CONGREVE
Little had happened to mark the greater part of the time that had
elapsed since Harry's graduation. For three years he had studied hard
for his doctor's degree, and during the fourth year he had been set to
teaching English literature to freshmen, which task, on the whole, he
accomplished with marked success. But during the fifth year, the year in
which we next see him, he was not teaching freshmen, though he was still
living in New Haven, and working, according to his own accounts, like a
galley slave. The events which led up to this state of things form a
matter of some moment in his career.
These began with the production, during his fourth year out of college,
of a play of his by the college dramatic association. Or, to be more
exact, it really began some months before that, when Harry, leaving a
theater one evening after witnessing a poor play, had remarked to his
companion of the moment: "I actually believe that I could write a better
play than that." To which the friend made the obvious answer, "Why don't
you, then?" "I will," replied Harry, and he did.
It was his first venture in that field of composition. In all his
literary activities he had never before, to borrow his own phrase,
committed dramaturgy. To the very fact that his maiden effort came so
late Harry was wont, in later years, to attribute a large measure of his
success. His idea was that if he had begun earlier his first results
would have been so excruciatingly bad as to discourage him from
sustained effort in that direction.
However this may be, the play was judged the best of those submitted in
a competition organized by the dramatic association, and was produced by
it during the following winter with a very fair amount of success.
Nobody could fairly have called it a remarkable play, but neither could
any one have been justified in calling it a bad one. Its theme was,
apart from its setting, singularly characteristic of the subsequent
style of its author and may be said to have struck the tragi-comic note
that sounded through all his later work. It concerned the experiences of
a struggling young English author, poor, but of gentle birth, who is
first seen inveighing against the snobbery, coldness and indifference
shown toward him by people of wealth and position, and later, after
coming unexpectedly into a peerage and a large fortune, is horrified to
find himself forced into displaying the very qualities which he had so
fiercely condemned in others. The machinery of the play was somewhat
artificial, but the characterization and dramatic interest were
skilfully worked out. The dialogue was everywhere delightful and the
contrast afforded between the conscientious, introspective sincerity of
the young author and the gaily unscrupulous casuistry of his wife was a
forecast, if not actually an early example, of his best work.
Harry was never blind to the faults of the play, but he remained
convinced that it was good in the main, and, what was more important,
retained his interest in dramatic composition. He worked hard during the
following spring and summer and at length evolved another play, which he
called "Chances" and believed was a great improvement upon his first
work. Early in August he sent the play to a New York manager to whom he
had obtained an introduction and after a week or two made an appointment
with him.
The secret trepidation with which he first entered the office of the
great, the redoubtable Leo Bachmann was largely allayed by the
appearance of the manager. He was a large flabby man, with scant stringy
hair and a not unpleasant smile. He sat heavily back in an office chair
and puffed continually at a much-chewed cigar, the ashes of which fell
unnoticed and collected in the furrows of his waistcoat. He spoke in a
soft thick voice, with a strong German accent. Harry did not see
anything particularly terrifying about him.
"Ah, yes, Mr. Vimbourne," said the manager when Harry had made himself
known. "You have sent me a play, yes? Ah, here it is.... Unfortunately I
have not had time to read it; I am very, very busy just now, but my man
Jennings has read it and tells me it is very nice. Very nice, indeed
..." he puffed in ruminative silence for a few seconds. "Could you come
back next week, say Friday, Mr. Vimbourne? and we will talk it over. I
am sorry to trouble you, but you see I am so very, very busy...."
Harry made another appointment and left, not wholly dissatisfied. He
returned, ten days afterward, to his second interview, which was an
almost exact replica of the first. He allowed himself to be put off
another ten days, but when he returned for the third time and was
greeted by precisely the same soft words he was irritated and hardly
able to conceal the fact.
"Ah, yes, your play," said the manager, as though he had just heard of
it for the first time. "Jennings was speaking to me of it only the other
night. I am sorry to say I have not read it yet." He took the manuscript
from a pile on his desk and turned over the leaves. "I am sorry--very
sorry--I have so little time...."
"I don't believe you, Mr. Bachmann," said Harry.
