The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell's play had so far
made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt justified in
taking the road with a combination of his own. He met the author at a
dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they were introduced with a
facile flourish of praise from the journalist who brought them together,
as the very men who were looking for each other, and who ought to be
able to give the American public a real American drama. The actor, who
believed he had an ideal of this drama, professed an immediate interest
in the kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying to do, and asked him
to come the next day, if he did not mind its being Sunday, and talk the
play over with him.
He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at about the hour people were
getting home from church, and he asked the author to join him. But
Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he hid his impatience of the
actor's politeness as well as he could, and began at the first moment
possible: "The idea of my play is biblical; we're still a very biblical
people." He had thought of the fact in seeing so many worshippers
swarming out of the churches.
"That is true," said the actor.
"It's the old idea of the wages of sin. I should like to call it that."
"The name has been used, hasn't it?"
"I shouldn't mind; for I want to get a new effect from the old notion,
and it would be all the stronger from familiar association with the
name. I want to show that the wages of sin is more sinning, which is the
very body of death."
"Well?"
"Well, I take a successful man at the acme of his success, and study him
in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in a
way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings;
and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable
sort--a material success that is gross and palpable. I have to use a
large canvas, as big as Shakespeare's, in fact, and I put in a great
many figures."
"That's right," said the actor. "You want to keep the stage full, with
people coming and going."
"There's a lot of coming and going, and a lot of incidents, to keep the
spectator interested, and on the lookout for what's to happen next. The
whole of the first act is working up to something that I've wanted to
see put on the stage for a good while, or ever since I've thought of
writing for the stage, and that is a large dinner, one of the public
kind."
"Capital!" said the actor.
"I've seen a good deal of that sort of thing as a reporter; you know
they put us at a table off to one side, and we see the whole thing, a
great deal better than the diners themselves do. It's a banquet, given
by a certain number of my man's friends, in honor of his fiftieth
birthday, and you see the men gathering in the hotel parlor--well, you
can imagine it in almost any hotel--and Haxard is in the foreground.
Haxard is the hero's name, you know."
"It's a good name," the actor mused aloud. "It has a strong sound."
"Do you like it? Well, Haxard," Maxwell continued, "is there in the
foreground, from the first moment the curtain rises, receiving his
friends, and shaking hands right and left, and joking and laughing with
everybody--a very small joke makes a very large laugh on occasions like
that, and I shall try to give some notion of the comparative size of the
joke and the laugh--and receiving congratulations, that give a notion of
what the dinner is for, and the kind of man he is, and how universally
respected and all that, till everybody has come; and then the doors
between the parlor and the dining-room are rolled back, and every man
goes out with his own wife, or his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt,
if he hasn't got a wife; I saw them do that once, at a big commercial
dinner I reported."
"Ah, I was afraid it was to be exclusively a man's dinner!" the actor
interrupted.
"Oh, no," Maxwell answered, with a shade of vexation. "That wouldn't do.
You couldn't have a scene, or, at least, not a whole act, without women.
Of course I understand that. Even if you could keep the attention of the
audience without them, through the importance of the intrigue, still you
would have to have them for the sake of the stage-picture. The drama is
literature that makes a double appeal; it appeals to the sense as well
as the intellect, and the stage is half the time merely a picture-frame.
I had to think that out pretty early."