Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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.

  The manager met him with “Ah, I’m glad you came soon. These things fade out of one’s mind so, and I really want to talk about your play. I’ve been very much interested in it.”

  Maxwell could only bow his head and murmur something about being very glad, very, very glad, with a stupid iteration.

  “I suppose you know, as well as I do, that it’s two plays, and that it’s only half as good as if it were one.”

  The manager wheeled around from his table, and looked keenly at the author, who contrived to say, “I think I know what you mean.”

  “You’ve got the making of the prettiest kind of little comedy in it, and you’ve got the making of a very strong tragedy. But I don’t think your oil and water mix, exactly,” said Grayson.

  “You think the interest of the love-business will detract from the interest of the homicide’s fate?”

  “And vice versa. Excuse me for asking something that I can very well understand your not wanting to tell till I had read your play. Isn’t this the piece Godolphin has been trying out West?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Maxwell. “I thought it might prejudice you against it, if—”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Why have you taken it from him?”

  Maxwell felt that he could make up for his want of earlier frankness now. “I didn’t take it from him; he gave it back to me.”

  He sketched the history of his relation to the actor, and the manager said, with smiling relish, “Just like him, just like Godolphin.” Then he added, “I’ll tell you, and you mustn’t take it amiss. Godolphin may not know just why he gave the piece up, and he probably thinks it’s something altogether different, but you may depend upon it the trouble was your trying to ride two horses in it. Didn’t you feel that it was a mistake yourself?”

  “I felt it so strongly at one time that I decided to develop the love-business into a play by itself and let the other go for some other time. My wife and I talked it over. We even discussed it with Godolphin. He wanted to do Atland. But we all backed out simultaneously, and went back to the play as it stood.”

  “Godolphin saw he couldn’t make enough of Atland,” said the manager, as if he were saying it to himself. “Well, you may be sure he feels now that the character which most appeals to the public in the play is Salome.”

  “He felt that before.”

  “And he was right. Now, I will tell you what you have got to do. You have either got to separate the love-business from the rest of the play and develop it into a comedy by itself—”

  “That would mean a great deal of work, and I am rather sick of the whole thing.”

  “Or,” the manager went on without minding Maxwell, “you have got to cut the part of Salome, and subordinate it entirely to Haxard” — Maxwell made a movement of impatience and refusal, and the manager finished— “or else you have got to treat it frankly as the leading part in the piece, and get it into the hands of some leading actress.”

  “Do you mean,” the author asked, “that you — or any manager — would take it if that were done?”

  Grayson looked a little unhappy. “No, that isn’t what I mean, exactly. I mean that as it stands, no manager would risk it, and that as soon as an actor had read it, he would see, as Godolphin must have seen from the start, that Haxard was a subordinate part. What you want to do is to get it in the hands of some woman who wants to star, and would take the road with it.” The manager expatiated at some length on the point, and then he stopped, and sat silent, as if he had done with the subject.

  Maxwell perceived that the time had come for him to get up and go away.

  “I’m greatly obliged to you for all your kindness, Mr. Grayson, and I won’t abuse your patience any further. You’ve been awfully good to me, and—” He faltered, in a dejection which he could not control. Against all reason, he had hoped that the manager would have taken his piece just as it stood, and apparently he would not have taken it in any event.

  “You mustn’t speak of that,” said the manager. “I wish you would let me see anything else you do. There’s a great deal that’s good in this piece, and I believe that a woman who would make it her battle-horse could make it go.”

  Maxwell asked, with melancholy scorn, “But you don’t happen to know any leading lady who is looking round for a battle-horse?”

  The manager seemed trying to think. “Yes, I do. You wouldn’t like her altogether, and I don’t say she would be the ideal Salome, but she would be, in her way, effective; and I know that she wants very much to get a play. She hasn’t been doing anything for a year or two but getting married and divorced, but she made a very good start. She used to call herself Yolande Havisham; I don’t suppose it was her name; and she had a good deal of success in the West; I don’t think she’s ever appeared in New York. I believe she was of quite a good Southern family; the Southerners all are; and I hear she has money.”

  “Godolphin mentioned a Southern girl for the part,” said Maxwell. “I wonder if—”

  “Very likely it’s the same one. She does emotional leads. She and Godolphin played together in California, I believe. I was trying to think of her married name — or her unmarried name—”

  Some one knocked at the door, and the young man put his head in, with what Maxwell fancied a preconcerted effect, and gave the manager a card. He said, “All right; bring him round,” and he added to Maxwell, “Shall I send your play—”

  “No, no, I will take it,” and Maxwell carried it away with a heavier heart than he had even when he got it back from Godolphin. He did not know how to begin again, and he had to go home and take counsel with his wife as to the next step.

