Mother of men, grown strong in givingHonor to them thy lights have led,sang the men. Yes, thought Harry, there was plenty of honor to give. Would that he might ever be one of those to whom such honor was due, but that was not to be thought of. It was enough for him to be one of those who were led by those lights. Yes, that was the first step, steadfastly to follow the light that the grave Mother held above and before him; to keep his eyes constantly on it, never looking down or behind.Rich in the toil of thousands living,Proud of the deeds of thousands dead,Deeds, deeds! That was what counted; any one could see visions and dream dreams; the veriest fool could meanwell. Oh, might a merciful Heaven help him to convert into deeds the lofty ideals that now surged within his brain!—What a ripping song that was, and how well it sounded to hear a thousand men singing it together! He forgot Aunt Cecilia for a moment, and checked his pace near the door to hear the last verse.Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging,Under whose feet the years are cast,Heir to an ageless empire, rangingOver the future and the past—Half blinded with tears he staggered out into the empty vestibule and steadied himself for a second against a pillar. He never had realized before how much it all meant to him, how he loved what he was leaving. And yet—"Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging"—he had never quite caught the full meaning of those words. They now seemed, in a way, to soften the pain of parting, to give him comfort and strength with which to face the years. Surely growing old would not be so bad if one could think of the spirit of youth as still there, alive, unchanging, spreading joy and hope through the world!And then, sweet and sudden as a breeze at sundown came the thought to him that here lay his life's work, his own little mission in the world: in using his intelligence and his power of interpretation, the only gifts he could discover himself as possessing, to guide and assist those who happened to come a little after him in the long procession of human life—in becoming, in short, a teacher. A sudden feeling of calmness and surety took possession of him; he was able to consider himself and his place in the world with a more complete detachment than he had ever before attained. He found himself able, for the moment, to rate his powers and limitations exactly as an unprejudiced observer might have done. Within him he suddenly, unmistakably felt those qualities of priest and prophet which, combined with that of the scholar, make up the ideal teacher."Spirit of youth," he whispered, "to you I dedicate myself, such as I am, and my life, such as it may be."He stood still for a moment and listened as the great chorus behind the closed door brought the song to a finish, ending on a note both solemn and exalted. For a secondor two there was silence, and then there burst forth the sound of the Yale cheer. The contrast between the last notes of the song and the brazen bellow of that cheer, hallowed by the memories of a hundred close-fought fields, struck Harry as both dramatic and comic, and caused a corresponding change in his own mood."Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging!" he quoted again, laughing. Then he hurried off to say good-by to his aunt.PART IICHAPTER ICAN LOVE BE CONTROLLED BY ADVICE?Madge Elliston lived alone with her mother in a small house on an unpretentious but socially unimpeachable side street, just off one of the main avenues. Their means, as Madge has already intimated, were modest—"modest," as the young lady sprightly put it, "to the point of prudishness." Joseph Elliston, her father, had been a brilliant and promising young professor when her mother married him, with, as people said, a career before him. If by career they meant affluence, they were wholly right in saying it was all before him. But though the two married on his prospects, they could not fairly have been said to have made an unwise venture. Nothing but death had kept Joseph Elliston from becoming a popular and respected teacher, a foremost authority on economics, the author of standard works on that subject, and the possessor of a comfortable income. But he had died when Madge, his only child, was five years old, leaving his small and sorrowing family barely enough to live on.The straitened circumstances in which the sad event threw Mrs. Elliston and her daughter were somewhat relieved by the generosity of the only sister of the widow, Eliza Scharndorst, herself a widow and the possessor of a large fortune. She was extremely fond of Madge, who always got on beautifully with her "Aunt Tizzy"—an infantile corruption allowed to survive into maturity—having more in common with her, if the truth must be known, than with her mother. She was a festive soul, much given to entertaining, and she was not long in discovering that the assistance of her niece was a distinct asset in making her home attractive to guests. It is not to be wondered at that Madge's occasional services in the way of decorating a dinner table or brightening up an otherwise stodgy reception would redound to her materialbenefit as well as to her spiritual welfare. Such good things as trips to Bermuda, occasional new frocks and instruction under the best music masters, came her way so frequently that by the time we next meet her, nearly five years after our last sight of her, Madge was a far better dowered young woman, socially speaking, than the