Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “You have your theory. You said I was jealous of her.”

  “I didn’t mean it. I never believed that.”

  “Then I can’t explain. If you don’t understand, after all that’s been said, what is the use of talking? I’m tired of it!”

  She went into her room, and he sank into the chair before his desk and sat there, thinking. When she came back, after a while, he did not look round at her, and she spoke to the back of his head. “Should you have any objection to my going home for a few days?”

  “No,” he returned.

  “I know papa would like to have me, and I think you would be less hampered in what you will have to do now if I’m not here.”

  “You’re very considerate. But if that’s what you are going for, you might as well stay. I’m not going to do anything whatever.”

  “Now, you mustn’t talk foolishly, Brice,” she said, with an air of superior virtue mixed with a hint of martyrdom. “I won’t have you doing anything rash or boyish. You will go on and let them have your play just the same as if I didn’t exist.” She somewhat marred the effect of her self-devotion by adding: “And I shall go on just as if it didn’t exist.” He said nothing, and she continued: “You couldn’t expect me to take any interest in it after this, could you? Because, though I am ready to make any sort of sacrifice for you, I think any one, I don’t care who it was, would say that was a little too much. Don’t you think so yourself?”

  “You are always right. I think that.”

  “Don’t be silly. I am trying to do the best I can, and you have no right to make it hard for me.”

  Maxwell wheeled round in his chair: “Then I wish you wouldn’t make your best so confoundedly disagreeable.”

  “Oh!” she twitted. “I see that you have made up your mind to let them have the play, after all.”

  “Yes, I have,” he answered, savagely.

  “Perhaps you meant to do it all along?”

  “Perhaps I did.”

  “Very well, then,” said Louise. “Would you mind coming to the train with me on your way down town to-morrow?”

  “Not at all.”

  XXII.

  In the morning neither of them recurred to what Louise had said of her going home for a few days. She had apparently made no preparation for the journey; but if she was better than her words in this, he was quite as bad as his in going down town after breakfast to let Grayson have the play, no matter whom he should get to do Salome. He did not reiterate his purpose, but she knew from the sullen leave, or no-leave, which he took of her, that it was fixed.

  When he was gone she had what seemed to her the very worst quarter of an hour she had ever known; but when he came back in the afternoon, looking haggard but savage, her ordeal had long been over. She asked him quietly if they had come to any definite conclusion about the play, and he answered, with harsh aggression, yes, that Mrs. Harley had agreed to take the part of Salome; Godolphin’s old company had been mostly got together, and they were to have the first rehearsal the next morning.

  “Should you like me to come some time?” asked Louise.

  “I should like you very much to come,” said Maxwell, soberly, but with a latent doubt of her meaning, which she perceived.

  “I have been thinking,” she said, “whether you would like me to call on Mrs. Harley this evening with you?”

  “What for?” he demanded, suspiciously.

  “Well, I don’t know. I thought it might be appropriate.”

  Maxwell thought a moment. “I don’t think it would be expected. After all, it isn’t a personal thing,” he said, with a relenting in his defiance.

  “No,” said Louise.

  They got through the evening without further question.

  They had always had some sort of explicit making-up before, even when they had only had a tacit falling out, but this time Louise thought there had better be none of that. They were to rehearse the play every day that week, and Maxwell said he must be at the theatre the next morning at eleven. He could not make out to his wife’s satisfaction that he was of much use, but he did not try to convince her. He only said that they referred things to him now and then, and that generally he did not seem to know much about them. She saw that his æsthetic honesty kept him from pretending to more than this, and she believed he ought to have greater credit than he claimed.

  Four or five days later she went with him to a rehearsal. By this time they had got so well forward with their work at the theatre that Maxwell said it would now be in appreciable shape; but still he warned her not to expect too much. He never could tell her just what she wanted to know about Mrs. Harley; all he could say was that her Salome was not ideal, though it had strong qualities; and he did not try to keep her from thinking it offensive; that would only have made bad worse.

