Louise sent Maxwell down to Mrs. Harley's apartment to thank her, and
tell her how slight the accident was; and while he was gone she
abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from
blood-poisoning, and her husband's early marriage with the actress, who
then appeared in all his plays, though they were not happy together. Her
own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy
out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came
back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so
as to give the woman a notion that he was not suffered to stay longer.
He explained that he had found her gloved and bonneted to go out, and
that he had not stayed for fear of keeping her. She had introduced him
to her mother, who was civil about Louise's accident, and they had both
begged him to let them do anything they could for her. He made his
observations, and when Louise, after a moment, asked him about them, he
said they affected him as severally typifying the Old South and the New
South. They had a photograph over the mantel, thrown up large, of an
officer in Confederate uniform. Otherwise the room had nothing personal
in it; he suspected the apartment of having been taken furnished, like
their own. Louise asked if he should say they were ladies, and he
answered that he thought they were.
"Of course," she said, and she added, with a wide sweep of censure:
"They get engaged to four or five men at a time, down there. Well," she
sighed, "you mustn't stay in here with me, dear. Go to your writing."
"I was thinking whether you couldn't come out and lie on the lounge. I
hate to leave you alone in here."
"No, the doctor said to be perfectly quiet. Perhaps I can, to-morrow, if
it doesn't swell up any worse."
She kept her hold of his hand, which he had laid in hers, and he sat
down beside the bed, in the chair he had left there. He did not speak,
and after a while she asked, "What are you thinking of?"
"Oh, nothing. The confounded play, I suppose."
"You're disappointed at Grayson's not taking it."
"One is always a fool."
"Yes," said Louise, with a catching of the breath. She gripped his hand
hard, and said, as well as she could in keeping back the tears, "Well, I
will never stand in your way, Brice. You may do
anything--_anything_--with it that you think best."
"I shall never do anything you don't like," he answered, and he leaned
over and kissed her, and at this her passion burst in a violent sobbing,
and when she could speak she made him solemnly promise that he would not
regard her in the least, but would do whatever was wisest and best with
the play, for otherwise she should never be happy again.
As she could not come out to join him at dinner, he brought a little
table to the bedside, and put his plate on it, and ate his dinner there
with her. She gave him some attractive morsels off her own plate, which
he had first insisted on bestowing upon her. They had such a gay evening
that the future brightened again, and they arranged for Maxwell to take
his play down-town the next day, and not lose a moment in trying to
place it with some manager.
It all left him very wakeful, for his head began to work upon this
scheme and that. When he went to lock the outer door for the night, the
sight of his overcoat hanging in the hall made him think of a
theatrical newspaper he had bought coming home, at a certain corner of
Broadway, where numbers of smooth-shaven, handsome men, and women with
dark eyes and champagned hair were lounging and passing. He had got it
on the desperate chance that it might suggest something useful to him.
He now took it out of his coat-pocket, and began to look its
advertisements over in the light of his study lamp, partly because he
was curious about it, and partly because he knew that he should begin to
revise his play otherwise, and then he should not sleep all night.
In several pages of the paper ladies with flowery and alliterative names
and pseudonyms proclaimed themselves in large letters, and in smaller
type the parts they were presently playing in different combinations;
others gave addresses and announced that they were At Liberty, or
specified the kinds of rôles they were accustomed to fill, as Leads or
Heavies, Dancing Soubrettes and Boys; Leads, Emotional and Juvenile;
Heavy or Juvenile or Emotional Leads. There were gentlemen seeking
engagements who were Artistic Whistling Soloists, Magicians, Leading
Men, Leading Heavies, Singing and Dancing Comedians, and there were both
ladies and gentlemen who were now Starring in this play or that, but
were open to offers later. A teacher of stage dancing promised
instruction in skirt and serpentine dancing, as well as high kicking,
front and back, the backward bend, side practice, toe-practice, and all
novelties. Dramatic authors had their cards among the rest, and one poor
fellow, as if he had not the heart to name himself, advertised a play to
be heard of at the office of the newspaper. Whatever related to the
theatre was there, in bizarre solidarity, which was droll enough to
Maxwell in one way. But he hated to be mixed up with all that, and he
perceived that he must be mixed up with it more and more, if he wrote
for the theatre. Whether he liked it or not, he was part of the thing
which in its entirety meant high-kicking and toe-practice, as well as
the expression of the most mystical passions of the heart. There was an
austerity in him which the fact offended, and he did what he could to
appease this austerity by reflecting that it was the drama and never the
theatre that he loved; but for the time this was useless. He saw that if
he wrote dramas he could not hold aloof from the theatre, nor from
actors and actresses--heavies and juveniles, and emotionals and
soubrettes. He must know them, and more intimately; and at first he must
be subject to them, however he mastered them at last; he must flatter
their oddities and indulge their caprices. His experience with
Godolphin had taught him that, and his experience with Godolphin in the
construction of his play could be nothing to what he must undergo at
rehearsals and in the effort to adapt his work to a company. He reminded
himself that Shakespeare even must have undergone all that. But this did
not console him. He was himself, and what another, the greatest, had
suffered would not save him. Besides, it was not the drama merely that
Maxwell loved; it was not making plays alone; it was causing the life
that he had known to speak from the stage, and to teach there its
serious and important lesson. In the last analysis he was a moralist,
and more a moralist than he imagined. To enforce, in the vividest and
most palpable form, what he had thought true, it might be worth while to
endure all the trials that he must; but at that moment he did not think
so; and he did not dare submit his misgiving to his wife.