penniless orphaned daughter of a college professor could normally hope to be.For when we next see her Miss Elliston is—and in no mere figurative sense—holding the center of the stage. A real stage in a real theater, under the full blaze of real footlights, and if no real audience sits on the other side of those footlights, it is no great matter, for a very real audience will sit there soon enough. On Friday night, to be exact, and this is Tuesday. To be even more exact, it is the first formal, dress rehearsal of an amateur performance of "The Beggar's Opera" (immortal work!) organized primarily for charitable purposes by a number of prominent citizens, among them Mrs. Rudolph Scharndorst, and secondarily, if we are to give any weight to the opinion of those present at the rehearsal, for the purpose of giving scope to the talents of Mrs. Rudolph Scharndorst's niece.For Madge is cast for the part of Polly Peachum, heroine of the piece. And if there was originally the slightest doubt as to the wisdom of such an assignment, it has vanished into thin air before now. For Madge is lovely—! It is not merely a matter of voice; there never was any doubt but that she had the best voice available for the part. What the scattered few in the dark auditorium are busy admiring now is the extraordinary charm, grace, actual beauty, even, of the girl performing before them. The more so because it is all so unattended; no one thought that she would give that effect on the stage. Of a type usually described as "attractive," slight and rather short, with hair sandy rather than golden, and a face distinguished only by a nice pair of blue eyes and a particularly ingratiating smile, Madge could not fairly be expected to turn herself into a vision of commanding beauty and charm with the slight external aids of paint and powder and a position behind a row of strong lights.The only unimpressed and indifferent person in the theater was the coach. That was quite as it should be, ofcourse; coaches must not exhibit bursts of enthusiasm, like common people. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the coach in question made none of his frequent interruptions during the first few moments of Polly's presence on the stage, but sat silently biting his pencil and frowning in the back row of the theater till after she had finished her second song."One moment!" he cried, running down the aisle. "I'm going to change that song." He exchanged a few whispered remarks with the leader of the orchestra, who had charge of the musical side of the production. "All right—never mind now—go on with the act ... No, don't cross there, Mrs. Peachum; stay where you are, and Miss Elliston! what are the last words of the second line of that song?""'Mothers obey.'""All right—let's have 'em. I didn't get them that time. Go on, please."The act continued, and admiration grew apace. When at length the act reached its close there was a faint but spontaneous outburst of applause from the almost empty theater."Well, what do you think of Madge?" asked Mrs. Scharndorst, waylaying the coach on his progress down the aisle."Oh, she'll do! There's a lot there to improve, though.—Strike for the second act—drinking scene!" This last uttered in a shout as he rushed on down to the stage. Not very fulsome praise, to be sure, but Mrs. Scharndorst knows her man, and is satisfied. Indeed, she respects him the more for not being fulsome.So do the other members of the cast and chorus; at least, if they do respect him, it cannot be for the enthusiasm of his approval. His demeanor, as he stands there on a chair in the orchestra pit, shouting directions to his minions, is not indicative of very profound satisfaction with the progress of the rehearsal."Thompson! If you're going to use your spot on Polly's entrance, for Heaven's sake keep it on her face and not on her feet! I didn't see a thing but her shoes then ... No, you there, that table way down front—so, and oh, Mrs. Smith! is that Tilman's idea of a costume for an old woman, middle class?... I thought so ... no, I'm afraid not! That train might be quite suitable for aduchess, but it won't do for a robber's wife. You see Miss Banks about it, will you please?... Mr. Barnaby! I want to get you and Miss Elliston to go through the business of that Pretty Polly song once again—you're both as stiff as pokers still.... No, just the motions. No, stand on both feet and keep your chest out while you're singing your part, and when she comes in, 'Fondly, fondly,' you half turn round, so—so that when she falls back on your arm she'll have a chance to show more than her chin to the audience.... No, I think I'll have you wait till the encore before you kiss her—it looks flat if you do it too often, and by the bye, Mr. Barnaby, will you make an appointment with Mrs. Adams for to-morrow to get up a dance for that prison scene—'How happy could I be with either'.... Four o'clock—all right.... What song?"This last is in answer to an inquiry from Miss Elliston."Oh, of course—'Can love be controlled by advice'.... Come down here and we'll talk it over. Careful, step in the middle of that chair and you'll be all right ... there!" And Miss Elliston and the great man sit down companionably in the places belonging respectively to the oboe and the trombone, just as though they had been friends from earliest youth.If there is one thing we despise, it is transparent roguishness on the part of an author. Let us hasten to admit, then, that the coach is none other than our friend Harry; a Harry not changed a particle, really, from his undergraduate days, though a Harry, to be sure, in whom the passage of five years has effected certain important developments. Such, for instance, as having become able to coach an amateur production of a musical show. These will be described and accounted for, all in good time. The story cannot be everywhere at once."About that song ... I know nothing about music, of course, but it struck me to-night that that was rather a good tune—one of the best in the show.... It may have been the singing, of course.""Not a bit of it—it's a ripping tune!