Delphi complete works of.., p.624
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 624
Louise began, “Oh, dear, I hope there’s nothing the matter with papa! Or your mother.”
She ran forward, and Maxwell followed at his usual pace, so that she had time to go inside and come out with the despatch before he mounted the veranda steps.
“You open it!” she entreated, piteously, holding it towards him.
He pulled it impatiently open, and glanced at the signature. “It’s from Godolphin;” and he read, “Don’t destroy old play. Keep new love-business for episode. Will come over this afternoon.” Maxwell smiled. “More mind transference.”
Louise laughed in hysterical relief. “Now you can make him do just what you want.”
VI.
Maxwell, now, at least, knew that he had got his play going in the right direction again. He felt a fresh pleasure in returning to the old lines after his excursion in the region of comedy, and he worked upon them with fresh energy. He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise. He was doubtful whether the mingling of characteristics would not end in unreality, but she was sure it would not; she said he was so much like a woman in the traits he had borrowed from himself that Salome would be all the truer for being like him; or, at any rate, she would be finer, and more ideal. She said that it was nonsense, the way people regarded women as altogether different from men; she believed they were very much alike; a girl was as much the daughter of her father as of her mother; she alleged herself as proof of the fact that a girl was often a great deal more her father’s daughter, and she argued that if Maxwell made Salome quite in his own spiritual image, no one would dream of criticising her as unwomanly. Then he asked if he need only make Atland in her spiritual image to have him the manliest sort of fellow. She said that was not what she meant, and, in any case, a man could have feminine traits, and be all the nicer for them, but, if a woman had masculine traits, she would be disgusting. At the same time, if you drew a man from a woman, he would be ridiculous.
“Then you want me to model Atland on myself, too,” said Maxwell.
She thought a moment. “Yes, I do. If Salome is to be taken mostly from me, I couldn’t bear to have him like anybody but you. It would be indelicate.”
“Well, now, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to stand it,” said Maxwell. “I am going to make Atland like Pinney.”
But she would not be turned from the serious aspect of the affair by his joking. She asked, “Do you think it would intensify the situation if he were not equal to her? If the spectator could be made to see that she was throwing herself away on him, after all?”
“Wouldn’t that leave the spectator a little too inconsolable? You don’t want the love-business to double the tragedy, you want to have it relieved, don’t you?”
“Yes, that is true. You must make him worth all the sacrifice. I couldn’t stand it if he wasn’t.”
Maxwell frowned, as he always did when he became earnest, and said with a little sigh, “He must be passive, negative, as I said; you must simply feel that he is good, and that she will be safe with him, after the worst has happened to her father. And I must keep the interest of the love-business light, without letting it become farcical. I must get charm, all I can, into her character. You won’t mind my getting the charm all from you?”
“Oh, Brice, what sweet things you say to me! I wish everybody could know how divine you are.”
“The women would all be making love to me, and I should hate that. One is quite enough.”
“Am I quite enough?” she entreated.
“You have been up to the present time.”
“And do you think I shall always be?” She slid from her chair to her knees on the floor beside him, where he sat at his desk, and put her arms round him.
He did not seem to know it. “Look here, Louise, I have got to connect this love-business with the main action of the play, somehow. It won’t do simply to have it an episode. How would it do to have Atland know all the time that Haxard has killed Greenshaw, and be keeping it from Salome, while she is betraying her love for him?”
“Wouldn’t that be rather tawdry?” Louise let her arms slip down to her side, and looked up at him, as she knelt.
“Yes, it would,” he owned.
He looked very unhappy about it, and she rose to her feet, as if to give it more serious attention. “Brice, I want your play to be thoroughly honest and true from beginning to end, and not to have any sort of catchpenny effectivism in it. You have planned it so nobly that I can’t bear to have you lower the standard the least bit; and I think the honest and true way is to let the love-business be a pleasant fact in the case, as it might very well be. Those things do keep going on in life alongside of the greatest misery, the greatest unhappiness.”
“Well,” said Maxwell, “I guess you are right about the love-business. I’ll treat it frankly for what it is, a fact in the case. That will be the right way, and that will be the strong way. It will be like life. I don’t know that you are bound to relate things strictly to each other in art, any more than they are related in life. There are all sorts of incidents and interests playing round every great event that seem to have no more relation to it than the rings of Saturn have to Saturn. They form the atmosphere of it. If I can let Haxard’s wretchedness be seen at last through the atmosphere of his daughter’s happiness!”
“Yes,” she said, “that will be quite enough.” She knew that they had talked up to the moment when he could best begin to work, and now left him to himself.
