Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Never have I seen an actress so anxious over her reception. Mrs. Carter asked me all manner of questions as to the temper of San Francisco audiences, regularly interviewed me on the subject, and seemed mighty ill at ease over the matter of the four weeks’ run of the “Heart of Maryland.”

  “I am absurdly superstitious,” says she. “You know I’m from the South, from Kentucky, and I believe in omens and signs and all the rest, but only in the bad ones, in the ill-omens. I suppose it’s safest. Do you know,” she exclaimed, suddenly, “I believe your fogs out here are actually doing my voice a world of good. Oh, this cli—”

  I leaped into the breach. “Your voice!” I shouted. “Fogs, you say! Now that’s curious.”

  “Why, I’ve been working ever since 10 this morning (at this time it was after 7) with my voice raised all the time, and I’m not a bit hoarse. Do you think I’m hoarse?”

  I spread my palms toward her.

  “No, not in the least,” she went on. “Now, nowhere else could I do that. And Monterey? Oh, talk to me about Monterey and Del Monte! I went there for a rest, you know, and the weather there (the danger flag was out) was absolutely perfect. Oh, I shall live in California some day. Such a climate I never — (I knew it was coming.)

  “Yes, of course,” I shrieked. “Talk to me about the ‘Heart of Maryland.’ Don’t you swing from the clapper of a bell somewhere?”

  Mrs. Carter put this aside lightly.

  “Yes, yes, but that’s just a little sensation. I like this play, this Maryland, better than any play I ever acted in” (caution — they all say this of their latest play, so make allowances), “and you know I don’t say it for mere advertising effect” (they always add this remark, too), “but the more I play it the better I like it. The climax of the second act is really one of the strongest things on the American stage. I do so hope you will like the play.”

  “Of course I’ll like it,” said I.

  “If a hammer falls behind a flat during a scene you won’t,” said Mrs. Carter, “and if a calcium light doesn’t go just right you’ll say the piece lacks ‘unity of conception.’ Oh, I know what critics are. And on first nights with the best management some one little thing is sure to happen. I wish we could do away with first nights and begin with seconds, or even thirds.”

  “Or with the last night and work backward.”

  And with this I got up and worked backward myself toward the door.

  “If you like ‘Maryland’ come and see me again and tell me about it,” said Mrs. Carter.

  “And if I don’t like it?”

  “Then you mustn’t come.”

  “I shall be frantic in my enthusiasm Monday night,” said I.

  The Wave 1897.

  BELASCO ON PLAYS

  I don’t need to go to see the “Heart of Maryland” now. I say that I don’t need to go, but I want to more than ever. Maybe you don’t quite understand the apparent contradiction here, but you would if you had been with me the other day in a little room over the ticket office of the Baldwin and heard Mr. Belasco himself tell the story of the play, of how he came to write it and how he actually did write. Incidentally, Mr. Belasco told me of his methods in general and his views on the drama.

  It was most interesting to hear him tell the story of the fourth act of “Maryland.” It was at once a pantomime — for he acted each part; a story — for he filled in the pauses of the dialogue with description and scene-plot, for he made one see the different shifts and changes, and the location of every flat and property. It was better than being behind the scenes. It was behind even behind-the-scenes. It was right in the midst of things — in the author’s brain. I confess I had come prejudiced against the curfew-shall-not-ring-to-night affair even before seeing the play; but as Mr. Belasco told of the careful and painstaking preparation for that very effect, it seemed to me the most natural thing for the lady to do under the circumstances. You say the thing was suggested to Mr. Belasco by the poem; very well, the lady in the play may have had the poem in mind herself. How do you know?

  “It’s the careful preparation that makes all the difference between melodrama and drama,” said Mr. Belasco.

  “As how?” said I.

