‘I?’ Again he looked a little surprised by a question to which he’d supposed I naturally knew the answer. ‘Why, just from watching Emma.’
Chapter Four
IRVIE WAS ONLY eight when he wrote the poem on Don Quixote that gave him so much tender celebration within the family and its fringes. He had more of the same from more people when he wrote, produced, directed and principally acted a full-fledged play. This was at the close of his Sophomore year at Princeton. June was in flower, not long before we all went away for the summer; Irvie and Edgar Semple, now successfully entitled to call themselves Juniors, had returned from their second bright college year, and Irvie brought with him a manuscript composed in hours spared from the curriculum. He began his casting almost within the moment of his arrival.
Emma, at dinner that evening, was too joyously excited to touch her soup; she was as full of the play as she was of the change in Irvie wrought by the past nine months in New Jersey.
‘I’m really not exaggerating’, she told Harriet and me. ‘He’s really not the same person he was as a Freshman. It’s really as if he’d utterly become a sophisticated man but all without the slightest putting-on or a trace of affectation. He’s so aristocratically matured, so really distinguished-looking and cosmopolitan, and’s spent I don’t know how many of his week-ends in New York! He wears his clothes just beautifully but really without the slightest consciousness of them. Mary Reame’s to have the principal woman’s part in the play, of course—’
‘Why do you say “of course”?’ Harriet asked. ‘Mary’s a dear girl and certainly good-looking; but I don’t see how that entitles her to—’
‘She’s perfect!’ Emma was authoritative. ‘Irvie says he wrote the part for her and everybody knows she’s always been the best actress of all the girls in our charades.
Irvie’s having me play her mother—’
‘You? Mary’s mother?’ Harriet said. ‘At seventeen — and Mary must be twenty, isn’t she? I don’t see—’
‘Those things don’t make the slightest difference on the stage.’ Emma made this announcement eagerly. ‘He says it’s almost as good as Mary’s because they’re all splendid acting parts and this mother has almost the strongest scene with him in the whole play, he says. He expects to finish writing the last act by lunchtime tomorrow so we’re going to begin rehearsing right afterward at the Peases’. First, though, we all have to be there at eight this evening to hear him read it to us up to where it stops. He’s already read it up to there to his father and mother and they say they just can’t understand how in the world he ever did it because it sounds so professional.’
‘How about Edgar Semple?’ I asked. ‘As they’ve been rooming together at college, hasn’t Irvie read it to Edgar, too? “What does he think of it?’
‘Edgar?’ Emma looked vague. ‘I don’t know. I suppose Edgar’s heard some of it and of course he’d like it. Anyhow, Irvie’s going to have him play one of the parts — nothing that calls for much action or emotion of course. Nobody’d ever think of Edgar as especially much of an actor, I don’t think. Irvie knows almost all of his own part by heart already and it’s more than twice as long as any other in the whole play.’
‘You bet!’ I said; but Emma was too exuberant to notice this chuckle, and Harriet gave me only the mere whiff of a side glance as she said, ‘Tell us some more about your part in it, dear.’
‘Mine, Mother? Well, you see the whole play turns on the character he’s going to do, himself — a man called “Abercrombie Brown”. He says “Abercrombie Brown” is supposed to symbolize the elements that are in all masculine characters in the world, so it means the man of the future, kind of above and advanced beyond people as they are to-day. He says it’s going to be terribly hard for him to put across the footlights; but don’t you think his conception of “Abercrombie Brown” is a perfectly marvellous idea, Mother?’
‘Of course she does’, I said. ‘Is that the name of the play, Emma— “Abercrombie Brown”?’
‘No. He thought of that; but he says the most outstanding New York playwrights don’t use that kind of title much any more. The title’s going to be “As If He Didn’t Know”, and don’t you think it’s perfectly splendid, Mother?’
Harriet warmly said she did. ‘The “He” who knows is Irvie, is it?’ she asked approvingly.
