Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

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

  “Perhaps I’ve seen it,” he suggested, demurely.

  “No, no, you didn’t see it! That is the amusing part of it. You were as blind as a bat all the time, and you never had the least suspicion; you’ve told me so.”

  “Well, then, I’ve seen it retrospectively.”

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

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

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

  “I hadn’t so good a model.”

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

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

  “Yes,” she said, after one of the delicious silences that divided their moments of exaltation. “There won’t be any trouble about getting your play taken, now.”

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

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

  “Well, what?”

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

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

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

  “I don’t think there’s been anything exactly like it before,” he allowed.

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

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

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

  “Well, then, sha’n’t you always say that I did something towards it?”

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

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

  “I dare say the audience will find it so.”

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

  “What do you suppose it means?” she gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  V.

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

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

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

  “The lover?”

  “Yes. He thinks he sees his part in it.”

  “And do you?”

  “How do I know?”

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

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

  “Why don’t you say these things to Godolphin?”

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

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

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

  “He was willing to fling you away!”

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

  “I hope you’re not going to let him see that you think so.”

  “Oh, no! I’m going to keep him in a suppliant attitude throughout, and I’m going to let you come in and tame his spirit, if he — kicks.”

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

  “I haven’t. I’m joking without any heart.” He stood up. “Let us go and take a bath.”

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

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

  “I shall not bathe, either.”

  “Well, then, I’ll watch the other women.” He put out his hand and took hers.

  She felt his touch very cold. “You are excited I can see. I wish—”

  “What? That I was not an intending dramatist?”

  “That you didn’t have such excitements in your life. They will kill you.”

  “They are all that will keep me alive.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “We ought to have clapped.”

  “Do you think she is an actress?”

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

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

  “Why, of course. You were only a matinée.”

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

  “You’re still thinking,” she sighed. “Come! We must go back.”

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

  “What makes you think she’s a girl?” asked his wife, as they moved slowly off.

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

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

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

  “I don’t see why she shouldn’t be serious. There’s nothing ignoble in what she does.”

  “No. It can be very impassioned.”

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

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