  “Preparation for your effects; gradual, natural, leading up to them, coaxing your audience step by step till you have them just where you want, and then spring your effect, and not until then. I always take my audiences into my confidence, as it were, this way. The actors in the drama need not know what’s to happen, but the audience know. I tell them in one way or another. For instance, when my hero is a prisoner in the bell tower not a single man, woman or child from pit to dome but knows that he is to escape, that the play is to end with the union of the lovers. It’s just a question of means. So I introduce the Provost Marshal complaining of the inefficiency of firing guns as a signal for escaping prisoners, and his suggestion as to the ringing of the bell. Then, too, I show them what happens when a prisoner tries to escape and fails. All the preceding act, too, is “treatment” for that bell scene. It’s the only way to make a scene effective.

  “As to your idea of play-making, now,” I suggested. “I write a play around either some central scene or some central idea. ‘Maryland’ I wrote around the climax of the second act. The ‘Wife’ around the scene where the husband of the unfaithful Helen Truman tells her to turn to him in her trouble. The ‘Charity Ball’ was written around an idea. The idea that a girl once unvirtuous is not necessarily bad thereafter; can, in fact, become the honest wife of an honest man.”

  I asked Mr. Belasco about the problem plays. He shook his head. “Failures every one, the public won’t have ‘em. They won’t be touched in the raw. They come to the theater to see an amusing play, not a moral dissection with lancet and scalpel. There’s Ibsen, of course, but Ibsen is a dramatist whom people read. Staged, his plays would fail surely and inevitably.” Also, Mr. Belasco told me something surprising. “The problem play,” said he, “is easy writing, easiest kind of play-writing. There are no effects, no great scenes; it’s all discussion, discussion, discussion; the author leads up to nothing, has no great climaxes; he can, as you might say, write till he gets tired — or the audience does — and then ring down. No,” said Mr. Belasco, “give me the play of great, strong, universal passions, love and hatred, and revenge and remorse, and let the noble passions survive and triumph; get at the heart of mankind, under its vest, as you might say, and find out the beautiful, true nobility that’s there. That’s my religion, and because I do that is why I am sure that my plays are successful. And another point, these great human passions, there are a limited number of them after all. After the first score of great plays of the world had been written the dramatists began to be obliged to repeat themselves a little, to “lift,” as it were, from their predecessors. Take it in real life, the identical same crises and scenes and situations are constantly reoccurring. There is no such thing as absolute originality nowadays. You are not original even in real life. Believe me, there is no situation however striking, whether on the stage of a theater or the stage of human existence, but what the changes have been rung upon it to infinity.”

  “Rung with a curfew bell?” said I. (Of course I didn’t say it.) But the idea occurred to me. And, after all, Mr. Belasco is not far from right.

  The Wave 1896

  A CALIFORNIA ARTIST

  Peters met us at the gate, standing on the steps that were the vertebrae of a whale. He was booted to the knee, and wore a sweater and a sombrero, and looked just as picturesque as I had hoped and expected an artist should look. I suppose one is always on the lookout for pictures and scenes about an artist’s habitat, and would persist in seeing them whether they existed or not. But at any rate I was rather impressed with all this, because it was unique and characteristic of a California artist. In Brittany he would have worn sabots and a beret, and perhaps a “blouse.” In England it would have been a velvet jacket, but in Monterey, mark you, the artist wears a sombrero and high boots, and s
tands on steps that are the joints of a whale’s spine. Where else would you see an artist with such attributes? We went into the studio.

  Redwood, unfinished, and a huge north light, a couch or two, a black dog, lots of sunshine, and an odor of good tobacco. On every one of the four walls, pictures, pictures, and pictures. Mostly moonlights, painted very broad and flat, as though with Brobdingnag brushes. And in one corner a huge panel-like painting very striking, a sheer cliff, tremendously high, overlooking a moonlit ocean. On the edge — but the very uttermost edge, you understand — a man standing, wearing a cocked hat and a great coat. There was nothing more, not a single detail, and the man was standing with his back turned, yet it was Bonaparte and St. Helena, beyond all shadow of doubt. Clever, you say? Enormously so, I say. A single huge broad “note,” as it were, simple, strong, conveying but a single impression, direct as a blow.