  It had been snowing overnight, and there was a bright glare of sunshine on the drifts, which rendered the theatre doubly dark when they stepped into it from the street. It was a dramatic event for Louise to enter by the stage-door, and to find Maxwell recognized by the old man in charge as having authority to do so; and she made as much of the strange interior as the obscurity and her preoccupation would allow. There was that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects are prepared to be felt before the footlights. Nothing of the glamour of the front is possible; there is a hard air of business in everything; and the work that goes to the making of a play shows itself the severest toil. Figures now came and went in the twilight beyond the reach of the gas in the door-keeper’s booth, but rapidly as if bent upon definite errands, and with nothing of that loitering gayety which is the imagined temperament of the stage.

  Louise and Maxwell were to see Grayson first in his private office, and while their names were taken in, the old door-keeper gave them seats on the Mourners’ Bench, a hard wooden settee in the corridor, which he said was the place where actors wanting an engagement waited till the manager sent word that he could see them. The manager did not make the author and his wife wait, but came for them himself, and led the way back to his room. When he gave them seats there, Maxwell had the pleasure of seeing that Louise made an excellent impression with the magnate, of whom he had never quite lost the awe we feel for the master of our fortunes, whoever he is. He perceived that her inalienable worldly splendor added to his own consequence, and that his wife’s air of grande dame was not lost upon a man who could at least enjoy it artistically. Grayson was very polite to her, and said hopefuller things about the play than he had yet said to Maxwell, though he had always been civil about its merits. He had a number of papers before him, and he asked Louise if she had noticed their friendliness. She said, yes, she had seen some of those things, but she had supposed they were authorized, and she did not know how much to value them.

  Grayson laughed and confessed that he did not practice any concealments with the press when it was a question of getting something to the public notice. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t want the piece to come in on rubbers.”

  “What do you mean?” she demanded, with an ignorant joy in the phrase.

  “That’s what we call it when a thing hasn’t been sufficiently heralded, or heralded at all. We have got to look after that part of it, you know.”

  “Of course, I am not complaining, though I think all that’s dreadful.”

  The manager assented partly. Then he said: “There’s something curious about it. You may put up the whole affair yourself, and yet in what’s said you can tell whether there’s a real good will that comes from the writers themselves or not.”

  “And you mean that there is this mystical kindness for Mr. Maxwell’s play in the prophecies that all read so much alike to me?”

  “Yes, I do,” said the manager, laughing. “They like him because he’s new and young, and is making his way single-handed.”

  “Well,” said Louis
e, “those seem good grounds for preference to me, too;” and she thought how nearly they had been her own grounds for liking Maxwell.

  Grayson went with them to the stage and found her the best place to sit and see the rehearsal. He made some one get chairs, and he sat with her chatting while men in high hats and overcoats and women in bonnets and fur-edged butterfly-capes came in one after another. Godolphin arrived among the first, with an ulster which came down to where his pantaloons were turned up above his overshoes. He caught sight of Louise, and approached her with outstretched hand, and Grayson gave up his chair to the actor. Godolphin was very cordial, deferentially cordial, with a delicate vein of reminiscent comradery running through his manner. She spoke to him of having at last got his ideal for Salome, and he said, with a slight sigh and a sort of melancholy absence: “Yes, Miss Havisham will do it magnificently.” Then he asked, with a look of latent significance:

  “Have you ever seen her?”

  Louise laughed for as darkling a reason. “Only in real life. You know we live just over and under each other.”

  “Ah, true. But I meant, on the stage. She’s a great artist. You know she’s the one I wanted for Salome from the start.”

  “Then you ought to be very happy in getting her at last.”

  “She will do everything for the play,” sighed Godolphin. “She’ll make up for all my shortcomings.”

  “You won’t persuade us that you have any shortcomings, Mr. Godolphin,” said Louise. “You are Haxard, and Haxard is the play. You can’t think, Mr. Godolphin, how deeply grateful we both are to you for your confidence in my husband’s work, your sacrifices—”

  “You overpay me a thousand times for everything, Mrs. Maxwell,” said the actor. “Any one might have been proud and happy to do all I’ve done, and more, for such a play. I’ve never changed my opinion for a moment that it was the American drama. And now if Miss Havisham only turns out to be the Salome we want!”