"Ah?" said the manager, without the slightest apparent interest. "Why
not, Mr. Vimbourne?"
"Well, you turned straight to the best scene in it just now, for one
thing.... Beside, you wouldn't keep me hanging on this way if you didn't
see something in it, and if you see anything in it of course you've read
it. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bachmann, that isn't my idea of
business."
Mr. Bachmann's next remark was so unexpected that Harry nearly swooned
in his chair. "I read it the day after it came," he said softly.
"Then why on earth didn't you say so in the first place?" stammered
Harry.
The manager made no reply for some moments, but sat silently puffing and
turning over the pages of Harry's manuscript.
"I like to know people," he murmured at last, very gently and with
apparent irrelevance. Harry, however, saw the bearing of the remark and
suddenly felt extraordinarily small. He had been rather proud of his
little burst of spirit and independence; he now saw that Leo Bachmann
had drawn it from him with the ease and certainty of touch with which a
musician produces a note from a flute. He wondered, abjectly, how many
other self-satisfied young authors had sat where he sat and been played
upon by that great puffing mass of pulp.
Bachmann was the next to speak. "I like your play very much, Mr.
Vimbourne," he said. "It is very nice--some things in it not so good,
but on the whole, it is very nice. I think I vill try to produce it, Mr.
Vimbourne, but not yet--not till I see how my September plays go. I
shall keep yours in reserve, and then, later, we may try it. About the
first of November, when the Fifth Avenue crowd comes back to town...."
He smiled slightly. "They are the people that vill vant to see it. Not
Harlem. Not Brooklyn. The four hundred. Even so," he continued,
ruminatively, "even so, I shall not make on it."
This seemed to Harry a good opening for a proposition he had been
longing to make since the very first but had never quite dared. "If you
want me to put anything up on it, Mr. Bachmann, why--I...."
"No," said Mr. Bachmann gently; "I never do that, I produce my own
plays, for my own reasons. I vill pay you a sum, down. And a small
royalty, perhaps--after the hundredth performance."
Harry looked up and smiled, and the manager smiled back at him. His
smile grew quite broad, almost a laugh, in fact. Then he rose from his
chair--the first time Harry had seen him out of it--and clasped Harry's
hand between his two large plump ones.
"I think we shall get on very well, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "Very well,
indeed. I vill let you know when rehearsals begin. And you must write
more--a great deal more. But--vait till after the rehearsals!"
"Yes, I think I understand you," said Harry, laughing. "I'll wait. And
I'll come to the rehearsals, too!"
In October the rehearsals actually started, and Harry began to see what
he told Mr. Bachmann he thought he understood. Day after day he sat in
the dark draughty theater and watched the people on the stage slash and
cut and change his carefully constructed dialogue without offering a
word of remonstrance. At first the pleasure of seeing his own work take
tangible form, on a real professional stage and by the agency of real
professional actors more than made up for the loss. Then as the
rehearsals went on, he perceived that there was a very real reason for
every cut and change, and that the play benefited tremendously thereby.
He began to see how acting accomplishes a great deal of what he had
always considered the office of dialogue. A dialogue of five speeches,
to take a concrete example, on the probable reasons why a certain person
did not arrive when he was expected was made unnecessary by one of the
characters crossing the stage and looking out of a window at just the
right moment and with just the right facial expression.
Harry made no secret of his conviction that his play improved immensely
under the care of Bachmann and his people. His attitude was that they
knew everything about play-producing and he knew nothing, and that the
extraordinary thing was that he had been able to provide them with any
dramatic material whatever. He joked about it with the actors and
managers, when occasion offered, as callously as if he had been a third
person, and rather surprised himself by the light-heartedness he
displayed. Whether this was entirely genuine, whether it did not contain
elements of a pose, a desire to appear as a man of the theatrical world,
a fear of falling into all the usual errors of youthful playwrights, he
did not at first ask himself.
One day, about a week before the opening night, he received a jolt that
made him look upon himself and his calling in rather a new light. This
came through an unexpected agent--none other, indeed, than a woman of
the cast, and not the player of the principal female part at that, but a
lesser light, Bertha Bensel by name, a plain but pleasant little person
of uncertain age. Harry was lunching alone with her and carrying on in
what had become his customary style when talking of his play.