—Let's see what the trombone part for it looks like.... There isn't any—just those little thingumbobs. Oh, the accompaniment is all on the strings, of course; I forgot.""Well, what I want to get at is, do you think Gay's words are up to it?""Nowhere near. I'd much rather sing some of yours, if that's what you're getting at.... They're not quitejeune fille, either; I just discovered that to-day.""There's a great deal in this show that isn't. We've cut most of it, but there's a good bit left, only no one who hasn't studied the period can spot it.... You needn't tell any one that.—Well, let's see about some words. 'Can love be controlled by advice, will Cupid our mothers obey'—we'll keep that, I think ..."He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket and scribbled rapidly on it. In a minute or two he had evolved the following stanzas, retaining the first four lines of Gay's original song:Can love be controlled by advice?Will Cupid our mothers obey?Though my heart were as frozen as iceAt his flame 'twould have melted away.Now love is enthroned in my heartAll your threats and entreaties are in vain;His power defies all your art,And chiding but adds to my pain.Ah, mother! if ever in youthYour heart by love's anguish was wrung;If ever you thrilled with its truthToo sweet to be spoken or sung;If ever you've longed for life's best,Nor reckoned the issue thereof;If heart ever beat in your breastHave pity on me—for I love!"There!" said he, handing it to the prima donna; "see what you think of that.""Oh ... much better! There'll be much more fun in singing it.""It isn't much in the way of poetry," explained Harry, "but it gives a certain dramatic interest to the song, which is the main thing. You can change anything you want in it, of course; I daresay some of those words are quite unsingable on the notes of the song.""No—I think they'll be all right. Thank you very much; it was hard to make anything out of the other words. Also, I shall be able to tell Mama that you've cut out some of Gay's naughty words and put in some innocent ones of your own instead. She's been just a little worried lately, I think; she seems to have an idea that 'The Beggar's Opera' isn't quite a nice play for a young lady to act in!""Well, one can hardly blame her...." This sentence trailed off into inaudibility as Harry turned to give his attention to some one else coming up with a question at the moment. Perhaps Miss Elliston did not even hear the beginning of the sentence; it is easier to believe that she did not, in view of what followed. Certainly every extenuating circumstance is needed, on both sides, to help account for the fact that so trivial conversation as that which just took place should have led directly to unpleasantness and indirectly to consequences of a far-reaching kind. It is easier to comprehend, also, if one remembers that Miss Elliston's thoughts when she was left alone by Harry occupying the position of the trombone, remained on, or at any rate quite near, the point at which the conversation broke off, whereas Harry's had flown far from it. So that when, after an interval of a few minutes, Harry's voice again became articulate to her in the single isolated sentence "given her something to say to her old frump of a mother," addressed to the leader of the orchestra, she at first misconstrued his meaning, interpreting his remark not as he meant it, as referring to her stage mother, Mrs. Peachum, but as referring to quieting the puritanical scruples of her own mother, Mrs. Elliston.The whole affair hung on an incredibly slender thread of coincidence. If Harry had not unconsciously raised his voice somewhat on that one phrase, if he had not happened to use the word "frump," which might conceivably be twisted into applying to either mother, Miss Elliston would never, even for a moment, have been tempted to attribute the baser meaning to his words. As it was the thought did not remain in her head above five seconds, at the outside; she knew Harry better than to believe seriously that he would say such a thing. But by another unfortunate chance Harry happened to be looking her way during those few seconds, and marked her angry flush and the instantaneous glance of indignation and contempt that she shot toward him. He saw her flush die down and her expression soften again, but the natural quickness that had made him realize her state of mind was not long in giving him an explanation of it.All might yet have been well had not Harry's sense of humor played him false. As usually happened at these evening rehearsals he escorted Miss Elliston home, herhouse lying on the way to his. In the course of the walk an unhappy impulse made him refer to the little incident, which had struck him as merely humorous."By the way," said he "your sense of filial duty almost led you astray to-night, didn't it?""Filial duty?""Yes—you thought I was making remarks about