The man in the box-office, where he stood in the glow of an electric light at midday, recovered himself from the disappointment he suffered when Maxwell asked for the manager instead of a seat for the night’s performance. He owned that the manager was in his room, but said he was very much engaged, and he was hardly moved from this conviction by Maxwell’s urgence that he should send in his card; perhaps something in Maxwell’s tone and face as of authority prevailed with him; perhaps it was the title of the Boston Abstract, which Maxwell wrote under his name, to recall himself better to the manager’s memory. The answer was a good while getting back; people came in and bought tickets and went away, while Maxwell hung about the vestibule of the theatre and studied the bill of the play which formed its present attraction, but at last the man in the box-office put his face sidewise to the semi-circular opening above the glass-framed plan of seats and, after he had identified Maxwell, said, “Mr. Grayson would like to see you.” At the same time the swinging doors of the theatre opened, and a young man came out, to whom the other added, indicating Maxwell, “This is the gentleman;” and the young man held the door open for him to pass in, and then went swiftly before him into the theatre, and led the way around the orchestra circle to a little door that opened in the wall beside one of the boxes. There was a rehearsal going on in the glare of some grouped incandescent bulbs on the stage, and people moving about in top hats and bonnets and other every-day outside gear, which Maxwell lost sight of in his progress through the wings and past a rough brick wall before he arrived at another door down some winding stairs in the depths of the building. His guide knocked at it, and when an answering voice said, “Come in!” he left Maxwell to go in alone. The manager had risen from his chair at his table, and stood, holding out his hand, with a smile of kindly enough welcome. He said, “I’ve just made you out, Mr. Maxwell. Do you come as a friendly interviewer, or as a deadly dramatist!”
“As both or as neither, whichever you like,” said Maxwell, and he gladly took the manager’s hand, and then took the chair which he cleared of some prompt-books for him to sit down in.
“I hadn’t forgotten the pleasant talk I had with you in Boston, you see,” the manager began again, “but I had forgotten whom I had it with.”
“I can’t say I had even done that,” Maxwell answered, and this seemed to please the manager.
“Well, that counts you one,” he said. “You noticed that we have put on ‘Engaged?’ We’ve made a failure of the piece we began with; it’s several pieces now. Couldn’t you do something like ‘Engaged?’”
“I wish I could! But I’m afraid Gilbert is the only man living who can do anything like ‘Engaged.’ My hand is too heavy for that kind.”
“Well, the heavy hand is not so bad if it hits hard enough,” said the manager, who had a face of lively intelligence and an air of wary kindliness. He looked fifty, but this was partly the effect of overwork. There was something of the Jew, something of the Irishman, in his visage; but he was neither; he was a Yankee, from Maine, with a Boston training in his business. “What have you got?” he asked, for Maxwell’s play was evident.
“Something I’ve been at work on for a year, more or less.” Maxwell sketched the plot of his play, and the manager seemed interested.
“Rather Ibsenish, isn’t it?” he suggested at the end.
The time had passed with Maxwell when he wished to have this said of his play, not because he did not admire Ibsen, but because he preferred the recognition of the original quality of his work. “I don’t know that it is, very. Perhaps — if one didn’t like it.”
“Oh, I don’t know that I should dislike it for its Ibsenism. The time of that sort of thing may be coming. You never can be sure, in this business, when the time of anything is coming. I’ve always thought that a naturalized Ibsenism wouldn’t be so bad for our stage. You don’t want to be quite so bleak, you know, as the real Norwegian Ibsen.”
“I’ve tried not to be very bleak, because I thought it wasn’t in the scheme,” said Maxwell.
“I don’t understand that it ends well?”
“Unless you consider the implicated marriage of the young people a good ending. Haxard himself, of course, is past all surgery. But the thing isn’t pessimistic, as I understand, for its doctrine is that harm comes only from doing wrong.”
The manager laughed. “Oh, the average public would consider that very pessimistic. They want no harm to come even from doing wrong. They want the drama to get round it, somehow. If you could show that Divine Providence forgets wrong-doing altogether in certain cases, you would make the fortune of your piece. Come, why couldn’t you try something of that kind? It would be the greatest comfort to all the sinners in front, for every last man of them — or woman — would think she was the one who was going to get away.”
“I might come up to that, later,” said Maxwell, willing to take the humorous view of the matter, if it would please the manager and smooth the way for the consideration of his work; but, more obscurely, he was impatient, and sorry to have found him in so philosophical a mood.
The manager was like the man of any other trade; he liked to talk of his business, and this morning he talked of it a long time, and to an effect that Maxwell must have found useful if he had not been so bent upon getting to his manuscript that he had no mind for generalities. At last the manager said, abruptly, “You want me to read your play?”
“Very much,” Maxwell answered, and he promptly put the packet he had brought into the manager’s extended hand.
He not only took it, but he untied it, and even glanced at the first few pages. “All right,” he said, “I’ll read it, and let you hear from me as soon as I can. Your address — oh, it’s on the wrapper, here. By-the-way, why shouldn’t you lunch with me? We’ll go over to the Players’ Club.”
