1
FELIX, having torn up all his previous attempts, was again at work upon
a play. It seemed clear to him now that plays were not written to please
the author: they were written to please the public.
There was plenty of time to work, now. They were seeing hardly anybody
that summer. Clive came occasionally, and they spent a few week-ends at
his place in Woods Point. They did not see Phyllis, for she was still at
the normal school, having heroically decided to shorten the term of her
training by taking the summer course. Dorothy Sheridan came once or
twice to their studio before leaving to spend the summer in some eastern
fishing village where things were very “paintable.” Howard Morgan had
dropped in one evening to smoke a cigarette with them. They had made the
acquaintance of a taciturn etcher in the studio next door, and of an
unhappily married boy-painter who lived around the corner and who used
sometimes to take refuge from domestic infelicities in a cup of their
coffee....
It seemed to Felix that in these idle summer months, with life flowing
lazily past in the sunshine, he should be able to accomplish something
in play-writing. Certainly there was nothing else to distract or excite
him.
He went about his task soberly and conscientiously this time. He
undertook to learn how plays were written. He read books on
“play-construction.” He even, conquering his instinctive distaste,
studied the methods of Pinero and H. A. Jones. Their plays bored him
ineffably—they seemed trite, false, vulgar and dull. But the public had
liked them, and doubtless they had something to teach him.
“Why don’t you write what you want to, in your own way?” Rose-Ann would
ask impatiently.
But he did not want to write “in his own way.” The things he had written
to suit himself that spring, the fantastic dramatic fragments which he
had torn up in disgust, were too utterly freakish, too whimsical and
absurd. He wanted to prove that he could write something else—something
that was not so damnably “different.” He wanted to write a regular
three-act play, of the sort that audiences liked, and he was going to
learn to do it if it took five years.... It had taken Hawkins five years
to get to a point where he could impress a manager—Hawkins, lending him
a book on play—construction, had confessed as much.... And Hawkins was
now on the verge of a brilliant success. He had gone to New York to
collaborate with the manager on a few final changes.
It was slow going, this way; but Felix was not discouraged. It seemed
good to struggle at an uncongenial task. Eventually he would conquer its
difficulties. He might continue to “get by” with freakish criticism; but
he was going to be a writer of plays that ordinary people could
recognize as plays. It was not his business to please himself; Bernard
Shaw might do that—but he, Felix, was not Bernard Shaw; it was his
business to adapt himself to the realities of current play-writing....
He told all this to Rose-Ann, who listened in hostile silence.
Rose-Ann had changed, become less poignantly restless. She seemed to
have discovered a new way of occupying herself—or rediscovered an old
way, long since abandoned. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used
to read books all the time. I found them so much more satisfying than
actual life. And then I stopped reading, and tried to live. I’ve hardly
read anything since I came to Chicago.... So there’s lots of things I
want to read.”
She read, day after day, from the time Felix rose from their breakfast
of grapefruit and coffee and cigarettes, till afternoon, lying curled up
among the pillows of the window seat; she went out for luncheon
somewhere alone, and sat in the Park all afternoon or wandered through
the Museum whose crumbling stucco porticos of nobly antique pattern
looked themselves like relics of some departed race; taking with her a
book, which she seldom opened, but which served for companionship—and a
notebook, in which she wrote sentences and paragraphs which Felix found
she would rather he did not read. “They seem just to belong to me,” she
said, shyly.
She had retired into some inner chamber of her self, to think and dream;
and the books, the walks, the wanderings among fragments of dead
antiquity, the solitude, were all a part of this dream life.... The
books which she read, a chapter or two at a time, putting one aside to
take up another, were such as took the mind into strange worlds, like
“Thais” and “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”; or those which told the
adventures of a soul in contact with a new world which it finds strange
and perilous, like “The Damnation of Theron Ware” and “The Red and the
Black.” Or books of anthropology and of poetry, those two ideal guides
of the stay-at-home traveller in quest of strangeness. So much Felix
curiously noted, and reflected that he had been at home in those strange
worlds all his life and was now trying a greater adventure—the discovery
of the familiar and commonplace world in which he actually lived....
When Felix left the office, having hastily written “something light” for
the editorial page, or furbished up a few paragraphs for the dramatic
column, he would come home to the studio and work fiercely and painfully
for two or three hours.
“But, Felix, you work too _hard_!” Rose-Ann had said to him. “That isn’t
the way to work!” Whatever the way to work might be, he had not yet
found it; but at least he could try.... And late in the afternoon,
throwing down his pen with a sense of duty done, he would go to the
Park, and find Rose-Ann waiting for him on a bench, with book and
notebook in her lap. They would find some cool place to dine, and then
walk for hours along the shore of the lake, talking.
Yes, Rose-Ann had changed, become less fiery and impatient, more calm.
And coming at this hour out of that inner chamber of self in which she
spent her days, she brought to him quaint and lovely thoughts, delicate
and ironic fancies, things that charmed and allured his imagination.