your mother to-night when I was talking to Cosgrove about Mrs. Peachum and that song....""Oh, that—!" Any one who knew her might have expected Miss Elliston to laugh and continue with something like "Yes, I know; wasn't it ridiculous of me?" since she really knew perfectly well that Harry was talking about Mrs. Peachum. That she did not is due partly to the fatigue incident to rehearsing a leading part in an opera in addition to teaching school from nine till one every day, and partly to the eternally inexplicable depths of the feminine nature. She had been very much ashamed of herself for having even for a moment done that injustice to Harry, and she wished intensely that the affair might be buried in the deepest oblivion. Harry's opening of the subject, consequently, seemed to her tactless and a trifle brutal. She had done penance all the evening for her after all very trifling mistake; why should he insist upon humiliating her this way?... Obviously she was very tired!"Yes," went on Harry, "don't expect me to believe that you were angry on behalf of Mrs. Peachum!""No. I suppose I had a right to be angry on behalf of my own mother, if I wanted to, though.""But I wasn't talking about your mother—you know that!""Oh, weren't you?""Well, do you think so?""How should I know? I was only eavesdropping, of course, I have no right to think anything about it.""Madge, don't be silly.""Well?""Do you really, honestly think that I am guilty of having spoken slightingly of your mother? Just answer me that, yes or no.""As I say, I have no right to any opinion on the subject. I only heard something not intended—""Oh, the—" The remainder of this exclamation was fortunately lost in the collar of Harry's greatcoat. "You had better give me back that song—I presume you won't want to sing it now.""Why not? Art is above all personal feelings." It was mere wilfulness that led her to utter this cynical remark. What she really wanted to say was "Of course I want to sing it, and I know you meant Mrs. Peachum," but somehow the other answer was given before she knew it."Madge, you may not know it, but you are positively insulting.""Oh, Harry—! Who began being insulting? Not that I mind your insulting me....""Oh. That's the way it is, is it? I see." They were now standing talking at the foot of Madge's front steps. Harry continued, very quietly: "Now perhaps you'd better give me back that song.""I don't see the necessity.""I'll be damned if you shall sing it now!" His voice remained low, but passion sounded in it as unmistakably as if he had shouted. The remark was, in fact, made in an uncontrollable burst of anger, necessitating the severing of all diplomatic relations."Just as you like, of course." Madge's tone, cold, expressionless, hopelessly polite, is equivalent to the granting of a demanded passport. "Here it is. Good-night.""Good-night."So they parted, in a white heat of anger. But being both fairly sensible people, in the main, beside being the kind of people whose anger however violently it may burn at first, does not last long, they realized before sleep closed their eyes that night that the quarrel would not last over another day.Morning brought to Harry, at any rate, a complete return of sanity, and before breakfast he sat down and wrote the following note:Dear Madge:I send back the song merely as a token of the abjectness of my submission—I don't suppose you will want to sing it now. I can't tell you how sorry I am about my behavior last night; I can only ask you to attribute asmuch, of it as possible to the fatigue of business and forgive the rest!Harry.which he enclosed in an envelope with the words of the song and sent to Madge by a messenger boy.Madge received it while she was at breakfast. She went out and told the boy to wait for an answer, and went back and finished her breakfast before writing a reply. Her face was noticeably grave as she ate, and it became even graver when at last she sat down at her desk and started to put pen to paper. She wrote three pages of note-paper, read them, and tore them up. She then wrote a page and a half, taking more time over them than over the three. This she also tore up. Then she sat inactive at her desk for several minutes, and at last, seeing that she was due at her school in a few minutes, she took up another sheet of paper and wrote: "All right—my fault entirely. M. E.," and sent it off by the boy.When Harry saw her at the rehearsal that evening she greeted him exactly as if nothing had happened. She had rather less to say to him than was customary during rehearsals, but Harry was so busy and preoccupied he did not notice that. He did notice that she sang the original words to the disputed song, which, as he told himself, was just what he expected.For the next two days he was fairly buried in responsibility and detail and hardly conscious of any feeling whatever beyond an intense desire to have the performance over. It was not until this desire was partially fulfilled, the curtain actually risen on the Friday night and the performance well under way, that he was able to sit back and draw a free breath. The moment came when, having seen that all was well behind the scenes, he dropped into the back of the box occupied by Aunt Selina and one or two chosen friends to watch the progress of the play from the front.Then, for the first time, he was able to look at it more from the point of view of a spectator than that of a creator. Now that his work was completed and must stand or fall on its own merit, he