"You know," he was saying, "I thought at one time I had written a play,
but I haven't, I've written a moving picture show. Everybody is writing
movies these days, even those that try to write anything else, which
just shows. I'm going regularly into the movie business, after this.
Seriously. And I intend to write the real kind of movies, the kind that
don't bother about the characters at all, but just dramatize scenery. I
shall call things by their proper names, too. Let's see--a Devonshire
parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for
a Louis Onze chateau with a Le Notre garden. She discovers, just in
time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana
prairie, who happens along just at the right moment. The situation is
still awkward, however, because the parsonage finds that her prairie has
a wife living, a New York gambling hell, whom he hates but who won't
release him. So the parsonage refuses his disinterested offers and
starts life for herself. After various adventures with a South Carolina
plantation, an Indian Ocean trawler, an Argentine pampas and the Scala
theater at Milan, the poor parsonage ends up in a London sweat shop, to
which she is at last discovered by the Scotch moor, who had been looking
for her all these years. Embrace. Passed by the national board of
censors."
Miss Bensel smiled, but did not seem to see much humor in this foolery.
That was due, thought Harry, to the fatigue of her long morning's work,
and he determined not to bother her with any more nonsense. The silence
which he allowed to ensue, however, was broken by an unexpected remark
from his _vis-a-vis_, who said with a dispassionate air:
"I think, Mr. Wimbourne, you stand in a great danger."
"Danger?"
"Yes, that is, I hope you do. If not, I'm very much disappointed in
you."
"Thank you so much, but just how?"
"You're in danger of getting to take your art as lightly as you talk
about it. Then you'll be lost, for good. It's a real danger. I've seen
the thing happen before, to people of as much talent as you, or nearly
so."
Harry looked at her in blank astonishment, and she went on:
"If you go on talking that way about your profession, you'll get to
think that way and finally _be_ that way. All roses and
champagne--nothing worth while. You may go on writing plays, but they'll
get sillier and sillier, even if they get more and more popular. So your
life will pass away in frivolity and popularity.... That's not your
place in the world, Mr. Wimbourne. You've got talent--perhaps more. You
know that? This play, now. I say nothing about the dialogue, because
good dialogue is not so rare--though yours is the best I've seen for
some time--but how about the rest of it, the story, the ideas? It's good
stuff--you know it is."
Harry leaned back in his chair and tapped the table meditatively with a
spoon. He had the lack of self-consciousness that enables a person to
take blame exactly in the spirit in which it is given, with no alloying
mixture of embarrassment or resentment.
"Yes," he said after a while, "I suppose you're right about it. I have a
certain responsibility.... I suppose the stuff is good, when all is said
and done--though I don't dare to think it can be."
Miss Bensel leaned forward with her elbows on the table and allowed her
face to relax into a smile, a curious little smile that did not part her
lips but drew down the corners of her mouth.
"That's it--I thought that probably was it! You're so modest you're
afraid to take yourself seriously. Well, that's a pretty good fault; I
think on the whole it's better than taking yourself too seriously. But
don't do it, even so. Take it from me, my dear boy, you can't accomplish
anything worth while in this world, _anything_, whatever it is, unless
you take your work seriously--at bottom."
Harry did a good deal of serious thinking on the subject during the rest
of the day, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he
became that Miss Bensel was right. He thought of Dickens' famous
utterance on the subject of being flippant about one's life's work; he
thought of the example of Congreve. Congreve, there was an appropriate
warning! Congreve, whose life was a duel between the painstaking artist
and the polished man-about-town, who never would speak other than
lightly of his best work, whose boast and whose shame it was
deliberately to stifle the fires of his own genius. Was he, Harry,
guilty of something like the pose of Congreve? He thought of his
attitude of exaggerated _camaraderie_ with the actors and managers, of
his attitude toward his own work; he realized that frivolity had become
not merely a pose, but a habit. Was he not, in such doings, following in
the steps of Congreve--the man who insisted that the work that made him
famous had been written for the sole purpose of whiling away the tedium
of convalescence after an illness?