‘Yes, “Abercrombie Brown”, of course, Mother. You see he goes about among the other characters probing into them and then just laughing satirically at them, and then of course the heroine — that’s Mary Reame — falls terribly in love with him; but he just laughs at her, too; so the mother of Mary — that’s me — well, she sort of takes him to task, as I understand it, and he probes her character too and shows her where she’s all wrong in her old-fashioned motherliness and her capitalistic ideas. “Abercrombie Brown” is a widely known young socialistic psychologist and all that, and—’
I interrupted. ‘Irvie’s a socialist now, Emma?’
‘Yes, of course’, she said. ‘He says the capitalistic system’s practically a washout and so—’
‘And Edgar?’ I interrupted again. ‘Does he feel that way, too?’
‘I guess so, I don’t know; he never says much, you see. His part’s almost the shortest in the play — I believe he’s supposed to be middle-class and’s got a bank or something, the mother’s husband — and in the climax of the last act Irvie knocks him down, because Edgar’s isn’t a sympathetic part and—’
‘Is that the end of the play, Emma?’
‘No, the end’s the part that isn’t written yet; but he’ll have it tomorrow and he told us a good deal about what he thinks it’s going to be. It sounds marvellous — simply too marvellous, Mother!’
Harriet patted Emma’s back. ‘Tell us about it, dear.’
‘Well, he thinks he’ll have the stage get dark and all the other characters go off, and “Abercrombie Brown” —
I told you that’s Irvie, didn’t I? — sits on a rock — it’s in the woods somewhere — and the stage gets dark and he has a soliloquy about the dark mysterious woods being like this life of ours that nobody can find their way around in — sometimes not even he because he’s discovered he never really cared anything at all about the heroine, she’s too conventional and stodgy. Cousin Evelyn says she thinks that’s one of the most original ideas in the whole play. Then, while he’s sitting there wondering if he ought to commit suicide — why, then, just at the end, he’s going to have a light from a reflector in the wings, a kind of bright pink, and — and—’
Emma’s voice had become emotional; I helped her out. ‘And the light falls on the rock and “Abercrombie Brown”, doesn’t it, Emma?”
‘Yes — and he steps up on top of the rock and stands in the light — he stands there with his arms outstretched and — and laughing.’ Emma swallowed, blinked, then recovered herself and was eager again. ‘The idea’s pretty subtle; but it means he’s just laughing at the whole world — laughing and laughing at it! I think it’s the most marvellous idea I ever heard of! Did either of you ever hear of a play that had an end like that?’
‘You mean did your mother or I ever hear of a play ending with the star in the centre of the stage and a light focused on him or her, Emma?’
‘Oh, I mean the whole thing!’ she cried. ‘I mean the light and the woods and the rock and laughing at the world — all of it! Did you ever know anything like it?’
‘No, not exactly like all of it’, I admitted, conscious of another side glance from Harriet. ‘Not like quite all of it.’
Emma ate no more than a bite or two of her dinner and was off to the Peases’ again to hear Irvie’s reading. When she’d scurried out of the dining-room Harriet gave me the look of a woman who expects to have her feelings hurt, and said, ‘I don’t hope to interfere with what you probably think is your sense of humour on the subject of Irvie Pease; but to me this play sounds very like the work of youthful genius — original and daring to be unusual. You couldn’t possibl
y keep an open mind and not try to be funny about it — at least until you see it performed, could you?’
I said I hoped so, and, for the meekness of my tone, was ill-rewarded by my sister. She spoke not but gave me a glance in which there was nothing except suspiciousness.
A day or two after this she disorganized my afternoon’s work for me. With misgiving I heard her hurrying up the stairs from the second floor; she began to defend herself challengingly as she opened the door. ‘You know perfectly well I never interrupt you, myself,’ she said, ‘and that I never let anybody else do so. Even when someone telephones on a matter of business I never—’
‘What is it, Harriet?’
‘It’s different’, she said. ‘Irvie Pease wants to consult you about his play. He’s downstairs and I think you ought.’
‘Why “ought”?’
‘Because at his age you wouldn’t have liked advice to be refused by an older and more experienced man, would you?’
‘Good heavens!’ I said. ‘Irvie doesn’t think I’m more experienced than he is, does he?’
‘Of course he does!’