They had now been six months married, and if he had allowed himself to
face the fact he must have owned that, though they loved each other so
truly, and he had known moments of exquisite, of incredible rapture, he
had been as little happy as in any half-year he had lived. He never
formulated his wife's character, or defined the precise relation she
bore to his life; if he could have been challenged to do so, he would
have said that she was the whole of life to him, and that she was the
most delightful woman in the world.
He tasted to its last sweetness the love of loving her and of being
loved by her. At the same time there was an obscure stress upon him
which he did not trace to her at once; a trouble in his thoughts which,
if he could have seen it clearly, he would have recognized for a lurking
anxiety concerning how she would take the events of their life as they
came. Without realizing it, for his mind was mostly on his work, and it
was only in some dim recess of his spirit that the struggle took place,
he was perpetually striving to adjust himself to the unexpected, or
rather the unpredictable.
But when he was most afraid of her harassing uncertainty of emotion or
action he was aware of her fixed loyalty to him; and perhaps it was the
final effect with himself that he dreaded. Should he always be able to
bear and forbear, as he felt she would, with all her variableness and
turning? The question did not put itself in words, and neither did his
conviction that his relation to the theatre was doubled in difficulty
through her. But he perceived that she had no love for the drama, and
only a love for his love of it; and sometimes he vaguely suspected that
if he had been in business she would have been as fond of business as
she was of the drama. He never perhaps comprehended her ideal, and how
it could include an explicit and somewhat noisy devotion to the aims of
his ambition, because it was his, and a patronizing reservation in
regard to the ambition itself. But this was quite possible with Louise,
just as it was possible for her to have had a humble personal joy in
giving herself to him, while she had a distinct social sense of the
sacrifice she had made in marrying him. In herself she looked up to him;
as her father's and mother's daughter, as the child of her circumstance,
there is no doubt she looked down upon him. But neither of these
attitudes held in their common life. Love may or may not level ranks,
but marriage unquestionably does, and is the one form of absolute
equality. The Maxwells did not take themselves or each other
objectively; they loved and hated, they made war and made peace, without
any sense of the difference or desert that might have been apparent to
the spectators.
Maxwell had never been so near the standpoint of the impartial observer
as now when he confronted the question of what he should do, with a
heart twice burdened by the question whether his wife would not make it
hard for him to do it, whatever it was. He thought, with dark
foreboding, of the difficulties he should have to smooth out for her if
it ever came to a production of the piece. The best thing that could
happen, perhaps, would be its rejection, final and total, by all
possible managers and actors; for she would detest any one who took the
part of Salome, and would hold him responsible for all she should suffer
from it.
He recurred to what he had felt so strongly himself, and what Grayson
had suggested, and thought how he could free himself from fealty to her
by cutting out the whole love-business from his play. But that would be
very hard. The thing had now knitted itself in one texture in his mind,
and though he could sever the ties that bound the parts together, it
would take from the piece the great element of charm. It was not
symmetrical as it stood, but it was not two distinct motives; the
motives had blended, and they really belonged to each other. He would
have to invent some other love-business if he cut this out, but still it
could be done. Then it suddenly flashed upon him that there was
something easier yet, and that was to abandon the notion of getting his
piece played at all, and to turn it into a novel. He could give it
narrative form without much trouble, if any, beyond that of copying it,
and it would be thought a very dramatic story. He saw instantly how he
could keep and even enhance all the charm of the love-business as it
stood, in a novel; and in his revulsion of feeling he wished to tell his
wife. He made a movement towards the door of her room, but he heard the
even breathing of her sleep, and he stopped and flung himself on the
lounge to think. It was such a happy solution of the whole affair! He
need not even cease trying it with the managers, for he could use the
copy of the play that Godolphin had returned for that, and he could use
the copy he had always kept for recasting it in narrative. By the time
that he had got his play back from the last manager he would have his
novel ready for the first publisher. In the meantime he should be
writing his letters for the _Abstract_, and not consuming all his little
savings.
The relief from the stress upon him was delicious. He lay at rest and
heard the soft breathing of his wife from the other room, and an
indescribable tenderness for her filled his heart. Then he heard her
voice saying, "Well, don't wake him, poor boy!"