In the morning neither of them recurred to what Louise had said of her
going home for a few days. She had apparently made no preparation for
the journey; but if she was better than her words in this, he was quite
as bad as his in going down town after breakfast to let Grayson have the
play, no matter whom he should get to do Salome. He did not reiterate
his purpose, but she knew from the sullen leave, or no-leave, which he
took of her, that it was fixed.
When he was gone she had what seemed to her the very worst quarter of an
hour she had ever known; but when he came back in the afternoon, looking
haggard but savage, her ordeal had long been over. She asked him quietly
if they had come to any definite conclusion about the play, and he
answered, with harsh aggression, yes, that Mrs. Harley had agreed to
take the part of Salome; Godolphin's old company had been mostly got
together, and they were to have the first rehearsal the next morning.
"Should you like me to come some time?" asked Louise.
"I should like you very much to come," said Maxwell, soberly, but with a
latent doubt of her meaning, which she perceived.
"I have been thinking," she said, "whether you would like me to call on
Mrs. Harley this evening with you?"
"What for?" he demanded, suspiciously.
"Well, I don't know. I thought it might be appropriate."
Maxwell thought a moment. "I don't think it would be expected. After
all, it isn't a personal thing," he said, with a relenting in his
defiance.
"No," said Louise.
They got through the evening without further question.
They had always had some sort of explicit making-up before, even when
they had only had a tacit falling out, but this time Louise thought
there had better be none of that. They were to rehearse the play every
day that week, and Maxwell said he must be at the theatre the next
morning at eleven. He could not make out to his wife's satisfaction
that he was of much use, but he did not try to convince her. He only
said that they referred things to him now and then, and that generally
he did not seem to know much about them. She saw that his æsthetic
honesty kept him from pretending to more than this, and she believed he
ought to have greater credit than he claimed.
Four or five days later she went with him to a rehearsal. By this time
they had got so well forward with their work at the theatre that Maxwell
said it would now be in appreciable shape; but still he warned her not
to expect too much. He never could tell her just what she wanted to know
about Mrs. Harley; all he could say was that her Salome was not ideal,
though it had strong qualities; and he did not try to keep her from
thinking it offensive; that would only have made bad worse.
It had been snowing overnight, and there was a bright glare of sunshine
on the drifts, which rendered the theatre doubly dark when they stepped
into it from the street. It was a dramatic event for Louise to enter by
the stage-door, and to find Maxwell recognized by the old man in charge
as having authority to do so; and she made as much of the strange
interior as the obscurity and her preoccupation would allow. There was
that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first
characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is
one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects
are prepared to be felt before the footlights. Nothing of the glamour of
the front is possible; there is a hard air of business in everything;
and the work that goes to the making of a play shows itself the severest
toil. Figures now came and went in the twilight beyond the reach of the
gas in the door-keeper's booth, but rapidly as if bent upon definite
errands, and with nothing of that loitering gayety which is the imagined
temperament of the stage.
Louise and Maxwell were to see Grayson first in his private office, and
while their names were taken in, the old door-keeper gave them seats on
the Mourners' Bench, a hard wooden settee in the corridor, which he said
was the place where actors wanting an engagement waited till the manager
sent word that he could see them. The manager did not make the author
and his wife wait, but came for them himself, and led the way back to
his room. When he gave them seats there, Maxwell had the pleasure of
seeing that Louise made an excellent impression with the magnate, of
whom he had never quite lost the awe we feel for the master of our
fortunes, whoever he is. He perceived that her inalienable worldly
splendor added to his own consequence, and that his wife's air of
_grande dame_ was not lost upon a man who could at least enjoy it
artistically. Grayson was very polite to her, and said hopefuller things
about the play than he had yet said to Maxwell, though he had always
been civil about its merits. He had a number of papers before him, and
he asked Louise if she had noticed their friendliness. She said, yes,
she had seen some of those things, but she had supposed they were
authorized, and she did not know how much to value them.
Grayson laughed and confessed that he did not practice any concealments
with the press when it was a question of getting something to the public
notice. "Of course," he said, "we don't want the piece to come in on
rubbers."
"What do you mean?" she demanded, with an ignorant joy in the phrase.
"That's what we call it when a thing hasn't been sufficiently heralded,
or heralded at all. We have got to look after that part of it, you
know."
"Of course, I am not complaining, though I think all that's dreadful."
The manager assented partly. Then he said: "There's something curious
about it. You may put up the whole affair yourself, and yet in what's
said you can tell whether there's a real good will that comes from the
writers themselves or not."
"And you mean that there is this mystical kindness for Mr. Maxwell's
play in the prophecies that all read so much alike to me?"
"Yes, I do," said the manager, laughing. "They like him because he's new
and young, and is making his way single-handed."
"Well," said Louise, "those seem good grounds for preference to me,
too;" and she thought how nearly they had been her own grounds for
liking Maxwell.
Grayson went with them to the stage and found her the best place to sit
and see the rehearsal. He made some one get chairs, and he sat with her
chatting while men in high hats and overcoats and women in bonnets and
fur-edged butterfly-capes came in one after another. Godolphin arrived
among the first, with an ulster which came down to where his pantaloons
were turned up above his overshoes. He caught sight of Louise, and
approached her with outstretched hand, and Grayson gave up his chair to
the actor. Godolphin was very cordial, deferentially cordial, with a
delicate vein of reminiscent comradery running through his manner. She
spoke to him of having at last got his ideal for Salome, and he said,
with a slight sigh and a sort of melancholy absence: "Yes, Miss Havisham
will do it magnificently." Then he asked, with a look of latent
significance:
"Have you ever seen her?"
Louise laughed for as darkling a reason. "Only in real life. You know we
live just over and under each other."
"Ah, true. But I meant, on the stage. She's a great artist. You know
she's the one I wanted for Salome from the start."
"Then you ought to be very happy in getting her at last."
"She will do everything for the play," sighed Godolphin. "She'll make up
for all my shortcomings."
"You won't persuade us that you have any shortcomings, Mr. Godolphin,"
said Louise. "You are Haxard, and Haxard is the play. You can't think,
Mr. Godolphin, how deeply grateful we both are to you for your
confidence in my husband's work, your sacrifices--"
"You overpay me a thousand times for everything, Mrs. Maxwell," said
the actor. "Any one might have been proud and happy to do all I've done,
and more, for such a play. I've never changed my opinion for a moment
that it was _the_ American drama. And now if Miss Havisham only turns
out to be the Salome we want!"
"If?" returned Louise, and she felt a wild joy in the word. "Why, I
thought there could be no earthly doubt about it."
"Oh, there isn't. We are all united on that point, I believe, Maxwell?"