Irvie didn’t. When she’d gone down and sent him up, it almost immediately became plain that he didn’t. I had to confess to myself, though, that his easy smile was winsome and that, as Emma’d said, this academic year of his had given him a new manner. It seemed to consist of an offhand cheerful kind of carelessness — as if nothing mattered much but everything would probably be all right. If it weren’t, he’d not be disturbed; he’d know how to deal with it comfortably.
His former boyish gracefulness was markedly still with him. Apparently he had no consciousness of it now, although a portrait painter, seeking Irvie’s best pose, would probably have said, ‘Hold that!’ to almost any of the new Junior’s attitudes. Even when he slid one leg over the arm of the easy-chair he’d taken after greeting me with an amused ‘Hello, hello, hello!’ his long thin figure had picturesque quality in every easy line and contour. His face, long too, and symmetrically so, had shaped into the comely modellings that were to be permanent in his full manhood; the most critical old eye must have found them agreeable and the whole of him disarming.
More, Emma hadn’t claimed altogether overmuch for him when she said he was ‘distinguished-looking’; nor with that look did he wear upon his harmonious surface anything that a youthful person, his contemporary, would have called an air of conceit. To the eyes of age almost all the young look innocently self-centred, so profoundly so that we elders are flattered when they notice us; but Irvie Pease’s preoccupation with himself was of an engaging kind — his youngly restless large brown eyes had a twinkle. He’d have been observed in any crowd, and a stranger would have wished to know him. Within a month after this call upon me I overheard a plainly formidable dowager in the North Station, in Boston, exclaim as she stared at him, ‘Who is that fascinating-looking youth!’
Having lounged himself into the easy-chair and brought forth from a pocket of his excellent brown jacket a briar pipe, which he caressed rather than smoked, he added his own apology to Harriet’s.
‘Aunt Harriet says you’re dogging away at a book or something.’ (Harriet was his cousin, not his aunt; but he and Edgar had always aunted and uncled both of us.) ‘Sorry to interrupt; but a rather technical problem or two’s turned up in this play of mine and I thought maybe a chat with you’d shed a light. Father told me you used to do a bit along this line, yourself.’
‘Yes; but I stopped it before you were born, Irving.’
‘Did you really? You wrote a play and then quit?’ He was interested somewhat languidly. ‘So you wrote one, too, did you?’
‘Yes, sixteen’, I said, yielding to the ignoble impulse. Age does not remove these weaknesses of character; we elders, incurably human, still are urged from inside to bark when we’re barked at; we turn boastful when others brag to us, and we go proud when the pride of others is shown to us. Vanity evokes vanity from even the lean and slippered pantaloon.
‘Sixteen? Sixteen plays?’ Irvie looked more incredulous than surprised. ‘I don’t suppose you mean sixteen plays that were actually produced professionally, with professional actors and New York openings and all that — do you?’
‘I seem to remember that they got at least that far, Irving.’
‘You don’t say!’ This wasn’t an animated exclamation of his; it was only a soothing one. He plainly thought that either my doddering memories were deceiving me, or if indeed my vaunted sixteen plays had actually seen ‘Broadway’ they now belonged to a remote, unremembered past — an extinct era when nobody knew anything of consequence and nothing really counted. However, in thinking my poor old plays unremembered, as I was sure he did, he was all too right, and I didn’t hold it against him. ‘Sixteen — well, well!’ he said indulgently, then spoke with the briskness of one who turns to a living topic. ‘This play of mine, now; I’d like to get your honest opinion of it. I’d like you to be frank about it.’
‘Yes, of course, Irving.’
‘This play of mine,’ he said, ’is right now in its incipient amorphous phase. It’s plastic, like a work of sculpture I keep moulding between my hands, if you see what I mean.’
‘Yes, I think I do, Irving.’
His brow showed a slight corrugation, not of thought but as a sign that we were now arriving at something serious. ‘You see, this performance I’m doing here is only a try-out. From the way some of the older people seem to be taking it — my father, for instance, and I don’t know a better literary or dramatic mind than he’s got — well, perhaps it sounds a bit giddy in an undergraduate; but I’d rather like to see the thing on Broadway, myself. That’s why I want to make a thorough test of it with these amateurs. Well, that means I’ve got a problem before me.’
