July and August went by, and it was time for Godolphin to take the road
again. By this time Maxwell's play was in as perfect form as it could be
until it was tried upon the stage and then overhauled for repairs.
Godolphin had decided to try it first in Toronto, where he was going to
open, and then to give it in the West as often as he could. If it did as
well as he expected he would bring it on for a run in New York about the
middle of December. He would want Maxwell at the rehearsals there, but
for the present he said he preferred to stage-manage it himself; they
had talked it up so fully that he had all the author's intentions in
mind.
He came over from Manchester the day before his vacation ended to take
leave of the Maxwells. He was in great spirits with the play, but he
confessed to a misgiving in regard to the lady whom he had secured for
the part of Salome. He said there was only one woman he ever saw fit to
do that part, but when he named the actress the Maxwells had to say
they had never heard of her before. "She is a Southerner. She is very
well known in the West," Godolphin said.
Louise asked if she had ever played in Boston, and when he said she had
not, Louise said "Oh!"
Maxwell trembled, but Godolphin seemed to find nothing latent in his
wife's offensive tone, and after a little further talk they all parted
on the friendliest terms. The Maxwells did not hear from him for a
fortnight, though he was to have tried the play in Toronto at least a
week earlier. Then there came a telegram from Midland:
"_Tried play here last night. Went like wildfire.
Will write._
GODOLPHIN.
The message meant success, and the Maxwells walked the air. The
production of the piece was mentioned in the Associated Press despatches
to the Boston papers, and though Mrs. Maxwell studied these in vain for
some verbal corroboration of Godolphin's jubilant message, she did not
lose faith in it, nor allow her husband to do so. In fact, while they
waited for Godolphin's promised letter, they made use of their leisure
to count the chickens which had begun to hatch. The actor had agreed to
pay the author at the rate of five dollars an act for each performance
of the play, and as it was five acts long a simple feat of arithmetic
showed that the nightly gain from it would be twenty-five dollars, and
that if it ran every night and two afternoons, for matinées, the weekly
return from it would be two hundred dollars. Besides this, Godolphin had
once said, in a moment of high content with the piece, that if it went
as he expected it to go he would pay Maxwell over and above this
twenty-five dollars a performance five per cent. of the net receipts
whenever these passed one thousand dollars. His promise had not been put
in writing, and Maxwell had said at the time that he should be satisfied
with his five dollars an act, but he had told his wife of it, and they
had both agreed that Godolphin would keep it. They now took it into the
account in summing up their gains, and Mrs. Maxwell thought it
reasonable to figure at least twenty-five dollars more from it for each
time the play was given; but as this brought the weekly sum up to four
hundred dollars, she so far yielded to her husband as to scale the total
at three hundred dollars, though she said it was absurd to put it at any
such figure. She refused, at any rate, to estimate their earnings from
the season at less than fifteen thousand dollars. It was useless for
Maxwell to urge that Godolphin had other pieces in his repertory,
things that had made his reputation, and that he would naturally want to
give sometimes. She asked him whether Godolphin himself had not
voluntarily said that if the piece went as he expected he would play
nothing else as long as he lived, like Jefferson with Rip Van Winkle;
and here, she said, it had already, by his own showing, gone at once
like wildfire. When Maxwell pleaded that they did not know what wildfire
meant she declared that it meant an overwhelming house and unbridled
rapture in the audience; it meant an instant and lasting triumph for the
play. She began to praise Godolphin, or, at least, to own herself
mistaken in some of her decrials of him. She could not be kept from
bubbling over to two or three ladies at the hotel, where it was quickly
known what an immense success the first performance of Maxwell's play
had been. He was put to shame by several asking him when they were to
have it in Boston, but his wife had no embarrassment in answering that
it would probably be kept the whole winter in New York, and not come to
Boston till some time in the early spring.
She was resolved, now, that he should drive over to Beverly Farms with
her, and tell her father and mother about the success of the play. She
had instantly telegraphed them on getting Godolphin's despatch, and she
began to call out to her father as soon as she got inside the house, and
saw him coming down the stairs in the hall, "_Now_, what do you say,
papa? Isn't it glorious? Didn't I tell you it would be the greatest
success? Did you ever hear anything like it? Where's mamma? If she
shouldn't be at home, I don't know what I shall do!"
"She's here," said her father, arriving at the foot of the stairs, where
Louise embraced him, and then let him shake hands with her husband.
"She's dressing. We were just going over to see you."
"Well, you've been pretty deliberate about it! Here it's after lunch,
and I telegraphed you at ten o'clock." She went on to bully her father
more and more, and to flourish Maxwell's triumph in his face. "We're
going to have three hundred dollars a week from it at the very least,
and fifteen thousand dollars for the season. What do you think of that?
Isn't that pretty good, for two people that had nothing in the world
yesterday? What do you say _now_, papa?"
There were all sorts of lurking taunts, demands, reproaches, in these
words, which both the men felt, but they smiled across her, and made as
if they were superior to her simple exultation.
"I should say you had written the play yourself, Louise," said her
father.
"No," answered her husband, "Godolphin wrote the play; or I've no doubt
he's telling the reporters so by this time."
Louise would not mind them. "Well, I don't care! I want papa to
acknowledge that I was right, for once. Anybody could believe in Brice's
genius, but I believed in his star, and I always knew that he would get
on, and I was all for his giving up his newspaper work, and devoting
himself to the drama; and now the way is open to him, and all he has got
to do is to keep on writing."
"Come now, Louise," said her husband.
"Well," her father interposed, "I'm glad of your luck, Maxwell. It isn't
in my line, exactly, but I don't believe I could be any happier, if it
were. After all, it's doing something to elevate the stage. I wish
someone would take hold of the pulpit."