  He could not bear to tell her of his disappointment, and it was harder still to tell her of the kind of hope the manager had held out to him. He revolved a compromise in his mind, and when they sat down together he did not mean to conceal anything, but only to postpone something; he did not clearly know why. He told her the alternatives the manager had suggested, and she agreed with him they were all impossible.

  “Besides,” she said, “he doesn’t promise to take the play, even if you do everything to a ‘t.’ Did he ask you to lunch again?”

  “No, that seemed altogether a thing of the past.”

  “Well, let us have ours, and then we can go into the Park, and f
orget all about it for a while, and perhaps something new will suggest itself.”

  That was what they did, but nothing new suggested itself. They came home fretted with their futile talk. There seemed nothing for Maxwell to do but to begin the next day with some other manager.

  They found a note from Grayson waiting Maxwell. “Well, you open it,” he said, listlessly, to his wife, and in fact he felt himself at that moment physically unable to cope with the task, and he dreaded any fluctuation of emotion that would follow, even if it were a joyous one.

  “What does this mean, Brice?” demanded his wife, with a terrible provisionality in her tone, as she stretched out the letter to him, and stood before him where he lounged in the cushioned window-seat.

  Grayson had written: “If you care to submit your play to Yolande Havisham, you can easily do so. I find that her address is the same as yours. Her name is Harley. But I was mistaken about the divorce. It was a death.”

  Maxwell lay stupidly holding the note before him.

  “Will you tell me what it means?” his wife repeated. “Or why you didn’t tell me before, if you meant to give your play to that creature?”

  “I don’t mean to give it to her,” said Maxwell, doggedly. “I never did, for an instant. As for not telling you that Grayson had suggested it — well, perhaps I wished to spare myself a scene like the present.”

  “Do you think I will believe you?”

  “I don’t think you will insult me. Why shouldn’t you believe I am telling you the truth?”

  “Because — because you didn’t tell me at once.”

  “That is nonsense, and you know it. If I wanted to keep this from you, it was to spare you the annoyance I can’t help now, and because the thing was settled in my mind as soon as Grayson proposed it.”

  “Then, why has he written to you about it?”

  “I suppose I didn’t say it was settled.”

  “Suppose? Don’t you know whether you did?”

  “Come, now, Louise! I am not on the witness-stand, and I won’t be cross-questioned. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What is the matter with you? Am I to blame because a man who doesn’t imagine your dislike of a woman that you never spoke to suggests her taking part in a play that she probably wouldn’t look at? You’re preposterous! Try to have a little common-sense!” These appeals seemed to have a certain effect with his wife; she looked daunted; but Maxwell had the misfortune to add, “One would think you were jealous of the woman.”

  “Now you are insulting me!” she cried. “But it’s a part of the vulgarity of the whole business. Actors, authors, managers, you’re all alike.”

  Maxwell got very pale. “Look out, Louise!” he warned her.

  “I won’t look out. If you had any delicacy, the least delicacy in the world, you could imagine how a woman who had given the most sacred feelings of her nature to you for your selfish art would loathe to be represented by such a creature as that, and still not be jealous of her, as you call it! But I am justly punished! I might have expected it.”

  The maid appeared at the door and said something, which neither of them could make out at once, but which proved to be the question whether Mrs. Maxwell had ordered the dinner.

  “No, I will go — I was just going out for it,” said Louise. She had in fact not taken off her hat or gloves since she came in from her walk, and she now turned and swept out of the room without looking at her husband. He longed to detain her, to speak some kindly or clarifying word, to set himself right with her, to set her right with herself; but the rage was so hot in his heart that he could not. She came back to the door a moment, and looked in. “I will do my duty.”

  “It’s rather late,” he sneered, “but if you’re very conscientious, I dare say we shall have dinner at the usual time.”

  He did not leave the window-seat, and it was as if the door had only just clashed to after her when there came a repeated and violent ringing at the bell, so that he jumped up himself, to answer it, without waiting for the maid.

  “Your wife — your wife!” panted the bell-boy, who stood there. “She’s hurt herself, and she’s fainted.”

  “My wife? Where — how?” He ran down stairs after the boy, and in the hallway on the ground floor he found Louise stretched upon the marble pavement, with her head in the lap of a woman, who was chafing her hands. He needed no look at this woman’s face to be sure that it was the woman of his wife’s abhorrence, and he felt quite as sure that it was the actress Yolande Havisham, from the effective drama of her self-possession.