‘What’s the problem, Irving?’
‘I’ve got to decide,’ he said, ‘which way I’ll do the end. Emma tells me she’s given you an idea of the plot, its symbolic meanings, the characters and — —’
‘She has indeed, Irving — at every meal. What’s your trouble about the end?’
‘I’d hardly call it a trouble.’ He made a negligent gesture with his pipe. ‘It’s just an argument with Edgar. You see, he’s made suggestions now and then while I was writing the piece; but sometimes he runs completely off the track. For instance, he wanted me to change quite a little of the phrasing, because people might get the idea I’m being too much like Bernard Shaw. Well, of course, even when I was a boy, I took quite an interest in modems like Shaw and Wells and Ibsen; but what I’m really doing in this piece is shooting out in advance of that group’s psychology. I’d like to take a long progressive step forward, if you see what I mean.’
‘What about the end?’ I asked. ‘Was your argument with Edgar mainly about that?’
‘In a way’, he said. ‘I’m sitting on the rock, you see, all alone in the dark and that’s where I have this soliloquy. You mightn’t have heard; but soliloquies are back now, you know. Until we hit me on the rock with the light, the audience gets just the voice coming out of the darkness.’
‘Just the voice, Irving? Yours, you mean?’
‘Yes. I make it just a slender voice, rather little and eerie, up to the cue for the reflector, and this slender, eerie little voice sums up the whole meaning — how I didn’t really care for “Nora” at all and how to me all the older generations are just bunglers that have made life and the world nothing but a big sloppy mess.’
‘I see’, I said. ‘What’s “Abercrombie Brown” do about it, Irving?’
‘I laugh’, he replied. ‘That’s where I stop using the eerie little slender voice, and the reflector comes on with me up on top of the rock, standing there laughing and laughing at everything. Well, Edgar keeps pecking at me to change all that and I think the whole play’ll be definitely lost if I do.’
‘How’s Edgar want you to change it, Irving?’
‘He thinks it’d be better if I’d be laughing at myself instead of at life and
the world. He thinks I ought to change the soliloquy to show I’m finding out at last I’d been mistaken — all wrong about “Nora” and the other characters and that everybody else was right and I’d been a fat-head about everything from the start; so “Abercrombie Brown” would end the play by laughing at himself instead of at life and the world. I don’t like it. It’d change the psychology of the whole play. It’d be dangerous.’
‘You’re sure?’ I asked.
‘Definitely’, Irvie said. ‘Some people might like it; but on the other hand this isn’t a play for the groundlings. The idea of having me mistaken about everything and laughing at myself for a fool looks to me like giving up all the subtlety I want to bring out. The very point I’m definitely meticulous about is hitting a terrifically modern note. I’d lose it if I’d laugh at myself instead of at life and the world.’
‘Then Edgar’s idea is all wrong, is it?’
‘It’s bright but it’s cheaper’, Irvie said. ‘I don’t deny I’ve been considering it; but it’d belittle my whole conception of “Abercrombie Brown”. No, it won’t do. I shan’t use it. I — —’
‘Just a moment’, I interposed, and I ought to be ashamed to admit that my tone was gravely insidious. ‘Am I right in surmising your conception of “Abercrombie Brown” to be somewhat in the nature of a self-portrait, Irving?’
‘Oh, no doubt’, he said carelessly. ‘But of course myself seen objectively.’ He slid his leg from the arm of the chair and rose. ‘I’d like to spend more time with you talking over things informally this way; but Father’s given me our old stable to make over into a playhouse, I’ve got ’em all working out there and I’d better toddle along to hold ’em down. They’re liable to run haywire building the proscenium.’
He returned his pipe to his jacket pocket, and, as he sauntered to the door, I comprehended that for an otherwise idle quarter of an hour or so of his all he’d desired me to be was an audience. ‘Glad to have you look in any time and see what we’re doing to the old place’, he said in farewell. ‘We may make the old Pease horse-barn the foundation of a Civic Theatre. The town needs one. ‘Bye-bye.’
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 455