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The Story of a Play: A novel, a novel by William Dean Howells |
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Chapter 10 |
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_ CHAPTER X The weather grew rough early in September, and all at once, all in a moment, as it were, the pretty watering-place lost its air of summer gayety. The sky had an inner gray in its blue; the sea looked cold. A few hardy bathers braved it out on select days in the surf, but they were purple and red when they ran up to the bath-houses, and they came out wrinkled, and hurried to their hotels, where there began to be a smell of steam-heat and a snapping of radiators in the halls. The barges went away laden to the stations, and came back empty, except at night, when they brought over the few and fewer husbands whose wives were staying down simply because they hated to go up and begin the social life of the winter. The people who had thronged the grassy-bordered paths of the village dwindled in number; the riding and driving on the roads was less and less; the native life showed itself more in the sparsity of the sojourners. The sweet fern in the open fields, and the brakes and blackberry-vines among the bowlders, were blighted with the cold wind; even the sea-weed swaying at the foot of the rocks seemed to feel a sharper chill than that of the brine. A storm came, and strewed the beach with kelp, and blew over half the bath-houses; and then the hardiest lingerer ceased to talk of staying through October. There began to be rumors at the Maxwells' hotel that it would close before the month was out; some ladies pressed the landlord for the truth, and he confessed that he expected to shut the house by the 25th. This spread dismay; but certain of the boarders said they would go to the other hotels, which were to keep open till October. The dependent cottages had been mostly emptied before; those who remained in them, if they did not go away, came into the hotel. The Maxwells themselves did this at last, for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it, so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions there came, if not friendship, an intensification of acquaintance, such as is imaginable of a company of cultured castaways. Ladies who were not quite socially certain of one another in town gossiped fearlessly together; there was whist among the men; more than once it happened that a young girl played or sang by request, and not, as so often happens where a hotel is full, against the general desire. It came once to a wish that Mr. Maxwell would read something from his play; but no one had the courage to ask him. In society he was rather severe with women, and his wife was not sorry for that; she made herself all the more approachable because of it. But she discouraged the hope of anything like reading from him; she even feigned that he might not like to do it without consulting Mr. Godolphin, and if she did not live a lie concerning the status of his play, she did not scruple to tell one, now and then. That is, she would say it was going beyond their expectations, and this was not so fabulous as it might seem, for their expectations were not so high as they had been, and Godolphin was really playing the piece once or twice a week. They heard no more from him by letter, for Maxwell had decided that it would be better not to answer his missive from Midland; but he was pretty faithful in sending the newspaper notices whenever he played, and so they knew that he had not abandoned it. They did not know whether he had carried out his threat of overhauling it; and Maxwell chose to remain in ignorance of the fact till Godolphin himself should speak again. Unless he demanded the play back he was really helpless, and he was not ready to do that, for he hoped that when the actor brought it on to New York he could talk with him about it, and come to some understanding. He had not his wife's belief in the perfection of the piece; it might very well have proved weak in places, and after his first indignation at the notion of Godolphin's revising it, he was willing to do what he could to meet his wishes. He did not so much care what shape it had in these remote theatres of the West; the real test was New York, and there it should appear only as he wished. It was a comfort to his wife when he took this stand, and she vowed him to keep it; she would have made him go down on his knees and hold up his right hand, which was her notion of the way an oath was taken in court, but she did not think he would do it, and he might refuse to seal any vow at all if she urged it. In the meanwhile she was not without other consolations. At her insistence he wrote to the newspaper which had printed the Ibsen crank's article on the play, and said how much pleasure it had given him, and begged his thanks to the author. They got a very pretty letter back from him, adding some praises of the piece which he said he had kept out of print because he did not want to seem too gushing about it; and he ventured some wary censures of the acting, which he said he had preferred not to criticise openly, since the drama was far more important to him than the theatre. He believed that Mr. Godolphin