“I do some other kind of writing.”
“As—”
“Oh, no! I’m not here to interview myself.”
“Oh, but you ought. I know you’ve written something — some novel. Your name was so familiar from the first.” Mr. Ray laughed and shook his head in mockery of her cheap device. “You mustn’t be vexed because I’m so vague about it. I’m very ignorant.”
“You said you were from Boston.”
“But there are Bostons and Bostons. The Boston that I belonged to never hears of American books till they are forgotten!”
“Ah, how famous I must be there!”
“I see you are determined to be bad. But I remember now; it was a play. Haven’t you written a play?” He held up three fingers. “I knew it! What was it?”
“My plays,” said the young fellow, with a mock of superiority, “have never been played. I’ve been told that they are above the heads of an audience. It’s a great consolation. But now, really, about Mr. Maxwell’s. When is it to be given here? I hoped very much that I might happen on the very time.”
Louise hesitated a moment, and then she said: “You know he has taken it back from Godolphin.” It was not so hard to say this as it was at first, but it still required resolution.
“Oh, I’m so glad!” said Mr. Ray. “I never thought he appreciated it. He was so anxious to make his part all in all that he would have been willing to damage the rest of it irretrievably. I could see, from the way he talked of it, that he was mortally jealous of Salome; and the girl who did that did it very sweetly and prettily. Who has got the play now?”
“Well,” said Louise, with rather a painful smile, “nobody has it at present. We’re trying to stir up strife for it among managers.”
“What play is that?” asked her friend, the hostess, and all that end of the table became attentive, as any fashionable company will at the mention of a play; books may be more or less out of the range of society, but plays never at all.
“My husband’s,” said Louise, meekly.
“Why, does your husband write plays?” cried the lady.
“What did you think he did?” returned Louise, resentfully; she did not in the least know what her friend’s husband did, and he was no more there to speak for himself than her own.
“He’s written a very great play,” Mr. Ray spoke up with generous courage; “the very greatest American play I have seen. I don’t say ever written, for I’ve written some myself that I haven’t seen yet,” he added, and every one laughed at his bit of self-sacrifice. “But Mr. Maxwell’s play is just such a play as I would have written if I could — large, and serious, and charming.”
He went on about it finely, and Louise’s heart swelled with pride. She wished Maxwell could have been there, but if he had been, of course Mr. Ray would not have spoken so freely.
The hostess asked him where he had seen it, and he said in Midland.
Then she said, “We must all go,” and she had the effect of rising to do so, but it was only to leave the men to their tobacco.
Louise laid hold of her in the drawing-room: “Who is he? What is he?”
“A little dear, isn’t he?”
“Yes, of course. But what has he done?”
“Why, he wrote a novel — I forget the name, but I have it somewhere. It made a great sensation. But surely you must know what it was?”
“No, no,” Louise lamented. “I am ashamed to say I don’t.”
When the men joined the ladies, she lingered long enough to thank Mr. Ray, and try to make him tell her the name of his novel. She at least made him promise to let them know the next time he was in New York, and she believed all he said of his regret that he was going home that night. He sent many sweet messages to Maxwell, whom he wanted to talk with about his play, and tell him all he had thought about it. He felt sure that some manager would take it and bring it out in New York, and again he exulted that it was out of the actor’s hands. A manager might not have an artistic interest in it; an actor could only have a personal interest in it.
XIX.
Louise came home in high spirits. The world seemed to have begun to move again. It was full of all sorts of gay hopes, or at least she was, and she was impatient to impart them to Maxwell. Now she decided that her great office in his life must be to cheer him up, to supply that spring of joyousness which was so lacking in him, and which he never could do any sort of work without. She meant to make him go into society with her. It would do him good, and he would shine. He could talk as well as Mr. Ray, and if he would let himself go, he could be as charming.
She rushed in to speak with him, and was vexed to find a strange man sitting in the parlor alone. The stranger rose at her onset, and then, when she confusedly retreated, he sank into his chair again. She had seen him black against the window, and had not made out any feature or expression of his face.
The maid explained that it was a gentleman who had called to see Mr. Maxwell earlier in the day, and the last time had asked if he might sit down and wait for him. He had been waiting only a few minutes.
“But who is he?” demanded Louise, with a provisional indignation in case it should be a liberty on some unauthorized person’s part. “Didn’t he give you a card?”
He had given the girl a card, and she now gave it to Mrs. Maxwell. It bore the name Mr. Lawrence Sterne, which Louise read with much the same emotion as if it had been Mr. William Shakespeare. She suspected what her husband would have called a fake of some sort, and she felt a little afraid. She did not like the notion of the man’s sitting there in her parlor while she had nobody with her but the girl. He might be all right, and he might even be a gentleman, but the dark bulk which had risen up against the window and stood holding a hat in its hand was not somehow a gentlemanly bulk, the hat was not definitively a gentleman’s hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman’s baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it still was kind.