Sometimes she talked of the books she had been reading, and enriched
their stories as she told them with a beauty that came from her own
mind.
She told him one day the story of a “girl-goldsmith,” a figure that
seemed to have captured her imagination, in a book called “Klaus Hinrich
Bass,” by a German clergyman named Frenssen—a startling story to be
written by a clergyman, Felix thought; but, reflecting upon Rose-Ann’s
father, he remembered that he knew very little about clergymen after
all. It was the story of a girl who believed in the truth and goodness
of her instincts; Rose-Ann told it with such zest and poetic feeling
that he read it one afternoon, when she was away in the Park, for
himself; and he found that she had re-created it in her own imagination,
giving to Frenssen’s idyl of sweet and fearless love some motives and
meanings which it did not seem to him to possess as he read it in the
pages of the book; it was as if Rose-Ann knew some things about that
girl-goldsmith which Frenssen himself had not guessed.... And sometimes,
when Rose-Ann told some story she had read, and Felix asked her whose it
was, she pretended to have forgotten—and he wondered if it were not her
own. But he feared to demand the truth, lest the shy beginnings of
creative effort be frightened by his questioning.
It was strange sometimes to feel that she was entering the world of
dreams just as he was leaving it.
One hot July evening, when he wanted to work on his play, she insisted
on his coming outdoors with her. “You don’t want to work,” she said.
“You know it!”
“Isn’t that a good reason for working, perhaps?” he said. He had that
day had a note from Hawkins in New York, and Hawkins’s patient plodding
and prospective success were making him feel ashamed of his own
laziness.
She showed a touch of her old impatience. “Has it come to this!” she
said. “Felix, do you really think the way to be an artist is to do all
the things you don’t want to do? I wonder if you take our marriage in
the same spirit! Am I a duty, too?”
“Ridiculous child!” he said, and went out with her.
“We’re going to take a ride on the lagoon,” she said, and led him to the
landing place, where a little launch presently chugged up and discharged
its dozen passengers. Felix and Rose-Ann clambered in, and sat in the
bow. The other waiting people followed them, and the boat started slowly
out into the mysterious islanded waters, stabbing with its searchlight
into the warm thick darkness and revealing with that unearthly light,
here and there, some place of trees bending to dip their boughs into the
water—the edge of one of the islands around and past which they steered
slowly, turning and winding about until they seemed to be exploring a
vast islanded wilderness. The breeze stirred faintly the hair of their
bared heads. The others of the party appeared to be lovers happily
entranced with love and with the mysterious beauty of this realm which
it seemed could hardly exist in the confines of a mere park. No one
spoke, except in whispers.
“Life ought to be like this,” whispered Rose-Ann, taking his hand. “Not
arranged and planned!”
A little later, she whispered fiercely: “Felix, are you thinking of that
damned play? Then stop it!”
It was true. Felix had been thinking of his play. He became annoyed with
her. She wanted him to write plays, to be a personage—and now, when he
tried....
As if in reply to his thought, she bent and said in his ear, “Felix, if
you write a conventional play like Hawkins’s, and make a success of it,
I shall leave you!”
He was inwardly dismayed.
“I wonder—” said Rose-Ann aloud, and then stopped, as if startled at
hearing her voice.
“Yes?” said Felix.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you afterward.”
And afterward, in a café where they had stopped for a cool drink before
going home to bed, she told him that she did not want him to be
successful—that she meant it quite seriously.
“It would spoil everything,” she said.
“Never fear, I shan’t be so successful as that,” he said glumly.
“But that’s just what I’m afraid of—that you will!” she said. “I looked
at your scenario the other day when you were at the office; and
it’s—well, I’ve seen that play a hundred times; it’s what they call
sure-fire stuff.”
She said this reproachfully, but Felix was elated. That was exactly what
he had been trying to make it. “Do you really think so!” he asked.
“I do,” she said. “And I know that if you keep on long enough, you’ll
succeed. But I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Felix, that play isn’t true—not as we see truth. It makes
people behave as people think they ought to—not as we know they feel.
You deal in conventional emotions entirely. The only interesting person
in the play is the wicked woman—and you know she isn’t wicked at all,
Felix, you only pretend to think so to please your audience.”
“You mean the woman who tries to take the other woman’s husband away
from her? Oh, I know—it’s stupid stuff, but—”
“Well, then, why do you do it? If you want to write about a girl who’s
in love with another woman’s husband, why don’t you do it honestly? You
and I don’t believe in those silly old notions. Why pretend that you
think she is wicked? Just to make money? I’d rather we starved than have
you write plays like that.”
It was at once an immense relief to be told that he need not try any
longer to write that stupid play, and a profound humiliation to be
scolded by his wife. He did not know whether to be angry or ashamed. His
eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the table and laid his
hand in hers in silence.
“What was it you were going to tell me there in the Park,” he said after
a while.
“I was thinking about ‘duty,’” she said. “Your attitude toward life
reminds me of a little story I read the other day—I think it was in
Anatole France ... a curious little story.... If you want to hear it?”
“Yes, tell me.”
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