in white brought pâtés and salads and ices and coffee. Ella Martin and Harriet, returning from an affectionate rush upon the dressing-rooms to congratulate the playwright-actor and their own Emma and Tommy, placed me at a table and talked across me with appropriate exuberance. What had most importantly delighted both Emma and Tommy, I gathered, was that there hadn’t been a ‘single hitch’. Harriet became impressive; she might have been conducting a muted passage in a symphony. ‘Not a single one! Emma says that’s the most marvellous thing of all, because Irvie changed the whole end of the play at the very last moment. They didn’t any of ’em know he was going to do it that way, so the end was as much a surprise to them as it was to the audience.’

  ‘Irvie hadn’t rehearsed it?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not with the rest of ’em. He didn’t decide on it until after the dress rehearsal last night, Emma says. He had them all go home and then he worked it out and got Edgar to write it on a typewriter and learned it by heart before he went to bed. Emma says the most wonderful thing of all is how he acted it tonight — that utter change — without a single hitch.’

  I thought interestedly about that typewriting of Edgar’s. I didn’t believe he’d done it from Irvie’s dictation; but evidently he wasn’t explaining this to anybody — nor, thus far, was Irvie. On the white table before me moonshine mingled with candlelight, and behind me I heard the unmistakable bass-viol voice of our city’s foremost authority upon Elizabethan Drama, old Judge Samuel Johnson Wilboyd. Though my back was toward him, my mind’s eye saw his zooming words blow forward the grey fringes of that unique relic, a shield against dental-minded gossips, his great lambrequin moustache.

  ‘Curb that mock-modest laughter, Will, my dear fellow; it deceives not me. Your son is not of the herd and you well know it. I say he is a dramatist. In time his works will go over this country and people will know t
hat the light the theatre has so long awaited has come. Foster that talent. See that his university courses feed it. When he shall have graduated see to it that he have pens, ink, paper, a secluded room in which to use them. You need do nothing more.’

  Will Pease spoke apologetically. ‘His mother’ll be delighted when I tell her what you’ve said, Judge, and of course it’s gratifying that Irving shows this dramatic talent. We’re glad he’s so versatile; but you see I — that is, it’s rather been planned that he’s to go through law school after he leaves college — he and our other boy, Edgar Semple, too — and that then they’ll both be coming into my office. You’d sanction his making the law his profession, wouldn’t you, Judge?’

  ‘Ordinarily, yes. Beginning his professional life in your office, Will, my dear fellow, would be an exceptional privilege for any ordinary young man. Let young Semple have that, if you please, but not your son. The masterstroke with which he ended this evening’s drama says “No” to any other calling. Without that masterstroke we of the audience might have been — well, slightly surfeited with the prevalence of the leading character, “Abercrombie”. We might, indeed, have gone away thinking him rather egregious. But no, in the very last moments before the final curtain, the author introduced a legitimate but wholly unexpected dramatic surprise that won all hearts. It was, in the common phrase, electric.’

  ‘Yes, I felt so, too’, the pleased Will said. ‘Even to his mother and me it was a surprise.’

  ‘Will, my dear fellow, it was more. That soliloquy, I say, was a masterstroke. I yield to no man in my respect for the law as a great profession; but I say to you that you must — I employ the word “must” advisedly — give your son his chance to become our leading dramatist.’