Maxwell flushed with eager joy; then he faltered.
“I should like to do it immensely. But I’m afraid — I’m afraid Mrs. Maxwell will be waiting for me.”
“Oh, all right; some other time,” answered the manager; and then Maxwell was vexed that he had offered any excuse, for he thought it would have been very pleasant and perhaps useful for him to lunch at the Players’. But the manager did not urge him. He only said, as he led the way to the stage-door, “I didn’t know there was a Mrs. Maxwell.”
“She’s happened since we met,” said Maxwell, blushing with fond pride. “We’re such a small family that we like to get together at lunch,” he added.
“Oh, yes, I can understand that stage of it,” said the manager. “By-the-way, are you still connected with the Abstract? I noticed the name on your card.”
“Not quite in the old way. But,” and with the words a purpose formed itself in Maxwell’s mind, “they’ve asked me to write their New York letter.”
“Well, drop in now and then. I may have something for you.” The manager shook hands with him cordially, and Maxwell opened the door and found himself in the street.
He was so little conscious of the transit homeward that he seemed to find himself the next moment with Louise in their little parlor. He remembered afterwards that there was something strange in her manner towards him at first, but, before he could feel presently cognizant of it, this wore off in the interest of what he had to tell.
“The sum of it all,” he ended his account of the interview with the manager, “is that he’s taken the thing to read, and that he’s to let me hear from him when he’s read it. When that will be nobody knows, and I should be the last to ask. But he seemed interested in my sketch of it, and he had an intelligence about it that was consoling. And it was a great comfort, after Godolphin, and Godolphin’s pyrotechnics, to have him take it in a hard, business way. He made no sort of promises, and he held out no sort of hopes; he didn’t commit himself in any sort of way, and he can’t break his word, for he hasn’t given it. I wish, now, that I had never let Godolphin have the play back after he first renounced it; I should have saved a great deal of time and wear and
tear of feelings. Yes, if I had taken your advice then—”
At this generous tribute to her wisdom, all that was reluctant ceased from Louise’s manner and behavior. She put her arm around his neck and protested. “No, no! I can’t let you say that, Brice! You were right about that, as you are about everything. If you hadn’t had this experience with Godolphin, you wouldn’t have known how to appreciate Mr. Grayson’s reception of you, and you might have been unreasonable. I can see now that it’s all been for the best, and that we needed just this discipline to prepare us for prosperity. But I guess Godolphin will wish, when he hears that Mr. Grayson has taken your piece, and is going to bring it out at the Argosy, here—”
“Oh, good heavens! Do give those poor chickens a chance to get out of the shell this time, my dear!”
“Well, I know it vexes you, and I know it’s silly; but still I feel sure that Mr. Grayson will take it. You don’t mind that, do you?”
“Not if you don’t say it. I want you to realize that the chances are altogether against it. He was civil, because I think he rather liked me personally—”
“Of course he did!”
“Oh!”
“Well, never mind. Personally—”
“And I don’t suppose it did me any harm with him to suppose that I still had a newspaper connection. I put Boston Abstract on my card — for purposes of identification, as the editors say — because I was writing for it when I met him in Boston.”
“Oh, well, as long as you’re not writing for it now, I don’t care. I want you to devote yourself entirely to the drama, Brice.”
“Yes, that’s all very well. But I think I shall do Ricker’s letters for him this winter at least. I was thinking of it on the way down. It’ll be work, but it’ll be money, too, and if I have something coming in I sha’n’t feel as if I were ruined every time my play gets back from a manager.”
“Mr. Grayson will take it!”
“Now, Louise, if you say that, you will simply drive me to despair, for I shall know how you will feel when he doesn’t—”
“No, I shall not feel so; and you will see. But if you don’t let me hope for you—”
“You know I can’t stand hoping. The only safe way is to look for the worst, and if anything better happens it is so much pure gain. If we hadn’t been so eager to pin our faith to Godolphin—”
“How much better off should we have been? What have we lost by it?” she challenged him.
He broke off with a laugh. “We have lost the pins. Well, hope away! But, remember, you take the whole responsibility.” Maxwell pulled out his watch. “Isn’t lunch nearly ready? This prosperity is making me hungry, and it seems about a year since breakfast.”
“I’ll see what’s keeping it,” said Louise, and she ran out to the kitchen with a sudden fear in her heart. She knew that she had meant to countermand her order for the fillet and mushrooms, and she thought that she had forgotten to order anything else for lunch. She found the cook just serving it up, because such a dish as that took more time than an ordinary lunch, and the things had come late. Louise said, Yes, she understood that; and went back to Maxwell, whom she found walking up and down the room in a famine very uncommon for him. She felt the motherly joy a woman has in being able to appease the hunger of the man she loves, and now she was glad that she had not postponed the fillet till dinner as she had thought of doing. Everything was turning out so entirely for the best that she was beginning to experience some revival of an ancestral faith in Providence in a heart individually agnostic, and she was piously happy when Maxwell said at sight of the lunch, “Isn’t this rather prophetic? If it isn’t that, it’s telepathic. I sha’n’t regret now that I didn’t go with Grayson to lunch at the Players’ Club.”
