The Story of a Play Part 5

"I see that you're not sure of it. We must go over it before he comes.

He hasn't been here yet?"

"Not yet."

"Why are you so quiet, Brice? Is anything the matter? You look tired."

"I'm not particularly tired."

"Then you are worried. What is it?"

"Oh, you would have to know, sooner or later." He took a letter from his pocket and gave it to her. "It came just after I had finished my morning's work."

She pulled it out of the envelope and read:

"MANCHESTER-BY-THE-SEA, Friday.

"DEAR SIR: I beg leave to relinquish any claim that you may feel I have established to the play you have in hand. As it now stands, I do not see my part in it, and I can imagine why you should be reluctant to make further changes in it, in order to meet my requirements.

"If I can be of any service to you in placing the piece, I shall be glad to have you make use of me.

"Yours truly, "LAUNCELOT G.o.dOLPHIN."

"You blame _me_!" she said, after a blinding moment, in which the letter darkened before her eyes, and she tottered in her walk. She gave it back to him as she spoke.

"What a pa.s.sion you have for blaming!" he answered, coldly. "If I fixed the blame on you it wouldn't help."

"No," Louise meekly a.s.sented, and they walked along towards their cottage. They hardly spoke again before they reached it and went in.

Then she asked, "Did you expect anything like this from the way he parted with you yesterday?"

Maxwell gave a bitter laugh. "From the way we parted yesterday I was expecting him early this afternoon, with the world in the palm of his hand, to lay it at my feet. He all but fell upon my neck when he left me. I suppose his not actually doing it was an actor's intimation that we were to see each other no more."

"I wish you had nothing to do with actors!" said Louise.

"_They_ appear to have nothing to do with me," said Maxwell. "It comes to the same thing."

They reached the cottage, and sat down in the little parlor where she had left him so hopefully at work in the morning, where they had talked his play over so jubilantly the night before.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, after an abysmal interval.

"Nothing. What is there to do?"

"You have a right to an explanation; you ought to demand it."

"I don't need any explanation. The case is perfectly clear. G.o.dolphin doesn't want my play. That is all."

"Oh, Brice!" she lamented. "I am so dreadfully sorry, and I know it was my fault. Why don't you let me write to him, and explain--"

Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't want any explanation. He doesn't want the play, even. We must make up our minds to that, and let him go.

Now we can try it with your managers."

Louise felt keenly the unkindness of his calling them her managers, but she was glad to have him unkind to her; deep within her Unitarianism she had the Puritan joy in suffering for a sin; her treatment of G.o.dolphin's suggestion of a skirt-dance, while very righteous in itself, was a sin against her husband's interest, and she would rather he were unkind to her than not. The sooner she was punished for it and done with it, the better; in her unscientific conception of life, the consequences of a sin ended with its punishment. If Maxwell had upbraided her with the bitterness she merited, it would have been to her as if it were all right again with G.o.dolphin. His failure to do so left the injury unrepaired, and she would have to do something. "I suppose you don't care to let me see what you've written to-day?"

"No, not now," said Maxwell, in a tone that said, "I haven't the heart for it."

They sat awhile without speaking, and then she ventured, "Brice, I have an idea, but I don't know what you will think of it. Why not take G.o.dolphin's letter on the face of it, and say that you are very sorry he must give up the play, and that you will be greatly obliged to him if he can suggest some other actor? That would be frank, at least."

Maxwell broke into a laugh that had some joy in it. "Do you think so? It isn't my idea of frankness exactly."

"No, of course not. You always say what you mean, and you don't change.

That is what is so beautiful in you. You can't understand a nature that is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow."

"Oh, I think I can," said Maxwell, with a satirical glance.

"Brice!" she softly murmured; and then she said, "Well, I don't care. He _is_ just like a woman."

"You didn't like my saying so last night."

"That was a different thing. At any rate, it's I that say so now, and I want you to write that to him. It will bring him back flying. Will you?"

"I'll think about it," said Maxwell; "I'm not sure that I want G.o.dolphin back, or not at once. It's a great relief to be rid of him, in a certain way, though a manager might be worse slavery. Still, I think I would like to try a manager. I have never shown this play to one, and I know the Odeon people in Boston, and, perhaps--"

"You are saying that to comfort me."

"I wouldn't comfort you for worlds, my dear. I am saying this to distress you. But since I have worked that love-business over, it seems to me much less a one-part play, and if I could get a manager to take a fancy to it I could have my own way with it much better; at least, he wouldn't want me to take all the good things out of the other characters' mouths and stuff them into Haxard's."

"Do you really think so?"

"I really thought so before I got G.o.dolphin's letter. That made him seem the one and only man for me."

"Yes," Louise a.s.sented, with a sad intelligence.

Maxwell seemed to have got some strength from confronting his calamity.

At any rate, he said, almost cheerfully, "I'll read you what I wrote this morning," and she had to let him, though she felt that it was taking her at a moment when her wish to console him was so great that she would not be able to criticise him. But she found that he had done it so well there was no need of criticism.

"You are wonderful, Brice!" she said, in a transport of adoration, which she indulged as simply his due. "You are miraculous! Well, this is the greatest triumph yet, even of _your_ genius. How you have seized the whole idea! And so subtly, so delicately! And so completely disguised!

The girl acts just as a girl _would_ have acted. How could you know it?"

"Perhaps I've seen it," he suggested, demurely.

"No, no, you _didn't_ see it! That is the amusing part of it. You were as blind as a bat all the time, and you never had the least suspicion; you've told me so."

"Well, then, I've seen it retrospectively."

"Perhaps that way. But I don't believe you've seen it at all. You've divined it; and that's where your genius is worth all the experience in the world. The girl is twice as good as the man, and you never experienced a girl's feelings or motives. You divined them. It's pure inspiration. It's the prophet in you!"

"You'll be stoning me next," said Maxwell. "I don't think the man is so very bad, even if I didn't divine him."