As he watched his own play being enacted before his eyes that afternoon
he realized that his work was, in the main, good, and that he had known
it all along. He had felt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's
astonishingly prompt (as he had since learned it to be) acceptance of it
had given conclusive proof of it. If anything further was needed, he had
it in the enthusiasm with which the actors played it and spoke of it.
Somehow, by some incredible chance, the divine gift had fallen upon him.
To belittle that gift, to fail to devote his best efforts to making the
most of it, would be to shirk his life's duty.
The third act, upon which most of the work of the afternoon was done,
drew to its close. It had been immensely shortened by cuts; Harry was
not sorry, though he missed some of what he had thought the best lines
in the play. Then the heroine made her final exit, and Harry suddenly
realized she had done so without her and the hero's having delivered two
little speeches that ought to have come just before; speeches on which
he had spent much care and labor. Those two lines had, in fact,
contained the whole gist of the play, or at any rate driven home its
thesis in a particularly striking way. The point of the play was that
living was simply a system of chances, and these speeches made clear the
distinction between the wrong kind of chancing, the careless,
risking-all kind, whose final result was always ruin, and the sober,
intelligent, prayerful kind, as shown in the lives of those who, after
careful consideration of all the chances that may affect them, do what
they decide is best and await the result with the calmness of a
Mohammedan fatalist.
Harry suddenly became imbued with the profound conviction that those two
speeches were absolutely necessary to the understanding of his play. He
hastily read over the last half of the act in his typewritten copy, and
failed to see how any spectator could catch the true meaning of the work
without them. Well, here was a chance to show how seriously he could
take his art! The whole affair took on a new and strange momentousness;
he stood at this instant, he told himself, at the very turning-point of
his artistic career. He would not take the wrong road, cost him what it
might; he would not be found wanting.
Bachmann was in the theater, sitting in the back row of the orchestra,
as was his custom. Harry determined to go straight to him and ask him to
put those lines in again. As he walked up the aisle he thought
feverishly of the tremendous import of this interview. Bachmann would
refuse at first, he knew that well enough. Bachmann would not easily be
convinced by the opinion of an inexperienced scribbler. But Harry was
determined not to be beaten; he was prepared to fight, prepared to make
a scene, if necessary; prepared to sacrifice the production of his play,
if it came to that. He could see Bachmann's slow smile as he reminded
him of practical considerations. "Your contract?" "Damn the contract,"
Harry would reply. "Ha, ha! I've got the whip hand of you there, Mr.
Bachmann! I can afford to break all the contracts I want!" "And your
career?" retorted Bachmann, with a sneer, but turning ever so slightly
pale. "Ho! my career! What the devil do I care for my career! I choose
to write for all time, not for my own! I...."
"Vell, Mr. Vimbourne," Bachmann, the live, fleshly Bachmann, was saying
in a startlingly mild and everyday tone of voice, "what can I do for
you?"
"Oh ... I just wanted to speak to you about this last scene," said
Harry, trying hard to keep his voice steady. "They've cut out two lines
just before Miss Cleves' exit that I think ought to be kept."
"Let's see."
Harry handed him the manuscript and anxiously watched him as he glanced
rapidly over the pages. "They're pretty important lines, really. They
explain a lot; I'm afraid people won't understand...." He could feel his
voice weakening and his knees trembling, but his determination remained.
"Burchard!" Bachmann bellowed, in the general direction of the stage.
"Yes!"
"What about those two speeches before Miss Cleves' exit?"
There was a short and rather flurried silence from the stage, after
which the voice of Burchard again emerged:
"Miss Cleves said she couldn't make her exit on that line."
"Where is she? Tell her to come back and try it."
The battle was won without a shot being fired. Harry, almost literally
knocked flat by the surprise and relief of the moment, sank into the
nearest seat. Bachmann got up and lumbered off toward the stage; Harry
leaned his head against the back of his chair and gave himself over to
an outburst of internal mirth, at his own expense.
He raised his eyes again to the stage. Curiously enough, the first
person his glance fell on was Miss Bensel, with her trim little figure
and humorously plain face. It seemed to him she was smiling out at him,
with a mocking little smile that drew down the corners of her mouth.