could watch from a wholly detached position. On the whole, he rather enjoyed the sensation. It occurred to him, for instance, as quite a new thought,that the excellent make-up of the stolid Mr. Dawson in the part of Peachum very largely counteracted his vocal "dulness"; and that Mrs. Smith as Mrs. Peachum, in spite of the innumerable sillinesses and bad tricks that had been his despair for weeks, was making an extremely good impression upon the audience.Then Madge made her entrance, and he saw at a glance, as he had never seen it before, just how good Madge was. She had a certain way of carrying her head, a certain sureness in adjusting her movements to her speech, a certain judgment in projecting her voice that went straight to the spot. Madge was a born actress, that was all there was to it; she ought to have made the stage her profession. He smiled inwardly as he thought how many people would make that remark after this performance. Then his amusement gave place to a sudden and strange resentment against the very idea of Madge's going on the stage; a resentment he made no effort either to understand or account for....The strings in the orchestra quavered a few languorous notes and Madge started her song "Can love be controlled by advice." Her voice was a singularly sweet one, of no great volume and yet possessed of a certain carrying quality. The excellence of her instruction, combined with her own good taste, had brought it to a state of what, for that voice, might be called perfection. She also had the good sense never to sing anything too big for her. But though her voice might not be suited to Wagner or Strauss it was far better suited to certain simpler things than a larger voice might have been, and the song she was singing now was one of these. Probably no more happy combination could be effected between singer and song than that of Madge and the slow, plaintive, seventeenth-century melody of "Grim king of the ghosts," which Gay had the good sense to incorporate into his masterpiece.To say that the audience was spellbound by her rendering of the song would be to stretch a point. It sat, for the most part, silently attentive, enjoying it very much and thinking that it would give her a good round of applause and an encore at the end. Harry, standing in the obscurity of the back part of Aunt Selina's box, was of very much the same mind. For about half of the song, that is. For near the end of the first verse he suddenlyrealized that Madge was singing not Gay's words, but his own.It was absurd, of course, but at that realization the whole world seemed suddenly to change. The floor beneath his feet became clouds, the theater a corner of paradise, the people in it choirs of marvelous ethereal beings, Mrs. Peachum (alias Smith) a ministrant seraph, Madge's voice the music of the spheres, and Madge herself, from being an unusually nice girl of his acquaintance, became....What nonsense! he told himself; the idea of getting so worked up at hearing his own words sung on a stage!—You fool, replied another voice within him, you know perfectly well that that's not it at all.—Don't tell me, replied the other Harry, the sensible one; such things don't happen, except in books; they don't happen to real people—ME, for instance.—Why not? obstinately inquired the other; why not you, as well as any one else?—Well, I can't stop to argue about it now, the practical Harry answered; I've got to go out and see that people are ready for their cues.He went out, and found everything running perfectly smoothly. People were standing waiting for their entrances minutes ahead of time, the electricians were at their posts, the make-up people had finished their work, the scene-shifters and property men had put everything in readiness for setting the next scene; no one even asked him a question. He flitted about for a few moments on imaginary errands, asking various people if all was going well; but the real question that he kept asking himself all the time was Is this IT? Is this IT?"I don't know!" he said at last, loudly and petulantly, and several people turned to see whom he was reproving now.When he got back to the box he found Madge still singing the last verse of her song. He wondered how many times she had had to repeat it, and hoped Cosgrove was living up to his agreement not to give more than one encore to each song. In reality this was her first encore; his hectic trip behind the scenes had occupied a much shorter time than he supposed. Madge was making a most exquisite piece of work of her little appeal to maternal sympathy; she was actually taking the second verse sitting down, leaning forward with her arms on a table in an attitude of conversationalpleading. He had not told her to do that; it was so hard to make effective that he would not have dared to suggest it. When she reached the line, "If heart ever beat in your breast" she suddenly rose, slightly threw back her arms and head, and sang the words on a wholly new note of restrained passion, beautifully dramatic and suggestive. The house burst into applause, but Harry was seized with a fit of unholy mirth at the irony of the situation—Madge, perfectly indifferent, singing those words, while he, their author, consumed with an all-devouring flame, stood stifling his passion in a dark corner. An insane desire seized him to run out to the middle of the stage and shout at the top of his voice "Have pity on me, for I love!" It would be true then. He supposed, however, that people might