“Did he ask you to do that?”
Maxwell nodded with his mouth full.
A sudden misgiving smote her. “Oh, Brice, you ought to have gone! Why didn’t you go?”
“It must have been a deep subconsciousness of the fillet and mushrooms. Or perhaps I didn’t quite like to think of your lunching alone.”
“Oh, you dear, faithful little soul!” she cried. The tears came into her eyes, and she ran round the table to kiss him several times on the top of his head.
He kept on eating as well as he could, and when she got back to her place, “Of course, it would have been a good thing for me to go to the Players’,” he teased, “for it would have pleased Grayson, and I should probably have met some other actors and managers there, and made interest with them provisionally for my play, if he shouldn’t happen to want it.”
“Oh, I know it,” she moaned. “You have ruined yourself for me. I’m not worth it. No, I’m not! Now, I want you to promise, dearest, that you’ll never mind me again, but lunch or dine, or breakfast, or sup whenever anybody asks you?”
“Well, I can’t promise all that, quite.”
“I mean, when the play is at stake.”
“Oh, in that case, yes.”
“What in the world did you say to Mr. Grayson?”
“Very much what I have said to you: that I hated to leave you to lunch alone here.”
“Oh, didn’t he think it very silly?” she entreated, fondly. “Don’t you think he’ll laugh at you for it!”
“Very likely. But he won’t like me the less for it. Men are glad of marital devotion in other men; they feel that it acts as a sort of dispensation for them.”
“You oughtn’t to waste those things on me,” she said, humbly. “You ought to keep them for your plays.”
“Oh, they’re not wasted, exactly. I can use them over again. I can say much better things than that with a pen in my hand.”
She hardly heard him. She felt a keen remorse for something she had meant to do and to say when he came home. Now she put it far from her; she thought she ought not to keep even an extinct suspicion in her heart against him, and she asked, “Brice, did you know that woman was living in this house?”
“What woman?”
Louise was ashamed to say anything about the smouldering eyes. “That woman on the bathing-beach at Magnolia — the one I met the other day.”
He said, dryly: “She seems to be pursuing us. How did you find it out?”
She told him, and she added, “I think she must be an actress of some sort.”
“Very likely, but I hope she won’t feel obliged to call because we’re connected with the profession.”
Some time afterwards Louise was stitching at a centre-piece she was embroidering for the dining-table, and Maxwell was writing a letter for the Abstract, which he was going to send to the editor with a note telling him that if it were the sort of thing he wanted he would do the letters for them.
“After all,” she breathed, “that look of the eyes may be purely physical.”
“What look?” Maxwell asked, from the depths of his work.
She laughed in perfect content, and said: “Oh, nothing.” But when he finished his letter, and was putting it into the envelope, she asked: “Did you tell Mr. Grayson that Godolphin had returned the play?”
“No, I didn’t. That wasn’t necessary at this stage of the proceedings.”
“No.”
XIV.
During the week that passed before Maxwell heard from the manager concerning his play, he did another letter for the Abstract, and, with a journalistic acquaintance enlarged through certain Boston men who had found places on New York papers, familiarized himself with New York ways and means of getting news. He visited what is called the Coast, a series of points where the latest intelligence grows in hotel bars and lobbies of a favorable exposure, and is nurtured by clerks and barkeepers skilled in its culture, and by inveterate gossips of their acquaintance; but he found this sort of stuff generally telegraphed on by the Associated Press before he reached it, and he preferred to make his letter a lively comment on events, rather than a report of them. The editor of the Abstract seemed to prefer this, too. He wrote Maxwell some excellent criticism, and invited
him to appeal to the better rather than the worse curiosity of his readers, to remember that this was the principle of the Abstract in its home conduct. Maxwell showed the letter to his wife, and she approved of it all so heartily that she would have liked to answer it herself. “Of course, Brice,” she said, “it’s you he wants, more than your news. Any wretched reporter could give him that, but you are the one man in the world who can give him your mind about it.”
“Why not say universe?” returned Maxwell, but though he mocked her he was glad to believe she was right, and he was proud of her faith in him.
In another way this was put to proof more than once during the week, for Louise seemed fated to meet Mrs. Harley on the common stairs now when she went out or came in. It was very strange that after living with her a whole month in the house and not seeing her, she should now be seeing her so much. Mostly she was alone, but sometimes she was with an elderly woman, whom Louise decided at one time to be her mother, and at another time to be a professional companion. The first time she met them together she was sure that Mrs. Harley indicated her to the chaperon, and that she remembered her from Magnolia, but she never looked at Louise, any more than Louise looked at her, after that.
She wondered if Maxwell ever met her, but she was ashamed to ask him, and he did not mention her. Only once when they were together did they happen to encounter her, and then he said, quite simply, “I think she’s certainly an actress. That public look of the eyes is unmistakable. Emotional parts, I should say.”
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 630