had a perfect conception of the part of Haxard, and a thorough respect for the piece, but his training had been altogether in the romantic school; he was working out of it, but he was not able at once to simplify himself. This was in fact the fault of the whole company. The girl who did Salome had moments of charming reality, but she too suffered from her tradition, and the rest went from bad to worse. He thought that they would all do better as they familiarized themselves with the piece, and he deeply regretted that Mr. Godolphin had been able to give it only once in Midland. At this Mrs. Maxwell's wounds inwardly bled afresh, and she came little short of bedewing the kind letter with her tears. She made Maxwell answer it at once, and she would not let him deprecate the writer's worship of him as the first American dramatist to attempt something in the spirit of the great modern masters abroad. She contended that it would be as false to refuse this tribute as to accept one that was not due him, and there could be no doubt but it was fully and richly merited. The critic wrote again in response to Maxwell, and they exchanged three or four letters. What was even more to Louise was the admirable behavior of her father when she went to eat humble-pie before him. He laughed at the notion of Godolphin's meddling with the play, and scolded her for not taking her husband's view of the case, which he found entirely reasonable, and the only reasonable view of it. He argued that Godolphin simply chose to assert in that way a claim to joint authorship, which he had all along probably believed he had, and he approved of Maxwell's letting him have his head in the matter, so far as the West was concerned. If he attempted to give it with any alterations of his own in the East, there would be time enough to stop him. Louise seized the occasion to confirm herself in her faith that her father admired Maxwell's genius as much as she did herself; and she tried to remember just the words he used in praising it, so that she could repeat them to Maxwell. She also committed to memory his declaration that the very fact of Godolphin's playing the piece every now and then was proof positive that he would be very reluctant to part with it, if it came to that. This seemed to her very important, and she could hardly put up with Maxwell's sardonic doubt of it. Before they left Magnolia there came a letter from Godolphin himself, wholly different in tone from his earlier letter. He said nothing now of overhauling the piece, which he felt was gradually making its way. He was playing it at various one-night stands in the Northwest, preparatory to bringing it to Chicago and putting it on for a week, and he asked if Maxwell could not come out and see it there. He believed they were all gradually getting down to it, and the author's presence at the rehearsals would be invaluable. He felt more and more that they had a fortune in it, and it only needed careful working to realize a bonanza. He renewed his promises, in view of his success so far, to play it exclusively if the triumph could be clinched by a week's run in such a place as Chicago. He wrote from Grand Rapids, and asked Maxwell to reply to him at Oshkosh. "Tell him you'll come, of course," said his wife. Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't mean this any more than he meant to revise the thing himself. He probably finds that he can't do that, and wants me to do it. But if I did it he might take it off after the first night in Chicago if the notices were unfavorable." "But they won't be," she argued. "I _know_ they won't." "I should simply break him up from the form he's got into, if I went to the rehearsals. He must keep on doing it in his own way till he comes to New York." "But think of the effect it will have in New York if you should happen to make it go in Chicago." "It won't have the slightest effect. When he brings it East, it will have to make its way just as if it had never been played anywhere before." A bright thought occurred to Louise. "Then tell him that if he will bring it on to Boston you will superintend all the rehearsals. And I will go with you to them." Maxwell only laughed at this. "Boston wouldn't serve any better than Chicago, as far as New York is concerned. We shall have to build a success from the ground up there, if we get one. It might run a whole winter in Boston, and then we should probably begin with half a house in New York, or a third. The only advantage of trying it anywhere before, is that the actors will be warm in their parts. Besides, do you suppose Godolphin could get a theatre in Boston out of the order of his engagement there next spring?" "Why not?" "Simply because every night at every house is taken six months beforehand." "Who would ever have dreamt," said Louise, ruefully, "that simply writing a play would involve any one in all these exasperating business details." "Nobody can get free of business," Maxwell returned. "Then I will tell you," she brightened up to say. "Why not sell him the piece outright, and wash your hands of it?" "Because he wouldn't buy it outright, and if I washed my hands of it he could do what he pleased with it. If he couldn't tinker it up himself he could hire some one else to do it, and that