  Peters told me he was “going in” for moonlights. That’s a good hearing for his style, as the art critic would say; is “admirably adapted” for those effects where all detail is lost in enormous flat masses of shadow. Just the effect to be seen on a moonlight night.

  “You would be surprised,” says Peters, “to see how many different kinds of moons there are.” He illustrated what he said by indicating one and another of the sketches. “There is the red moon, when she’s very low, and the yellow moon of the afternoon, and the pure white moon of midnight, and the blurred, pink moon of a misty evening, and the vary-tinted moon of the drawing. She’s never the same. Here are two ebauches, made on succeeding days, at the same time, and from the same place. Yet observe the difference.” There was, indeed, a tremendous difference. I became interested. “It’s the specialists,” Peters continued, “that ‘arrive’ now-a-days, whether they specialize on diseases of the ear, or on the intricacies of the law of patents, or on Persian coins of the 14th century.”

  “Or on pictures of moonlight,” said I.

  “Precisely; that’s my specialty.”

  Peters lives in Monterey on a hill-top, and paints from dawn to dark. After dark he goes out and looks at the moon, and the land and the shore in her light, and at the great cypresses. He doesn’t paint there. Just looks and looks, and takes mental photographs, as it were — impressions he remembers and paints the next day. Singularly enough Peters, though going in for moonlights, does not paint them en plein air — how could he, for the matter of that, without any light to see by — but he does take a sort of combination note and sketch book along with him. He showed this to me. Here and there were mazes of pencil scratching, and the pages are almost unintelligible to any one but Peters himself, and written over them and in them were such words as “blue,” “carmine and cobalt,” “warm gray,” “sienna,” “bitumen” and “red,” etc. — notes merely to help along in the more finished picture.

  Peters thinks Monterey should be a great place for artists. He has sketched nearly everywhere, and maintains that there is more artistic “stuff” right down there in the old town than there is in Barbizon, even, or in the artist towns of Brittany. A few artists, in fact, have already “discovered” the place — artists that who since have been “Medailles” and have acquired greatness. Harrison himself, that Alexander the Great of marine painters, was here for a time, and Julian Rix, and Tavermeir and others, but none of whom have studied, really studied — in a careful, almost scientific fashion — the moonlight effects of the place as has Peters. There are two ways of painting a moonlight sky — one as I have seen it done by scores of artists hitherto, who paint in the sky a sort of indeterminate dark gray or very “warm” black. The other way is as Peters does it. Night skies are blue — deep, deep blue. Look into the sky the next time you are out at night. Maybe you thought the sky was black at night. Look at it. Blue! of course it’s blue — bluer than the bluest thing you ever saw. But I never noticed the fact until Peters’ pictures called my attention to it.

  The interior of Peters’ house, by the way — not his studio, but his house — is a picture in itself. He has a wonderful collection of arms, furniture, carpets, china, stuffs and the like — something really extraordinary. There are old Delft mugs, and a chair of brocade silk that Josephine once used at Malmaison, and a ship-model of ivory presented to Bonaparte by the city of Toulon, original editions of Buffon, worth more than their weight in silver, and an old bed — one of the boxed-in kind, with sliding doors — from Brittany, that the guest still sleeps in — a marvel of carving, with the genuine Breton bird and worm design upon it, that stamps it at once as the rarest of curios.

  I was wondering how large must have been the sum that Peters was obliged to pay for the wonder, when by one of those extraordinary coincidences that are all the time happening, he said: “I gave the fellow twenty-five dollars for that bed.”

  A MINER INTERVIEWED

  A SKETCH FROM THE WAVE OF JULY 24, 1897.

  Mr. Lot O. Goldinsight is in town, recently returned from the Klondyke region, where he has been spending a few weeks of the summer season hunting and fishing. Mr. L. O. Goldinsight reports excellent caribou shooting, and has brought with him a fine stand of horns. The salmon will rise to a fly on the Klondyke, according to the statements of this enthusiastic sportsman, at almost any time during the hot weather. During the intervals of his sport the gentleman employed his time shoveling gold dust into hogsheads. “It is a very healthy exercise,” remarked Mr. Goldinsight, “and especially good for the muscles of the back. I found it tiresome at first, but I assure you that at the end of my stay I could shovel my five hundred pounds per hour and never feel it. Have something to drink?” he added affably. “Won’t you sit down?” He removed a flour sack of gold dust from the bottom of an armchair, and the reporter seated himself.