Within a week he got the rehabilitated love-business in place, and the play ready to show to Godolphin again. He had managed to hold the actor off in the meantime, but now he returned in full force, with suggestions and misgivings which had first to be cleared away before he could give a clear mind to what Maxwell had done. Then Maxwell could see that he was somehow disappointed, for he began to talk as if there were no understanding between them for his taking the play. He praised it warmly, but he said that it would be hard to find a woman to do the part of Salome.
“That is the principal part in the piece now, you know,” he added.
“I don’t see how,” Maxwell protested. “It seems to me that her character throws Haxard’s into greater relief than before, and gives it more prominence.”
“You’ve made the love-business too strong, I think. I supposed you would have something light and graceful to occupy the house in the suspense between the points in Haxard’s case. If I were to do him, I should be afraid that people would come back from Salome to him with more or less of an effort, I don’t say they would, but that’s the way it strikes me now; perhaps some one else would look at it quite differently.”
“Then, as it is, you don’t want it?”
“I don’t say that. But it seems to me that Salome is the principal figure now. I think that’s a mistake.”
“If it’s a fact, it’s a mistake. I don’t want to have it so,” said Maxwell, and he made such effort as he could to swallow his disgust.
Godolphin asked, after a while, “In that last scene between her and her father, and in fact in all the scenes between them, couldn’t you give more of the strong speeches to him? She’s a great creation now, but isn’t she too great for Atland?”
“I’ve kept Atland under, purposely, because the part is necessarily a negative one, and because I didn’t want him to compete with Haxard at all.”
“Yes, that is all right; but as it is, she competes with Haxard.”
After Godolphin had gone, Louise came down, and found Maxwell in a dreary muse over his manuscript. He looked up at her with a lack-lustre eye, and said, “Godolphin is jealous of Salome now. What he really wants is a five-act monologue that will keep him on the stage all the time. He thinks that as it is, she will take all the attention from him.”
Louise appeared to reflect. “Well, isn’t there something in that?”
“Good heavens! I should think you were going to play Haxard, too!”
“No; but of course you can’t have two characters of equal importance in your play. Some one has to be first, and Godolphin doesn’t want an actress taking all the honors away from him.”
“Then why did you pretend to like the way I had done it,” Maxwell demanded, angrily, “if you think she will take the honors from him?”
“I didn’t say that I did. All that I want is that you should ask yourself whether she would or not.”
“Are you jealous of her?”
“Now, my dear, if you are going to be unreasonable, I will not talk with you.”
Nothing maddened Maxwell so much as to have his wife take this tone with him, when he had followed her up through the sinuosities that always began with her after a certain point. Short of that she was as frank and candid as a man, and he understood her, but beyond that the eternal womanly began, and he could make nothing of her. She evaded, and came and went, and returned upon her course, and all with as good a conscience, apparently, as if she were meeting him fairly and squarely on the question they started with. Sometimes he doubted if she really knew that she was behaving insincerely, or whether, if she knew it, she could help doing it. He believed her to be a more truthful nature than himself, and it was insufferable for her to be less so, and then accuse him of illogicality.
“I have no wish to talk,” he said, smothering his rage, and taking up a page of manuscript.
“Of course,” she went on, as if there had been no break in their good feeling, “I know what a goose Godolphin is, and I don’t wonder you’re vexed with him, but you know very well that I have nothing but the good of the play in view as a work of art, and I should say that if you couldn’t keep Salome from rivalling Haxard in the interest of the spectator, you had better go back to the idea of making two plays of it. I think that the ‘Second Chapter’ would be a very good thing to begin with.”
“Why, good heavens! you said just the contrary when we decided to drop it.”
“Yes, but that was when I thought you would be able to subdue Salome.”
“There never was any question of subduing Salome; it was a question of subduing Atland!”
“It’s the same thing; keeping the love-business in the background.”
“I give it up!” Maxwell flung down his manuscript in sign of doing so. “The whole thing is a mess, and you seem to delight in tormenting me about it. How am I to give the love-business charm, and yet keep it in the background?”
“I should think you could.”
“How?”
“Well, I was afraid you would give Salome too much prominence.”
“Didn’t you know whether I had done so or not? You knew what I had done before Godolphin came!”
“If Godolphin thinks she is too prominent, you ought to trust his instinct.”
Maxwell would not answer her. He went out, and she saw him strolling down the path to the rocks. She took the manuscript and began to read it over.
He did not come back, and when she was ready to go to supper she had to go down to the rocks for him. His angry fit seemed to have passed, but he looked abjectly sad, and her heart ached at sight of him. She said, cheerfully, “I have been reading that love-business over again, Brice, and I don’t find it so far out as I was afraid it was. Salome is a little too prononcée, but you can easily mend that. She is a delightful character, and you have given her charm — too much charm. I don’t believe there’s a truer woman in the whole range of the drama. She is perfect, and that is why I think you can afford to keep her back a little in the passages with Haxard. Of course, Godolphin wants to shine there. You needn’t give him her speeches, but you can put them somewhere else, in some of the scenes with Atland; it won’t make any difference how much she outshines him, poor fellow.”