  “If?” returned Louise, and she felt a wild joy in the word. “Why, I thought there could be no earthly doubt about it.”

  “Oh, there isn’t. We are all united on that point, I believe, Maxwell?”

  Maxwell shrugged. “I confide in you and Mr. Grayson.”

  Godolphin looked at his watch. “It’s eleven now, and she isn’t here yet. I would rather not have begun without her, but I think we had better not delay any longer.” He excused himself to Louise, and went and sat down with his hat on at a small table, lit with a single electric bulb, dropping like a luminous spider by a thread from the dark above. Other electric bulbs were grouped before reflectors on either side of the stage, and these shone on the actors before Godolphin. Back in the depths of the stage, some scene-painters and carpenters were at work on large strips of canvas lying unrolled upon the floor or stretched upon light wooden frames. Across Godolphin’s head the dim hollow of the auditorium showed, pierced by long bars of sunlight full of dancing motes, which slanted across its gloom from the gallery windows. Women in long aprons were sweeping the floors and pounding the seats, and a smell of dust from their labors mixed with the smell of paint and glue and escaping gas which pervaded the atmosphere of the stage.

  Godolphin made Maxwell come and sit with him at the table; he opened his prompt-book and directed the rehearsal to begin. The people were mostly well up in their parts, and the work went smoothly, except for now and then an impatience in Godolphin which did not seem to come from what was going forward.

  He showed himself a thorough master of his trade in its more mechanical details, and there were signal instances of his intelligence in the higher things of it which might well have put Mrs. Maxwell to shame for her many hasty judgments of the actor. He was altogether more of a man, more of a mind, than she had supposed, even when she supposed the best of him. She perceived that Godolphin grasped the whole meaning of her husband’s work, and interpreted its intentions with perfect accuracy, not only in his own part of Haxard, but in all the other persons, and he corrected the playing of each of the rôles as the rehearsal went on. She saw how he had really formed the other actors upon himself. They repeated his tones, his attitudes, his mannerisms, in their several ways. His touch could be felt all through the performance, and his limitations characterized it. He was very gentle and forbearing with their mistakes, but he was absolute master all the same. If some one erred, Godolphin left his place and went and showed how the thing should be said and done. He carefully addressed the men by their surnames, with the Mr. always; the women were all Dear to him, according to a convention of the theatre. He said, “No, dear,” and “Yes, dear,” and he was as caressingly deferential to each of them as he was formally deferential to the men; he required the same final obedience of them, and it was not always so easy to make them obey. In non-essentials he yielded at times, as when one of the ladies had overdone a point, and he demurred. “But I always got a laugh on that, Mr. Godolphin,” she protested. “Oh, well, my dear, hang on to your laugh, then.” However he meant to do Haxard himself, his voice was for simplicity and reality in others. “Is that the way you would do it, is that the way you would say it, if it were you?” he stopped one of the men in a bit of rant.

  Even of Maxwell he exacted as clear a vision of his own work as he exacted of its interpreters. He asked the author his notion of points in dress and person among the different characters, which he had hitherto only generalized in his mind, and which he was gladly willing, when they were brought home to him, to leave altogether to Godolphin’s judgment.

  The rehearsal had gone well on towards the end of the first act, and Godolphin was beginning to fidget. From where she sat Louise saw him take out his watch and lean towards her husband to say something. An actor who was going through a piece of business perceived that he had not Godolphin’s attention, and stopped. Just then Mrs. Harley came in.

  Godolphin rose and advanced towards her with the prompt-book shut on his thumb. “You are late, Miss Havisham.”

  “Yes,” she answered, haughtily, as if in resentment of his tone. She added in concession, “Unavoidably. But Salome doesn’t come on till the end of the act.”

  “I think it best for the whole company to be present from the beginning,” said Godolphin.