Maxwell shrugged. "I'm not strong enough for that, quite. And I can't
say that I had any conscious intention to elevate the stage with my
play."
"But you had it unconsciously, Brice," said Louise, "and it can't help
having a good effect on life, too."
"It will teach people to be careful how they murder people," Maxwell
assented.
"Well, it's a great chance," said Hilary, with the will to steer a
middle course between Maxwell's modesty and Louise's overweening pride.
"There really isn't anything that people talk about more. They discuss
plays as they used to discuss sermons. If you've done a good play,
you've done a good thing."
His wife hastened to make answer for him. "He's done a _great_ play, and
there are no ifs or ans about it." She went on to celebrate Maxwell's
achievement till he was quite out of countenance, for he knew that she
was doing it mainly to rub his greatness into her father, and he had so
much of the old grudge left that he would not suffer himself to care
whether Hilary thought him great or not. It was a relief when Mrs.
Hilary came in. Louise became less defiant in her joy then, or else the
effect of it was lost in Mrs. Hilary's assumption of an entire
expectedness in the event. Her world was indeed so remote from the world
of art that she could value success in it only as it related itself to
her family, and it seemed altogether natural to her that her daughter's
husband should take its honors. She was by no means a stupid woman; for
a woman born and married to wealth, with all the advantages that go
with it, she was uncommonly intelligent; but she could not help looking
upon æsthetic honors of any sort as in questionable taste. She would
have preferred position in a son-in-law to any distinction appreciable
to the general, but wanting that it was fit he should be distinguished
in the way he chose. In her feeling it went far to redeem the drama that
it should be related to the Hilarys by marriage, and if she had put her
feeling into words, which always oversay the feelings, they would have
been to the effect that the drama had behaved very well indeed, and
deserved praise. This is what Mrs. Hilary's instinct would have said,
but, of course, her reason would have said something quite different,
and it was her reason that spoke to Maxwell, and expressed a pleasure in
his success that was very gratifying to him. He got on with her better
than with Hilary, partly because she was a woman and he was a man, and
partly because, though she had opposed his marriage with Louise more
steadily than her husband, there had been no open offence between them.
He did not easily forgive a hurt to his pride, and Hilary, with all his
good will since, and his quick repentance at the time, had never made it
quite right with Maxwell for treating him rudely once, when he came to
him so helplessly in the line of his newspaper work. They were always
civil to each other, and they would always be what is called good
friends; they had even an air of mutual understanding, as regarded
Louise and her exuberances. Still, she was so like her father in these,
and so unlike her mother, that it is probable the understanding between
Hilary and Maxwell concerning her was only the understanding of men, and
that Maxwell was really more in sympathy with Mrs. Hilary, even about
Louise, even about the world. He might have liked it as much as she, if
he had been as much of it, and he thought so well of it as a world that
he meant to conquer one of the chief places in it. In the meantime he
would have been very willing to revenge himself upon it, to satirize it,
to hurt it, to humble it--but for his own pleasure, not the world's
good.
Hilary wanted the young people to stay the afternoon, and have dinner,
but his wife perceived that they wished to be left alone in their
exultation, and she would not let him keep them beyond a decent moment,
or share too much in their joy. With only that telegram from Godolphin
they could not be definite about anything but their future, which
Louise, at least, beheld all rose color. Just what size or shape their
good fortune had already taken they did not know, and could not, till
they got the letter Godolphin had promised, and she was in haste to go
back to Magnolia for that, though it could not arrive before the next
morning at the earliest. She urged that he might have written before
telegraphing, or when he came from the theatre after the play was given.
She was not satisfied with the reception of her news, and she said so to
Maxwell, as soon as they started home.
"What did you want?" he retorted, in a certain vexation. "They were as
cordial as they could be."
"Cordial is not enough. You can't expect anything like uproar from
mamma, but she took it too much as a matter of course, and I _did_
suppose papa would be a little more riotous."
"If you are going to be as exacting as that with people," Maxwell
returned, "you are going to disappoint yourself frightfully; and if you
insist, you will make them hate you. People can't share your happiness
any more than they can share your misery; it's as much as they can do to
manage their own."
"But I did think my own father and mother might have entered into it a
little more," she grieved. "Well, you are right, Brice, and I will try
to hold in after this. It wasn't for myself I cared."
"I know," said Maxwell, so appreciatively that she felt all her loss
made up to her, and shrunk closer to him in the buggy he was driving
with a lax, absent-minded rein. "But I think a little less Fourth of
July on my account would be better."
"Yes, you are wise, and I shall not say another word about it to
anybody; just treat it as a common every-day event."
He laughed at what was so far from her possibilities, and began to tell
her of the scheme for still another play that had occurred to him while
they were talking with her father. She was interested in the scheme, but
more interested in the involuntary workings of his genius, and she
celebrated that till he had to beg her to stop, for she made him ashamed
of himself even in the solitude of the woodland stretches they were
passing through. Then he said, as if it were part of the same strain of
thought, "You have to lose a lot of things in writing a play. Now, for
instance, that beautiful green light there in the woods." He pointed to
a depth of the boscage where it had almost an emerald quality, it was so
vivid, so intense. "If I were writing a story about two lovers in such a
light, and how it bathed their figures and illumined their faces, I
could make the reader feel it just as I did. I could make them see it.
But if I were putting them in a play, I should have to trust the
carpenter and the scene-painter for the effect; and you know what broken
reeds they are."
"Yes," she sighed, "and some day I hope you will write novels. But now
you've made such a success with this play that you must do some others,
and when you've got two or three going steadily you can afford to take
up a novel. It would be wicked to turn your back on the opportunity
you've won."
He silently assented and said, "I shall be all the the better novelist
for waiting a year or two."