think it peculiar.From then on, as long as Madge held the stage, he stood rooted to the spot, unable to lift his eyes from her. Presently her lover came in, and they started the lovely duet, "Pretty Polly, say." At the end of the encore, according to Harry's instructions, Barnaby leaned over and kissed his Polly on the mouth. A sudden and intense dislike for Mr. Barnaby at that moment overcame Harry....The act ended; the house went wild again; the curtain flopped up and down with no apparent intention of ever stopping; ushers rushed down the aisles with great beribboned bunches of flowers. This gave Harry an idea; as soon as the second act was safely under way he rushed out to the nearest florist's shop and commandeered all the American Beauty roses in the place, to be delivered to Miss Elliston with his card at the end of the next act.As he was going out of the shop he stopped to look at some peculiar little pink and white flowers in a vase near the door."What are those?" he asked."Bleeding hearts," said the florist's clerk. "Just up from Florida; very hard to get at this time of year."Harry stood still, thinking. If he sent those—would she Know—Of course she would, answered the practical Harry immediately; she would not only Know but would call him a fool for his pains.—Oh, shut up! retorted the other."I'll have these then, instead of the roses, please," he said aloud. "All of them, and don't forget the card."They did not meet till after the performance was over. He caught sight of her making a sort of triumphal progress through the back of the stage, on her way to the dressing rooms, and deliberately placed himself in her path. She was looking rather surprisingly solemn, he noticed. Her face lighted up, however, when she saw him. She smiled, at least."Well, what didyouthink of it?" she asked."I think the performance was very creditable," he answered. "To say what I think of you would be compromising."She laughed and went on without making any reply. He could not see her face, but something gave him the impression that her smile did not last very long after she had turned away from him.He walked home alone through the crisp March night, breathing deeply and trying to reduce his teeming brain to a state of order and clarity. The walk from the theater home was not sufficient for this; he walked far beyond his house and all the way back again before he could think clearly enough. At last he raised his eyes to the comfortable stars and spoke a few words aloud in a low, calm voice."I really think," he said, "that this is IT. I really do think so ... But I must be very careful," he added, to himself; "verycareful. I must take no chances—this time. Both on Madge's account and on mine.""No," he added after a moment; "not on my account. On Madge's."CHAPTER IICONGREVELittle had happened to mark the greater part of the time that had elapsed since Harry's graduation. For three years he had studied hard for his doctor's degree, and during the fourth year he had been set to teaching English literature to freshmen, which task, on the whole, he accomplished with marked success. But during the fifth year, the year in which we next see him, he was not teaching freshmen, though he was still living in New Haven, and working, according to his own accounts, like a galley slave. The events which led up to this state of things form a matter of some moment in his career.These began with the production, during his fourth year out of college, of a play of his by the college dramatic association. Or, to be more exact, it really began some months before that, when Harry, leaving a theater one evening after witnessing a poor play, had remarked to his companion of the moment: "I actually believe that I could write a better play than that." To which the friend made the obvious answer, "Why don't you, then?" "I will," replied Harry, and he did.It was his first venture in that field of composition. In all his literary activities he had never before, to borrow his own phrase, committed dramaturgy. To the very fact that his maiden effort came so late Harry was wont, in later years, to attribute a large measure of his success. His idea was that if he had begun earlier his first results would have been so excruciatingly bad as to discourage him from sustained effort in that direction.However this may be, the play was judged the best of those submitted in a competition organized by the dramatic association, and was produced by it during the following winter with a very fair amount of success. Nobody could fairly have called it a remarkable play, but neither could any one have been justified in calling it a bad one. Its theme was, apart from its setting, singularly characteristic of the subsequent style of its author and may be said tohave struck the tragi-comic note that sounded through all his later work. It concerned the experiences of a struggling young English author, poor, but of gentle birth, who is first seen inveighing against the snobbery, coldness and indifference shown toward him by people of wealth and position, and later, after coming unexpectedly into a peerage and a large fortune, is horrified to find himself forced into displaying the very qualities which he had so fiercely condemned in others. The machinery of the play was somewhat artificial, but the characterization and dramatic interest were skilfully worked out. The dialogue was everywhere delightful and the contrast afforded between the conscientious, introspective sincerity of the young author