* * * * *
Everybody knows what happened to the play "Chances"; its history is a
page of the American stage. Much has been said and written about it; it
has been called a landmark, a stepping-stone, a first ditch, a guiding
light, a moral victory, a glorious failure, a promising defeat and
various similar things so often that people are tired of the very name
of it. What actually happened to it can be told in a few words; it was
well received, but not largely attended. It was withdrawn near the end
of its fourth week.
The critics were unanimous in praising it. Its dialogue was hailed as
the ideal dialogue of contemporary comedy. The characterization, the
humor of the lines, the universality of the theme, its wonderfully
logical and convincing development all received their due meed of
praise. It was compared to the comedies of Clyde Fitch, of Oscar Wilde,
of Sheridan, and of Congreve--yes, actually Congreve! Harry smiled when
he read that, and renewed his resolution never to let the comparison
apply in a personal way. But to be seriously compared to Congreve, not
Congreve the man but Congreve the author--! The thought made him fairly
dizzy.
But what took the eye of the critics, the best and soberest of them,
that is, more than anything else was the mixture of the humorous and
serious shown in the choice of the theme and its development. "To treat
the element of humor," wrote one critic, "not as a colored glass through
which to look at all life, as in farce, nor as a refreshing contrast to
its serious side, as in the 'comic relief' of a host of plays from the
Elizabethans down to the present day, but as part and parcel of the very
essence of life itself, co-existent with its solemnity, inseparable from
its difficulty, companion and friend to its unsolvable mystery; to put
people in such a mood that they can laugh at the greatest things in
their own lives, neither bitterly nor to give themselves Dutch courage,
but for the pure, life giving, illuminating exaltation of
laughing--this, we take it, is the whole essence and mission of comedy.
And this--we say it boldly and in no spirit of empty flattery--is the
type of comedy shown in Mr. Wimbourne's play."
It is not hard to see how such words should bring joy to the heart of
Harry and smiles of admiration and respect to the faces of his friends,
from Leo Bachmann right up to Aunt Selina. But they did not bring people
to the theater. For the first three performances the attendance was
satisfactory; then it began steadily to fall off and by the end of the
first week it became merely a question of how long it could survive.
Leo Bachmann was, curiously enough, the least affected of all the
theater crowd by the poor success of the work. He viewed the
discouraging box office reports with an untroubled smile, and cheerfully
began rehearsals for a new play. "Never you mind, my boy," he told
Harry, "I knew I should not make money off your play. I told you so in
the beginning. Never you mind! That is not your fault. It's just the way
things go. I have only one word to say to you, and that is--write!" Even
in his discouragement Harry could not help feeling that Mr. Bachmann was
strangely calm and cheerful.
Within a week from the end of the play's run a curious thing happened. A
visiting English dramatist and critic, a confirmed self-advertiser, but
a writer and thinker of unquestioned brilliancy, and a wit, withal, of
international reputation, was greatly struck by the play and wrote an
unsolicited letter about it which appeared in the pages of a leading
daily.
"No more striking proof," wrote this self-appointed defender of Harry,
"could be offered of the consanguinal intellectual stupidity of the
Anglo-Saxon race than I received at a performance of Mr. Harold
Wimbourne's play 'Chances' at the ---- Theater last night. For the first
time during my stay in this country as I looked over the almost empty
stalls and realized that this, incomparably the best play running in New
York, was also the worst attended, I could have fancied myself actually
in my own country.