He would not be entreated at once, but after letting her talk on to much the same effect for awhile, he said, “I will see what can be done with it. At present I am sick of the whole thing.”
“Yes, just drop it for the present,” she said. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t know it was time.”
She was very tender with him, walking up to the hotel, and all that evening she kept him amused, so that he would not want to look at his manuscript. She used him, as a wife is apt to use her husband when he is fretted and not very well, as if he were her little boy, and she did this so sweetly that Maxwell could not resent it.
The next morning she let him go to his play again, and work all the morning. He ended about noon, and told her he had done what she wanted done to the love-business, he thought, but he would not show it to her, for he said he was tired of it, and would have to go over it with Godolphin, at any rate, when he came in the afternoon. They went to the beach, but the person with the smouldering eyes failed to appear, and in fact they did not see her again at Magnolia, and they decided that she must have been passing a few days at one of the other hotels, and gone away.
Godolphin arrived in the sunniest good-humor, as if he had never had any thought of relinquishing the play, and he professed himself delighted with the changes Maxwell had made in the love-business. He said the character of Salome had the true proportion to all the rest now; and Maxwell understood that he would not be jealous of the actress who played the part, or feel her a dangerous rival in the public favor. He approved of the transposition of the speeches that Maxwell had made, or at least he no longer openly coveted them for Haxard.
What was more important to Maxwell was that Louise seemed finally contented with the part, too, and said that now, no matter what Godolphin wanted, she would never let it be touched again. “I am glad you have got that ‘impassioned’ rubbish out. I never thought that was in character with Salome.”
The artistic consciousness of Maxwell, which caught all the fine reluctances and all the delicate feminine preferences of his wife, was like a subtle web woven around him, and took everything, without his willing it, from within him as well as from without, and held it inexorably for future use. He knew the source of the impassioned rubbish which had displeased his wife; and he had felt while he was employing it that he was working in a commoner material than the rest of Salome’s character; but he had experimented with it in the hope that she might not notice it. The fact that she had instantly noticed it, and had generalized the dislike which she only betrayed at last, after she had punished him sufficiently, remained in the meshes of the net he wore about his mind, as something of value, which he could employ to exquisite effect if he could once find a scheme fit for it.
In the meantime it would be hard to say whether Godolphin continued more a sorrow or a joy to Maxwell, who was by no means always of the same mind about him. He told his wife sometimes, when she was pitying him, that it was a good discipline for him to work with such a man, for it taught him a great deal about himself, if it did not teach him much else. He said that it tamed his overweening pride to find that there was artistic ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed as to their true meaning, he saw how he could get a better effect out of it. He had an excellent intelligence, but this was employed so entirely in the study of impression that significance was often a secondary matter with him. He had not much humor, and Maxwell doubted if he felt it much in others, but he told a funny story admirably, and did character-stuff, as he called it, with the subtlest sense; he had begun in sketches of the variety type. Sometimes Maxwell thought him very well versed in the history and theory of the drama; but there were other times when his ignorance seemed almost creative in that direction. He had apparently no feeling for values; he would want a good effect used, without regard to the havoc it made of the whole picture, though doubtless if it could have been realized to him, he would have abhorred it as thoroughly as Maxwell himself. He would come over from Manchester one day with a notion for the play so bad that it almost made Maxwell shed tears; and the next with something so good that Maxwell marvelled at it; but Godolphin seemed to value the one no more than the other. He was a creature of moods the most extreme; his faith in Maxwell was as profound as his abysmal distrust of him; and his frank and open nature was full of suspicion. He was like a child in the simplicity of his selfishness, as far as his art was concerned, but in all matters aside from it he was chaotically generous. His formlessness was sometimes almost distracting; he presented himself to the author’s imagination as mere human material, waiting to be moulded in this shape or that. From day to day, from week to week, Maxwell lived in a superficial uncertainty whether Godolphin had really taken his play, or would ever produce it; yet at the bottom of his heart he confided in the promises which the actor lavished upon him in both the written and the spoken word. They had an agreement carefully drawn up as to all the business between them, but he knew that Godolphin would not be held by any clause of it that he wished to break; he did not believe that Godolphin understood what it bound him to, either when he signed it or afterward; but he was sure that he would do not only what was right, but what was noble, if he could be taken at the right moment. Upon the whole, he liked him; in a curious sort, he respected and honored him; and he defended him against Mrs. Maxwell when she said Godolphin was wearing her husband’s life out, and that if he made the play as greatly successful as “Hamlet,” or the “Trip to Chinatown,” he would not be worth what it cost them both in time and temper.
