1
ON the occasion of the opening bill of the Artists’ Theatre, a young man
who had just joined the staff of the Chronicle was delegated to attend
and criticize the performance; what he said in praise or blame would not
matter either way.... The play came off very well, was generously
applauded, and there was an excited little supper afterward at which
Felix and Rose-Ann and Clive and Phyllis and the cast of “The Dryad”
drank a good deal of wine, and many compliments were bandied back and
forth. And that, Felix thought, was the end of the matter.
But it seemed not. Of course, the young man who criticized the play for
the Chronicle had to make a fool of himself and Felix by hailing him as
“our new Barrie”; but that did not do any real harm. Most of the critics
were sensible, and treated the event with casual indifference. But old
Jennison, the “dean of the fraternity,” had gone the second night, and
given the play a most astonishing commendation, well-calculated to turn
any young playwright’s head—besides remarking privately to Felix on the
street that he was wasting his time fooling with amateurs—why didn’t he
aim for Broadway, he had the stuff in him, and so forth.... And the bill
was going so well, on account, it was said, of Felix’s play, that the
original run of two weeks had been extended to three.
Success? So his friends called it lightly, and though he made an effort
to see it in its true perspective, Felix felt a glow of elation. Perhaps
he had really shown that he could do something!
In this frame of mind, on the final night of the bill, which had managed
to eke out a four weeks’ run, he went to another little supper party,
with Rose-Ann, Clive and Phyllis, and the players, and heard—with
somewhat less sense of being “guyed”—their extravagant praises....
Besides, he knew something that they did not know—not even, as yet,
Rose-Ann: an actor-manager-playwright from New York, who happened to be
in town, had seen “The Dryad,” liked it, and said that it could be made
into a successful three-act play—had, in fact, offered to collaborate
with him upon it! That sounded like the real thing. Perhaps these
praises were not the absurdities they seemed....
That evening Clive was in a difficult mood; he and Phyllis had been
tormenting each other of late to the point of exacerbation. Clive’s
ironies lacked tonight the quality, whatever it was, that made them
agreeable. He managed by some satirical remark to offend Miss Macklin,
to whom he had been paying special attentions. He commenced to drink
recklessly. Phyllis refused contemptuously to speak to him. And then
suddenly he disappeared.
Phyllis came home with Felix and Rose-Ann. At the studio they made
coffee, and talked about the ball and their costumes. At last Felix told
them about the actor-manager and his offer.
“Well,” Phyllis asked, “how does it feel to have everything you want?”
“It feels,” Felix said, “unreal—disturbing. It can’t be true. Do you
remember the story of Polycrates?”
“No,” said Phyllis.
“Herodotus tells about it—and I was thinking about it only today, and I
made up a little rhyme about it. I’ll tell you the story....”
2
Phyllis, sitting on the floor, with her coffee beside her, was looking
up at him with eager eyes, eyes full of pride greater even than
Rose-Ann’s. Rose-Ann was a realist. She knew all this did not amount to
so much. This story was addressed to Phyllis. Rose-Ann, reclining on the
settle, seemed a little outside the circle of its intention, someone
accidentally looking on.
“He was a Persian king—very rich, very powerful, very happy. And there
came to visit him a Greek philosopher. The Persian king asked him, ‘What
is the use of philosophy?’ And the Greek philosopher answered. ‘It
serves to reconcile us to the unhappiness of our lot.’ ‘Then what use is
it to me?’ the king asked. ‘I am not unhappy. I am the happiest of
mortals.’ ‘Yes,’ said the philosopher, ‘you are too happy. You had
better beware!’ ‘Of What?’ asked the king. ‘Of the jealousy of the
gods,’ said the philosopher.
“That sounded reasonable enough to the king. He had nothing to fear from
men; but the gods—they might well be jealous of him. ‘What shall I do to
appease their wrath?’ he asked.
“Take the most precious thing you own, and throw it into the sea!” was
the advice of the philosopher.
“Now the king had a certain ring, which at the beginning of his reign he
had taken from the hand of a conquered monarch, and which he had always
cherished as the symbol of his victorious career. It seemed to him the
most precious of all his possessions, and so he went and threw it into
the sea.
“But the next evening as the king and the philosopher sat down to
dinner, the cook came running in with the ring, which he had that moment
found in the entrails of a fish which was going to be the king’s dinner.
The king took it with great satisfaction, saying, ‘The gods have given
me back my ring.’
“But the philosopher turned pale, and said, ‘The gods have rejected your
gift,’ and immediately went home, fearing to be in that kingdom when the
wrath of the gods descended upon it.
“And when he had returned to Greece, he heard that the king’s enemies
had descended upon the kingdom and overthrown it, and sacked the palace,
and carried away the king’s wives, and built a great pyre of the palace
furnishings and set the king on top of it on his golden throne, to be
burnt....
“The story ends happily after all, in Herodotus. But it was a narrow
squeak, and the gods only relented at the last minute, by softening the
hearts of his conquerors and sending a rain to put out the fire. But the
gods are capricious—and perhaps the next time they wouldn’t change their
minds.”
“And the rhyme you made up about it?” Phyllis asked.
“Well, it points the moral of the tale:
“_When there is nothing left to wish,
And Earth’s too much like Heaven,
Throw away some lovely gift
Of all the gods have given!_
“_Too happy, like that king of old
Who gave the sea his ring—
Find out if there’s in store for you
The fate of that old king!_”
Rose-Ann sat up and smiled at him. “But Felix,” she said, “you’ve got it
all wrong! You don’t understand the moral of that old fable at all!”
“No?”
“No!” said Rose-Ann. “The gods were angry at that old king because he
didn’t appreciate what they had done for him.... It was because he threw
away some of the loveliness that they had given him, that they punished
him. He was a coward—and the gods don’t like cowards!”
“No?” ... Felix was realizing now consciously what he had meant by the
story. Those evenings in his work-room, with the door open between him
and Phyllis, and Phyllis come in to sit on the floor beside him in some
interval of his work—intervals that grew longer and longer—all the
sweetness of that friendship, so much more than friendship that it was
almost like love ... it was this that he was going to throw away. He was
going to give up his room, and get another, or return to the studio to
work. It was this intention that he had unconsciously in mind when he
wrote—
“_Throw away some lovely gift
Of all the gods have given!_”
“No, Felix,” Rose-Ann was saying, “there’s no use being afraid of good
fortune. When the gods give us beauty, we must take it—not run away from
it.”
“So!...” he said. “I’m afraid the Greeks thought differently.”
“They were so much less Greek, then,” said Rose-Ann.
3
“It’s late,” said Phyllis. “I must go home. Will you take me, Felix?”
He put on his hat and went out with her silently.
They walked along the empty streets without a word until they reached
the door of the house in which she lived. Then she lifted her face up to
him, and said,
“You know that I love you, Felix.”
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