“I am sorry,” she said, “that my husband is out, and I am sorry to say that I don’t know just when he will be at home.” She stood and the man had risen again, with his portly frame and his invisible face between her and the light again. “If I could be of any use in giving him a message—” She stopped; it was really sending the man out of the house, and she could not do that; it was not decent. She added, “Or if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes longer—”
She sat down, but the man did not. He said: “I can’t wait any longer just now; but if Mr. Maxwell would like to see me, I am at the Coleman House.” She looked at him as if she did not understand, and he went on: “If he doesn’t recall my name he’ll remember answering my advertisement, some weeks ago in the Theatrical Register, for a play.”
“Oh yes!” said Louise. This was the actor whom she had written to on behalf of Maxwell. With electrical suddenness and distinctness she now recalled the name, L. Sterne, along with all the rest, though the card of Mr. Lawrence Sterne had not stirred her sleeping consciousness. She had always meant to tell Maxwell what she had done, but she was always waiting for something to come of it, and when nothing came of it, she did not tell; she had been so disgusted at the mere notion of answering the man’s advertisement. Now, here was the man himself, and he had to be answered, and that would probably be worse than answering his advertisement. “I remember,” she said, provisionally, but with the resolution to speak exactly the truth; “I wrote to you for Mr. Maxwell,” which did not satisfy her as the truth ought to have done.
“Well, then, I wish you would please tell him that I didn’t reply to his letter because it kept following me from place to place, and I only got it at the Register office this morning.”
“I will tell Mr. Maxwell,” said Louise.
“I should be glad to see his play, if he still has it to dispose of. From what Mr. Grayson has told me of it, I think it might — I think I should like to see it. It might suit the — the party I am acting for,” he added, letting himself go.
“Then you are not the — the — star?”
“I am the manager for the star.”
“Oh,” said Louise, with relief. The fact seemed to put another complexion on the affair. A distaste which she had formed for Mr. Sterne personally began to cede to other feelings. If he was manager for the star, he must be like other managers, such as Maxwell was willing to deal with, and if he knew Mr. Grayson he must be all right. “I will tell Mr. Maxwell,” she said, with no provisionality this time.
Mr. Sterne prepared to go, so far as buttoning his overcoat and making some paces towards the door gave token of his intention. Louise followed him with a politeness which was almost gratitude to him for reinstating her in her own esteem. He seemed to have atmospheric intelligence of her better will towards him, for he said, as if it were something she might feel an interest in: “If I can get a play that will suit, I shall take the road with a combination immediately after New Year’s. I don’t know whether you have ever seen the lady I want the play for.”
“The lady?” gasped Louise.
“She isn’t very well-known in the East yet, but she will be. She wants a play of her own. As I understand Mr. Grayson, there is a part in Mr. Maxwell’s play that would fit her to a T, or could be fitted to her; these things always need some little adaptation.” Mr. Sterne’s manner became easier and easier. “Curious thing about it is that you are next door — or next floor — neighbors, here. Mrs. Harley.”
“We — we have met her,” said Louise in a hollow murmur.
“Well, you can’t have any idea what Yolande Havisham is from Mrs. Harley. I shall be at the Coleman the whole evening, if Mr. Maxwell would like to call. Well, good-morning,” said Mr. Sterne, and he got himself away before Louise could tell him that Maxwell would never give his play to a woman; before she could say that it was already as good as accepted by another manager; before she could declare that if no manager ever wanted it, still, as far as Mrs. Harley was concerned, with her smouldering eyes, it would always be in negotiation; before she could form or express any utter and final refusal and denial of his abominable hopes.
It remained for her either to walk quietly down to the North River and drown herself or to wait her husband’s return and tell him everything and throw herself on his mercy, implore him, adjure him, not to give that woman his play; and then to go into a decline that would soon rid him of the clog and hinderance she had always been to him. It flashed through her turmoil of emotion that it was already dark, in spite of Mr. Sterne’s good-morning at parting, and that some one might speak to her on the way to the river; and then she thought how Maxwell would laugh when she told him the fear of being spoken to had kept her from suicide; and she sat waiting for him to come with such an inward haggardness that she was astonished, at sight of herself in the glass, to find that she wan looking very much as usual. Maxwell certainly noticed no difference when he came in and flung himself wearily on the lounge, and made no attempt to break the silence of their meeting; they had kissed, of course, but had not spoken.
She was by no means sure what she was going to do; she had hoped there would be some leading on his part that would make it easy for her to do right, whatever the right was, but her heart sank at sight of him. He looked defeated and harassed. But there was no help for it. She must speak, and speak unaided; the only question was whether she had better speak before dinner or after. She decided to speak after dinner, and then all at once she was saying: “Brice, I have brought something dreadful on myself.”
“At the lunch?” he asked, wearily, and she saw that he thought she had been making some silly speech she was ashamed of.
“Oh, if it had only been at the lunch!” she cried. “No, it was here — here in this very room.”
“I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Louise,” he said, lying back and shutting his eyes.
“Then I must tell you!” And she came out with the whole story, which she had to repeat in parts before he could understand it. When he did understand that she had answered an advertisement in the Register, in his name, he opened his eyes and sat up.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, don’t you see how wrong and wicked that was?”
“I’ve heard of worse things.”
“Oh, don’t say so, dearest! It was living a lie, don’t you see. And I’ve been living a lie ever since, and now I’m justly punished for not telling you long ago.”