  “Don’t be frightened. Your wife turned her foot on the steps here. I was coming into the house, and caught her from falling. It’s only a swoon.” She spoke with the pseudo-English accent of the stage, but with a Southern slip upon the vowels here and there. “Get some water, please.”

  The hall-boy came running up the back stairs with some that he had gone to get, and the woman bade Maxwell sprinkle his wife’s face. But he said: “No — you,” and he stooped and took his wife’s head into his own hands, so that she might not come to in the lap of Mrs. Harley; in the midst of his dismay he reflected how much she would hate that. He could hardly keep himself from being repellant and resentful towards the woman. In his remorse for quarrelling with Louise, it was the least reparation he could offer her. Mrs. Harley, if it were she, seemed not to notice his rudeness. She sprinkled Louise’s face, and wiped her forehead with the handkerchief she dipped in the water; but this did not bring her out of her faint, and Maxwell began to think she was dead, and to feel that he was a murderer. With a strange æsthetic vigilance he took note of his sensations for use in revising Haxard.

  The janitor of the building had somehow arrived, and Mrs. Harley said: “I will go for a doctor, if you can get her up to your apartment;” and she left Louise with the two men.

  The janitor, a burly Irishman, lifted her in his arms, and carried her up the three flights of steps; Maxwell followed, haggardly, helplessly.

  On her own bed, Louise revived, and said: “My shoe — Oh, get it off!”

  The doctor came a few minutes later, but Mrs. Harley did not appear with him as Maxwell had dreaded she would. He decided that Mrs. Maxwell had strained, not sprained, her ankle, and he explained how the difference was all the difference in the world, as he bound the ankle up with a long ribbon of india-rubber, and issued directions for care and quiet.

  He left them there, and Maxwell heard him below in parley, apparently with the actress at her door. Louise lay with her head on her husband’s arm, and held his other hand tight in hers, while he knelt by the bed. The bliss of repentance and mutual forgiveness filled both their hearts, while she told him how she had hurt herself.

  “I had got down to the last step, and I was putting my foot to the pavement, and I thought, Now I am going to turn my ankle. Wasn’t it strange? And I turned it. How did you get me upstairs?”

  “The janitor carried you.”

  “How lucky he happened to be there! I suppose the hall-boy kept me from falling — poor little fellow! You must give him some money. How did you find out about me?”

  “He ran up to tell,” Maxwell said this, and then he hesitated. “I guess you had better know all about it. Can you bear something disagreeable, or would you rather wait—”

  “No, no, tell me now! I can’t bear to wait. What is it?”

  “It wasn’t the hall-boy that caught you. It was that — woman.”

  He felt her neck and hand grow rigid, but he went on, and told her all about it. At the end some quiet tears came into her eyes. “Well, then, we must be civil to her. I am glad you told me at once, Brice!” She pulled his head down and kissed him, and he was glad, too.

  XV.

  Louise sent Maxwell down to Mrs. Harley’s apartment to thank her, and tell her how slight the accident was; and while he was gone she abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from blood-poisoning, and her husband’s early marriage with the actress, who then appeared in all
his plays, though they were not happy together. Her own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so as to give the woman a notion that he was not suffered to stay longer. He explained that he had found her gloved and bonneted to go out, and that he had not stayed for fear of keeping her. She had introduced him to her mother, who was civil about Louise’s accident, and they had both begged him to let them do anything they could for her. He made his observations, and when Louise, after a moment, asked him about them, he said they affected him as severally typifying the Old South and the New South. They had a photograph over the mantel, thrown up large, of an officer in Confederate uniform. Otherwise the room had nothing personal in it; he suspected the apartment of having been taken furnished, like their own. Louise asked if he should say they were ladies, and he answered that he thought they were.

  “Of course,” she said, and she added, with a wide sweep of censure: “They get engaged to four or five men at a time, down there. Well,” she sighed, “you mustn’t stay in here with me, dear. Go to your writing.”

  “I was thinking whether you couldn’t come out and lie on the lounge. I hate to leave you alone in here.”

  “No, the doctor said to be perfectly quiet. Perhaps I can, to-morrow, if it doesn’t swell up any worse.”

  She kept her hold of his hand, which he had laid in hers, and he sat down beside the bed, in the chair he had left there. He did not speak, and after a while she asked, “What are you thinking of?”

  “Oh, nothing. The confounded play, I suppose.”

  “You’re disappointed at Grayson’s not taking it.”

  “One is always a fool.”

  “Yes,” said Louise, with a catching of the breath. She gripped his hand hard, and said, as well as she could in keeping back the tears, “Well, I will never stand in your way, Brice. You may do anything — anything — with it that you think best.”