"What are the lessons or qualities in Mr. Wimbourne's play which the
American people cannot stomach? I suppose, when all is said and done, he
has committed the unpardonable offense of giving them a little of their
own medicine. He has rammed down their throats some few corollaries of
the Calvinistic doctrines for which the ancestors of the very people who
stay away from his play sailed an uncharted sea, conquered a wilderness,
and spilt their blood to champion against a usurping power. The Pilgrim
fathers founded the United States of America in order to publish the
greatness of God and the littleness of man. Their descendants either
ignore or condemn one of their number because he does not extol the
greatness of man and the littleness of God. Because Mr. Wimbourne
ventures to show, in a very mild--if very artistic and compelling
way--how slight a hold man has on the moving force of life, God, the
universe, a group of atoms--whatever you choose to call the world--he
becomes a pariah. He has escaped easily after his first offense, but it
will go hard with the Anglo-Saxon character if he is not stoned in the
streets after the next one. America is a great and rich country; what
does it care about religion or philosophy or art or any of that
poppycock? Serious and devout thinking simply _are not done_; it has
become as great a solecism to mention the name of the Deity in
society--except as the hero of a humorous story--as to talk about Kant
or Hegel. Americans have lost interest in that sort of stuff; they do
not need it. Why, now that they have become physically strong, should
they bother about the unsubstantial kind of strength known as moral to
which they were forced to resort when they were physically weak? Why,
having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what
upheld them when they were fieldmice?
"Of course I should not have made such a point in favor of a play if it
were not, technically and artistically speaking, a very good play. The
truth when it is badly spoken hardly merits more attention than if it
were not spoken at all. But 'Chances' is as beautifully constructed as
it was conceived; it is a play that I should be proud to have written
myself. Its technical perfections have already been praised, even by
that class of people least calculated to appreciate them; I mean the
critics. I will, therefore, mention but one small example, which I
believe, in the presence of so many greater beauties, has been
overlooked; namely, the short dialogue near the end of the first act in
which Frances, in perhaps half a page of conversation with the man to
whom she is then engaged, realizes that her engagement is empty, that
she has no heart for the man, that a new way of looking at love has
transcended her life;--realizes all this, and betrays it to the audience
without in the smallest degree giving herself away to the man with whom
she is talking or saying a word in violation of the probability of their
conversation. Such a feat in dramaturgy is, perhaps, appreciable only to
those who have tried to write plays themselves. Still, whom does that
not include?
"But I do not expect Americans to appreciate artistic perfection any
more than I expect Englishmen to. The shame, the disgrace to Americans
in not appreciating this play lies in the fact that it is fundamentally
American; American in its characters, in its setting, and above all in
its motive principles, which are the principles to which America owes
its very existence."
Such opinions, appearing over a famous signature, could not but revive
interest and talk about its subject, and the play experienced a slight
boom during the last few days of its existence. Its run, indeed, would
have been extended but for the fact that Bachmann had made all the
arrangements for its successor and advertised the date of its
appearance. Altogether the incident tended to show that if the play was
a failure it was at least a dynamic failure, indicative of future
success.
Harry was as little elated by the praise of the foreigner as he was cast
down by the condemnation of his countrymen. His demeanor all along, ever
since the day of his interview with Miss Bensel, had been characterized
by an observant calmness. He dissuaded as many of his relations and
friends as he could from being present at the first performance of the
play and ignored those who insisted on being there. He himself occupied
an obscure seat in the gallery and listened with the greatest attention
to the comments of those about him. He thereby began to form an idea of
what the general public thought of his work; knowledge which, as he
himself realized, would be of inestimable value if he could put it to
use in his next play.
A letter Harry wrote to his Uncle Giles just after the play was taken
off expresses his state of mind at this time. "'Chances' has gone by the
board," he wrote; "that splendid American institution, the Tired
Business Man, would have none of it, and it has ceased to be Drama and
has become merely Literature. But I have learned a lot during its brief
existence, and this knowledge I shall, please God, make use of if I ever
write another play. Which is a mere figure of speech, as I have started
one already.
"I have learned the point of view of the Tired Business Man. That was
what I wanted to know from the very first--not what the critics thought.
They could do no more than say it was good, and I knew that already. And
what the T. B. M. said was substantially, that my play was nice enough,
but that it had no _punch_. I don't know whether you recognize that
expression or not; it is one of those vivid American slang words that
English people are so fascinated by. People thought the play wasn't
interesting enough, and that is the simple truth about it. Therefore it
wasn't a good play. For my idea is that to be really good a play must
hold the stage, at least at the time it is written. And if we are ever
going to build up such a thing as the 'American drama' our critics are
continually bellowing about, we've got to begin with our foundations. We
can't create a full-fledged literary drama and then go to work and make
the people like it; we've got to begin with what the people like and
build up our drama on that. That's the way all the great 'dramas' of
history have grown up--the Greek, the French, the Spanish and the
Elizabethan; and it is interesting to notice that the drama that came
nearest to being the product of a mere literary class, the French, is
the weakest of the lot and is standing the test of time worst of them
all.