would be worse yet." "Well, then, the only thing for us to do is to go on to New York, and wait there till Godolphin comes. I suppose papa and mamma would like to have us stay through October with them in Boston, but I don't see much sense in that, and I don't choose to have the air of living on them. I want to present an unbroken front of independence from the beginning, as far as inquiring friends are concerned; and in New York we shall be so lost to sight that nobody will know how we are living. You can work at your new play while we're waiting, and we can feel that the onset in the battle of life has sounded." Maxwell laughed, as she meant him, at the mock heroics of her phrase, and she pulled off his hat, and rubbed his hair round on his skull in exultation at having arrived at some clear understanding. "I wouldn't have hair like silk," she jeered. "And I wouldn't have hair like corn-silk," he returned. "At least not on my own head." "Yes, it _is_ coarse. And it's yours quite as much as mine," she said, thoughtfully. "We _do_ belong to each other utterly, don't we? I never thought of it in that light before. And now our life has gone into your work, already! I can't tell you, Brice, how sweet it is to think of that love-business being our own! I shall be so proud of it on the stage! But as long as we live no one but ourselves must know anything about it. Do you suppose they will?" she asked, in sudden dismay. He smiled. "Should you care?" She reflected a moment. "No!" she shouted, boldly. "What difference?" "Godolphin would pay any sum for the privilege of using the fact as an advertisement. If he could put it into Pinney's hands, and give him _carte blanche_, to work in all the romance he liked--" "Brice!" she shrieked. "Well, we needn't give it away, and if _we_ don't, nobody else will." "No, and we must always keep it sacredly secret. Promise me one thing!" "Twenty!" "That you will let me hold your hand all through the first performance of that part. Will you?" "Why, we shall be set up like two brazen images in a box for all the first-nighters to stare at and the society reporters to describe. What would society journalism say to your holding my hand throughout the tender passages? It would be onto something personal in them in an instant." "No; now I will show you how we will do." They were sitting in a nook of the rocks, in the pallor of the late September sunshine, with their backs against a warm bowlder. "Now give me your hand." "Why, you've got hold of it already." "Oh yes, so I have! Well, I'll just grasp it in mine firmly, and let them both rest on your knee, so; and fling the edge of whatever I'm wearing on my shoulders over them, or my mantle, if it's hanging on the back of the chair, so"--she flung the edge of her shawl over their clasped hands to illustrate--"and nobody will suspect the least thing. Suppose the sea was the audience--a sea of faces you know; would any one dream down there that I was squeezing your hand at all the important moments, or you squeezing mine?" "I hope they wouldn't think me capable of doing anything so indelicate as squeezing a lady's hand," said Maxwell. "I don't know what they might think of you, though, if there was any such elaborate display of concealment as you've got up here." "Oh, this is merely rehearsing. Of course, I shall be more adroit, more careless, when I really come to it. But what I mean is that when we first see it together, the love-business, I shall want to feel that you are feeling every instant just as I do. Will you?" "I don't see any great objection to that. We shall both be feeling very anxious about the play, if that's what you mean." "That's what I mean in one sense," Louise allowed. "Sha'n't you be very anxious to see how they have imagined Salome and Atland?" "Not so anxious as about how Godolphin has 'created' Haxard." "I care nothing about that. But if the woman who does _me_ is vulgar, or underbred, or the least bit coarse, and doesn't keep the character just as sweet and delicate as you imagined it, I don't know what I shall do to her." "Nothing violent, I hope," Maxwell suggested languidly. "I am not so sure," said Louise. "It's a dreadfully intimate affair with me, and if I didn't like it I should hiss, anyway." Maxwell laughed long and loud. "What a delightful thing that would be for society journalism. 'At one point the wife of the author was apparently unable to control her emotions, and she was heard to express her disapprobation by a prolonged sibilation. All eyes were turned upon the box where she sat with her husband, their hands clasped under the edge of her mantle.' No, you mustn't hiss, my dear; but if you find Salome getting too much for you you can throw a dynamite bomb at the young woman who is doing her. I dare say we shall want to blow up the whole theatre before the play is over." "Oh, I don't believe we shall. I know the piece will go splendidly if the love-business is well done. But you can understand, can't you, just how I feel about Salome?" "I think I can, and I am perfectly sure that you will be bitterly disappointed in her, no matter how she's done, unless you do her yourself." "I wish I could!" "Then the other people might be disappointed." _ |
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