and the gaily unscrupulous casuistry of his wife was a forecast, if not actually an early example, of his best work.Harry was never blind to the faults of the play, but he remained convinced that it was good in the main, and, what was more important, retained his interest in dramatic composition. He worked hard during the following spring and summer and at length evolved another play, which he called "Chances" and believed was a great improvement upon his first work. Early in August he sent the play to a New York manager to whom he had obtained an introduction and after a week or two made an appointment with him.The secret trepidation with which he first entered the office of the great, the redoubtable Leo Bachmann was largely allayed by the appearance of the manager. He was a large flabby man, with scant stringy hair and a not unpleasant smile. He sat heavily back in an office chair and puffed continually at a much-chewed cigar, the ashes of which fell unnoticed and collected in the furrows of his waistcoat. He spoke in a soft thick voice, with a strong German accent. Harry did not see anything particularly terrifying about him."Ah, yes, Mr. Vimbourne," said the manager when Harry had made himself known. "You have sent me a play, yes? Ah, here it is.... Unfortunately I have not had time to read it; I am very, very busy just now, but my man Jennings has read it and tells me it is very nice. Very nice, indeed ..." he puffed in ruminative silence for a few seconds. "Could you come back next week, sayFriday, Mr. Vimbourne? and we will talk it over. I am sorry to trouble you, but you see I am so very, very busy...."Harry made another appointment and left, not wholly dissatisfied. He returned, ten days afterward, to his second interview, which was an almost exact replica of the first. He allowed himself to be put off another ten days, but when he returned for the third time and was greeted by precisely the same soft words he was irritated and hardly able to conceal the fact."Ah, yes, your play," said the manager, as though he had just heard of it for the first time. "Jennings was speaking to me of it only the other night. I am sorry to say I have not read it yet." He took the manuscript from a pile on his desk and turned over the leaves. "I am sorry—very sorry—I have so little time....""I don't believe you, Mr. Bachmann," said Harry."Ah?" said the manager, without the slightest apparent interest. "Why not, Mr. Vimbourne?""Well, you turned straight to the best scene in it just now, for one thing.... Beside, you wouldn't keep me hanging on this way if you didn't see something in it, and if you see anything in it of course you've read it. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bachmann, that isn't my idea of business."Mr. Bachmann's next remark was so unexpected that Harry nearly swooned in his chair. "I read it the day after it came," he said softly."Then why on earth didn't you say so in the first place?" stammered Harry.The manager made no reply for some moments, but sat silently puffing and turning over the pages of Harry's manuscript."I like to know people," he murmured at last, very gently and with apparent irrelevance. Harry, however, saw the bearing of the remark and suddenly felt extraordinarily small. He had been rather proud of his little burst of spirit and independence; he now saw that Leo Bachmann had drawn it from him with the ease and certainty of touch with which a musician produces a note from a flute. He wondered, abjectly, how many other self-satisfied young authors had sat where he sat and been played upon by that great puffing mass of pulp.Bachmann was the next to speak. "I like your play very much, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "It is very nice—some things in it not so good, but on the whole, it is very nice. I think I vill try to produce it, Mr. Vimbourne, but not yet—not till I see how my September plays go. I shall keep yours in reserve, and then, later, we may try it. About the first of November, when the Fifth Avenue crowd comes back to town...." He smiled slightly. "They are the people that vill vant to see it. Not Harlem. Not Brooklyn. The four hundred. Even so," he continued, ruminatively, "even so, I shall not make on it."This seemed to Harry a good opening for a proposition he had been longing to make since the very first but had never quite dared. "If you want me to put anything up on it, Mr. Bachmann, why—I....""No," said Mr. Bachmann gently; "I never do that, I produce my own plays, for my own reasons. I vill pay you a sum, down. And a small royalty, perhaps—after the hundredth performance."Harry looked up and smiled, and the manager smiled back at him. His smile grew quite broad, almost a laugh, in fact. Then he rose from his chair—the first time Harry had seen him out of it—and clasped Harry's hand between his two large plump ones."I think we shall get on very well, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "Very well, indeed. I vill let you know when rehearsals begin. And you must write more—a great deal more. But—vait till after the rehearsals!""Yes, I think I understand you," said Harry, laughing. "I'll wait. And I'll come to the rehearsals, too!"In October the rehearsals actually started, and Harry began to see what he told Mr. Bachmann he thought he understood. Day after day he sat in the dark draughty theater and watched the people on the stage slash and cut and change his carefully constructed dialogue without offering a word of remonstrance. At