"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.
They lost a good deal of time and temper with the play, which was almost
a conjugal affair with them, and the struggle to keep up a show of gay
leisure before the summering world up and down the coast told upon Mrs.
Maxwell's nerves. She did not mind the people in the hotel so much; they
were very nice, but she did not know many of them, and she could not
care for them as she did for her friends who came up from Beverly Farms
and over from Manchester. She hated to call Maxwell from his work at
such times, not only because she pitied him, but because he came to help
her receive her friends with such an air of gloomy absence and open
reluctance; and she had hated still worse to say he was busy with his
play, the play he was writing for Mr. Godolphin. Her friends were
apparently unable to imagine anyone writing a play so seriously, and
they were unable to imagine Mr. Godolphin at all, for they had never
heard of him; the splendor of his unknown name took them more than
anything else. As for getting Maxwell to return their visits with her,
when men had come with the ladies who called upon her, she could only
manage it if he was so fagged with working at his play that he was too
weak to resist her will, and even then he had to be torn from it almost
by main force. He behaved so badly in the discharge of some of these
duties to society, and was, to her eye at least, so bored and worried by
them that she found it hard to forgive him, and made him suffer for it
on the way home till she relented at the sight of his thin face, the
face that she loved, that she had thought the world well lost for. After
the third or fourth time she made him go with her she gave it up and
went alone, though she was aware that it might look as if they were not
on good terms. She only obliged him after that to go with her to her
father's, where she would not allow any shadow of suspicion to fall upon
their happiness, and where his absent-mindedness would be accounted for.
Her mother seemed to understand it better than her father, who, she
could see, sometimes inwardly resented it as neglect. She also exacted
of Maxwell that he should not sit silent through a whole meal at the
hotel, and that, if he did not or could not talk, he should keep looking
at her, and smiling and nodding, now and then. If he would remember to
do this she would do all the talking herself. Sometimes he did not
remember, and then she trod on his foot in vain.
The droll side of the case often presented itself for her relief, and,
after all, she knew beforehand that this was the manner of man she was
marrying, and she was glad to marry him. She was happier than she had
ever dreamed of being. She was one of those women who live so largely in
their sympathies that if these were employed she had no thought of
herself, and not to have any thought of one's self is to be blessed.
Maxwell had no thought of anything but his work, and that made his
bliss; if she could have no thought but of him in his work, she could
feel herself in Heaven with him.