"I may never write a more successful play than 'Chances'; I may never
get another play on the stage at all. But one thing I am sure of; I
shall never offer another play to the public without being convinced
that it is a better stage play than 'Chances.'"
Of course that a mere boy, fresh from college, with no practical
experience of the stage whatever, should get a play produced at all was
an unusual and highly gratifying thing. Harry became quite a lion that
autumn, in a small way. He remained in New York till after the play was
taken off, living with the James Wimbournes, and was the guest of honor
at one or two of Aunt Cecilia's rather dull but eminently important
dinners. He became the object of the attention of reporters, and also of
that section of metropolitan _literati_ who live in duplex apartments
and wear strings of pearls in their hair and can always tell Schubert
from Schumann. He was especially delighted with these, and determined
some day to write a play or a novel portraying the inner side of their
painstaking spirituality.
He saw a good deal of James during those weeks; more than he had seen of
him since their college days. James had been rather sparing of his
week-end visits to New Haven since moving to New York; Harry noticed
that. He was sorry, for he now found James a great help and stimulus. He
discovered that a walk or a motor ride with James between the hours of
five and seven would obliterate the effects of the caviar-est of
luncheons and the pinkest of teas and give him strength with which to
face evenings in the company of people who appeared unable even to
perspire anything less exalted than pure Pierian fluid.
"Well, it's nice to meet some one who doesn't smell of Russian
cigarettes," he observed one day as he took his place in the long, low,
slightly wicked-looking machine in which James whiled away most of his
leisure moments. "Do you know, sometimes I actually rush into the
nursery at Aunt Cecilia's and kiss the youngest and bread-and-butteryest
child there, just to get the Parnassian odors out of my lungs. Next to a
rather slobby child, though, I prefer the society of an ex-All-American
quarter-back."
"Half," said James.
"Oh, were you? Well, you don't smell of anything aesthetic-er than the
camphor balls you put that coat away for the summer in.... James, if you
go round another corner at eighty miles an hour I shall leap out and
telephone for a policeman!"
"Oh, that's all right. They all know me, anyway. They know I don't take
risks."
"Hm.... Well, it's all over for me next week, thank Heaven. I'm going
back to Aunt Selina and Sunday night suppers, and I _shall_ be glad!"
"Well, I will say," said James slowly and carefully, with the air of one
determined to do the most meticulous justice, "that you have kept your
head through it all pretty well."
"Oh, it's not hard, when you come right to it," said Harry, laughing.
"Of course there are moments when I wonder if I'm not really greater
than Shakespeare. And it does seem funny to realize that the rising
genius, the person people are all talking about, and poor little Me are
the same. But then I remember what a failure my play was, and shrivel
into the poor graduate student.... After I've written a successful play,
though, I won't answer for myself. And after I've written 'Hamlet,' as I
mean to some day, I shall be simply unbearable. You won't own me then."
"Watch-chain round your neck?" suggested James.
"Oh, worse than that--diamond bracelets! And corsets--if necessary. I
saw a man wearing both the other day, I really did."
"A man?"
"Well, an actor. That's the sort of thing they run to now-a-days. Long
hair and general sloppiness are quite out of date--among the really
ultra ones, that is."
"Well," said James, "I give you permission to be as ultra as you like,
after you've written 'Hamlet.'"
"That helps, of course. I daresay I'm lacking in proper seriousness, but
it seems to me that if the choice were offered me, right now, between
being the author of 'Hamlet' and being also an ultra, and not writing
'Hamlet' and staying as I am, I would choose the latter. I don't know
what my point of view may be at some future time, but that's what it is
now, or at least I think it is. And after all, nobody can get nearer the
truth than saying what he thinks his point of view at any given moment
is, can he, James?"