  “I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Harley. “Where are we?” she asked, and then she caught sight of Louise, and came up to her. “How do you do, Mrs. Maxwell? I don’t know whether I’m glad to see you or not. I believe I’m rather afraid to have you see my Salome; I’ve an idea you are going to be very severe with her.”

  “I am sure no severity will be needed. You’ll see me nodding approval all the way through,” Louise returned.

  “I have always thought, somehow, that you had the part especially under your protection. I feel that I’m a very bold woman to attempt it.”

  In spite of her will to say “Yes, a very bold woman indeed!” Louise answered: “Then I shall admire your courage, as well as your art.”

  She was aware of Godolphin fretting at the colloquy he could not interrupt, and of Mrs. Harley prolonging it wilfully. “I know you are sincere, and I am going to make you tell me everything you object to in me when it’s over. Will you?”

  “Of course,” Louise answered, gayly; and now Mrs. Harley turned to Godolphin again: “Where were you?”

  XXIII.

  Twice during the rehearsal Maxwell came to Louise and asked her if she were not tired and would not like to go home; he offered to go out and put her on a car. But both times she made him the same answer: she was not tired, and would not go away on any account; the second time she said, with a certain meaning in her look and voice, that she thought she could stand it if he could. At the end she went up and made her compliments to Mrs. Harley. “You must enjoy realizing your ideal of a character so perfectly,” she began.

  “Yes? Did you feel that about it?” the actress returned. “It is a satisfaction. But if one has a strong conception of a part, I don’t see how one can help rendering it strongly. And th
is Salome, she takes hold of me so powerfully. Her passion and her will, that won’t stop at anything, seem to pierce through and through me. You can feel that she wouldn’t mind killing a man or two to carry her point.”

  “That is certainly what you make one feel about her. And you make her very living, very actual.”

  “You are very good,” said Mrs. Harley. “I am so glad you liked it. I was dreadfully afraid you wouldn’t like it.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t imagine your being afraid of anything,” said Louise, lightly. Her smile was one which the other woman might have known how to interpret rightly, but her husband alone among men could feel its peculiar quality. Godolphin beamed with apparent satisfaction in it.

  “Wasn’t Salome magnificent?” he said; and he magnanimously turned to the actress. “You will make everybody forget Haxard. You made me forget him.”

  “I didn’t forget him though,” said Mrs. Harley. “I was trying all the time to play up to him — and to Mrs. Maxwell.”

  The actor laughed his deep, mellow, hollow laugh, which was a fine work of art in itself, and said: “Mrs. Maxwell, you must let me present the other dramatis personæ to you,” and he introduced the whole cast of the play, one after another. Each said something of the Salome, how grand it was, how impassioned, how powerful. Maxwell stood by, listening, with his eyes on his wife’s face, trying to read her thought.

  They were silent most of the way home, and she only talked of indifferent things. When the door of their apartment shut them in with themselves alone, she broke out: “Horrible, horrible, horrible! Well, the play is ruined, ruined! We might as well die; or I might! I suppose you really liked it!”

  Maxwell turned white with anger. “I didn’t try to make her think I did, anyway. But I knew how you really felt, and I don’t believe you deceived her very much, either. All the same I was ashamed to see you try.”

  “Don’t talk to me — don’t speak! She knew from every syllable I uttered that I perfectly loathed it, and I know that she tried to make it as hateful to me all the way through as she could. She played it at me, and she knew it was me. It was as if she kept saying all the time, ‘How do you like my translation of your Boston girl into Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or wherever I came from? This is the way you would have acted, if you were me!’ Yes, that is the hideous part of it. Her nature has come off on the character, and I shall never see, or hear, or think, or dream Salome, after this, without having Yolande Havisham before me. She’s spoiled the sweetest thing in my life. She’s made me hate myself; she’s made me hate you! Will you go out somewhere and get your lunch? I don’t want anything myself, and just now I can’t bear to look at you. Oh, you’re not to blame, that I know of, if that’s what you mean. Only go!”