  “By the way,” said Mr. Goldinsight, “I picked this up in your park to-day. It is really a very curious specimen; perhaps you can tell me something about it.”

  He handed the reporter a small round stone, such as is used in gravel walks. The reporter took it in his hand.

  “Why, sir,” said the reporter, “it is merely a common pebble; we have ’em by the ton down here. It’s gravel.”

  “Really, now,” said Mr. Goldinsight, “you surprise me. You know I’ve been on the Klondyke so long that possibly I might have forgotten. You never see gravel up there, you know. Some prospectors have gone out for it, and I believe one or two specimens have been found near the top of the gold deposits. But the percentage of gravel to gold is so small that I doubt if it will ever pay to mine it extensively. It won’t run more than an ounce of gravel to a ton or more of gold.”

  Mr. Goldinsight carefully returned the pebble to its buckskin bag and locked it in his safe.

  “I understand, sir,” said the reporter, “that you have a couple of ship-loads of gold dust on the way down.”

  “Ballast, merely ballast,” returned Mr. Goldinsight, airily. “I have an offer from a concrete paving company to whom I expect to dispose of the whole consignment. It is found that the gold dust mixes well with the mortar and sand, and makes a good, firm pavement.”

  Mr. Goldinsight was asked as to whether the finds of gold along the Klondyke would have an effect upon the value of lead.

  “It is hardly possible,” he assured the reporter. “It might be run into bullets, but the Winchester and Remington, and other firms are using the steel bullets so much of late that there will be practically no competition in that direction. For gas and water pipes — now there might be a market in that direction. But these gravel deposits you speak of down here—”

  “Oh, there can be no doubt that the pebbles are here,” answered the reporter.

  “You don’t think that the reports that have reached us along the Klondyke have been exaggerated?”

  “Not in the least. You may say that the supply of pebbles along the ocean beach below the Cliff House is practically inexhaustible, and pebbles have been found as far south as Pescadero. There are even indications of pebbles and gravel in the Sierras and along the
Mother Lode, but there they are so mixed with gold that they are considered of a low grade.”

  “When this news reaches the Klondyke,” said Mr. Goldinsight, “I assure you there will be a rush for this place. The men there will have the pebble fever at once. The difficulty will be in getting out of Alaska. You know there are two routes — one down the Yukon and one, very dangerous, over Chilly-Cat Pass. However, when a man is picking up pebbles and gravel by the hatful he won’t think of his past hardships. You know,” continued Mr. Goldinsight, “I am about to incorporate a company.”

  “Indeed, for what purpose?”

  “To mine for gravel hereabouts and transport it to the Klondyke; it would fetch something like 20 cents an ounce there.”

  “But what would the miners there want with it?”

  “Well,” said Mr. Lot O. Goldinsight, “it would be a good thing to mix the gravel with our gold in order that we might pan the gold easier.”

  WHEN A WOMAN HESITATES

  A SKETCH FROM THE WAVE OF MAY 29, 1897.

  Mrs. Trevor was not at home when Barclay called that afternoon, but the butler had instructions to tell him to wait for her; she had gone — where, Barclay did not quite understand — and would be back in half an hour. Barclay had waited for perhaps five minutes in the drawing-room examining the familiar paintings on the walls and turning idly the leaves of the gift books on the table, when a rustle of skirts from the direction of the portieres made him start and face about quickly, with the idea in his mind that Mrs. Trevor had returned sooner than expected. But it was not Mrs. Trevor who stood smiling at him in the door. Instead it was a very pretty — a wonderfully pretty — young girl of twenty or thereabouts, dressed in a smart tea-gown that set her off admirably.