She told him of the visit she had just had, and who the man was, and whom he wanted the play for; and now a strange thing happened with her. She did not beseech him not to give his play to that woman; on the contrary she said: “And now, Brice, I want you to let her have it. I know she will play Salome magnificently, and that will make the fortune of the piece, and it will give you such a name that anything you write after this will get accepted; and you can satisfy your utmost ambition, and you needn’t mind me — no — or think of me at all any more than if I were the dust of the earth; and I am! Will you?”
He got up from the lounge and began to walk the floor, as he always did when he was perplexed; and she let him walk up and down in silence as long as she could bear it. At last she said: “I am in earnest, Brice, I am indeed, and if you don’t do it, if you let me or my feelings stand in your way, in the slightest degree, I will never forgive you. Will you go straight down to the Coleman House, as soon as you’ve had your dinner, and tell that man he can have your play for that woman?”
“No,” said Maxwell, stopping in his walk, and looking at her in a dazed way.
Her heart seemed to leap into her throat. “Why?” she choked.
“Because Godolphin is here.”
“Godo—” she began; and she cast herself on the lounge that Maxwell had vacated, and plunged her face in the pillow and sobbed, “Oh, cruel, cruel, cruel! Oh, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel!”
XX.
Maxwell stood looking at his wife with the cold disgust which hysterics are apt to inspire in men after they have seen them more than once. “I suppose that when you are ready you will tell me what is the matter with you.”
“To let me suffer so, when you knew all the time that Godolphin was here, and you needn’t give your play to that creature at all,” wailed Louise.
“How did I know you were suffering?” he retorted. “And how do I know that I can do anything with Godolphin?”
“Oh, I know you can!” She sprang up with the greatest energy, and ran into the bedroom to put in order her tumbled hair; she kept talking to him from there. “I want you to go down and see him the instant you have had dinner; and don’t let him escape you. Tell him he can have the play on any terms. I believe he is the only one who can make it go. He was the first to appreciate the idea, and — Frida!” she called into the hall towards the kitchen, “we will have dinner at once, now, please — he always talked so intelligently about it; and now if he’s where you can superintend the rehearsals, it will be the greatest success. How in the world did you find out he was here?”
She came out of her room, in surprising repair, with this question, and the rest of their talk went on through dinner.
It appeared that Maxwell had heard of Godolphin’s presence from Grayson, whom he met in the street, and who told him that Godolphin had made a complete failure of his venture. His combination had gone to pieces at Cleveland, and his company were straggling back to New York as they could. Godolphin was deeply in debt to them all, and to everybody else; and yet the manager spoke cordially of him, and with no sort of disrespect, as if his insolvency were only an affair of the moment, which he would put right. Louise took the same view of it, and she urged Maxwell to consider how Godolphin had promptly paid him, and would always do so.
“Probably I got the pay of some poor de
vil who needed it worse,” said Maxwell.
She said, “Nonsense! The other actors will take care of all that. They are so good to each other,” and she blamed Maxwell for not going to see Godolphin at once.
“That was what I did,” he answered, “but he wasn’t at home. He was to be at home after dinner.”
“Well, that makes it all the more providential,” said Louise; her piety always awoke in view of favorable chances. “You mustn’t lose any time. Better not wait for the coffee.”
“I think I’ll wait for the coffee,” said Maxwell. “It’s no use going there before eight.”
“No,” she consented. “Where is he stopping?”
“At the Coleman House.”
“The Coleman House? Then if that wretch should see you?” She meant the manager of Mrs. Harley.
“He wouldn’t know me, probably,” Maxwell returned, scornfully. “But if you think there’s any danger of his laying hold of me, and getting the play away before Godolphin has a chance of refusing it, I’ll go masked. I’m tired of thinking about it. What sort of lunch did you have?”
“I had the best time in the world. You ought to have come with me, Brice. I shall make you, the next one. Oh, and guess who was there! Mr. Ray!”
“Our Mr. Ray?” Maxwell breathlessly demanded.
“There is no other, and he’s the sweetest little dear in the world. He isn’t so big as you are, even, and he’s such a merry spirit; he hasn’t the bulk your gloom gives you. I want you to be like him, Brice. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go into society, too.”
“If I’d gone into society to-day, I should have missed seeing Grayson, and shouldn’t have known Godolphin was in town.”
“Well, that is true, of course. But if you get your play into Godolphin’s hands, you’ll have to show yourself a little, so that nice people will be interested in it. You ought to have heard Mr. Ray celebrate it. He piped up before the whole table.”
Louise remembered what Ray said very well, and she repeated it to a profound joy in Maxwell. It gave him an exquisite pleasure, and it flattered him to believe that, as the hostess had said in response, they, the nice people, must see it, though he had his opinion of nice people, apart from their usefulness in seeing his play. To reward his wife for it all, he rose as soon as he had drunk his coffee, and went out to put on his hat and coat. She went with him, and saw that he put them on properly, and did not go off with half his coat-collar turned up. After he got his hat on, she took it off to see whether his cow-lick was worse than usual.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 634