first the pleasure of seeing his own work take tangible form, on a real professional stage and by the agency of real professional actors more than made up for the loss. Then as the rehearsals went on, he perceived that there was a very real reason for every cut and change, and that the play benefited tremendously thereby. He began to see how acting accomplishesa great deal of what he had always considered the office of dialogue. A dialogue of five speeches, to take a concrete example, on the probable reasons why a certain person did not arrive when he was expected was made unnecessary by one of the characters crossing the stage and looking out of a window at just the right moment and with just the right facial expression.Harry made no secret of his conviction that his play improved immensely under the care of Bachmann and his people. His attitude was that they knew everything about play-producing and he knew nothing, and that the extraordinary thing was that he had been able to provide them with any dramatic material whatever. He joked about it with the actors and managers, when occasion offered, as callously as if he had been a third person, and rather surprised himself by the light-heartedness he displayed. Whether this was entirely genuine, whether it did not contain elements of a pose, a desire to appear as a man of the theatrical world, a fear of falling into all the usual errors of youthful playwrights, he did not at first ask himself.One day, about a week before the opening night, he received a jolt that made him look upon himself and his calling in rather a new light. This came through an unexpected agent—none other, indeed, than a woman of the cast, and not the player of the principal female part at that, but a lesser light, Bertha Bensel by name, a plain but pleasant little person of uncertain age. Harry was lunching alone with her and carrying on in what had become his customary style when talking of his play."You know," he was saying, "I thought at one time I had written a play, but I haven't, I've written a moving picture show. Everybody is writing movies these days, even those that try to write anything else, which just shows. I'm going regularly into the movie business, after this. Seriously. And I intend to write the real kind of movies, the kind that don't bother about the characters at all, but just dramatize scenery. I shall call things by their proper names, too. Let's see—a Devonshire parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for a Louis Onze château with a Le Nôtre garden. She discovers, just in time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana prairie, who happensalong just at the right moment. The situation is still awkward, however, because the parsonage finds that her prairie has a wife living, a New York gambling hell, whom he hates but who won't release him. So the parsonage refuses his disinterested offers and starts life for herself. After various adventures with a South Carolina plantation, an Indian Ocean trawler, an Argentine pampas and the Scala theater at Milan, the poor parsonage ends up in a London sweat shop, to which she is at last discovered by the Scotch moor, who had been looking for her all these years. Embrace. Passed by the national board of censors."Miss Bensel smiled, but did not seem to see much humor in this foolery. That was due, thought Harry, to the fatigue of her long morning's work, and he determined not to bother her with any more nonsense. The silence which he allowed to ensue, however, was broken by an unexpected remark from hisvis-à-vis, who said with a dispassionate air:"I think, Mr. Wimbourne, you stand in a great danger.""Danger?""Yes, that is, I hope you do. If not, I'm very much disappointed in you.""Thank you so much, but just how?""You're in danger of getting to take your art as lightly as you talk about it. Then you'll be lost, for good. It's a real danger. I've seen the thing happen before, to people of as much talent as you, or nearly so."Harry looked at her in blank astonishment, and she went on:"If you go on talking that way about your profession, you'll get to think that way and finallybethat way. All roses and champagne—nothing worth while. You may go on writing plays, but they'll get sillier and sillier, even if they get more and more popular. So your life will pass away in frivolity and popularity.... That's not your place in the world, Mr. Wimbourne. You've got talent—perhaps more. You know that? This play, now. I say nothing about the dialogue, because good dialogue is not so rare—though yours is the best I've seen for some time—but how about the rest of it, the story, the ideas? It's good stuff—you know it is."Harry leaned back in his chair and tapped the tablemeditatively with a spoon. He had the lack of self-consciousness that enables a person to take blame exactly in the spirit in which it is given, with no alloying mixture of embarrassment or resentment."Yes," he said after a while, "I suppose you're right about it. I have a certain responsibility.... I suppose the stuff is good, when all is said and done—though I don't dare to think it can be."Miss Bensel leaned forward with her elbows on the table and allowed her face to relax into a smile, a curious little smile that did not part her lips but drew down the corners of her mouth."That's it—I thought that probably was it! You're so modest you're afraid to take yourself seriously. Well, that's a pretty good fault; I think on the whole it's better than taking yourself too seriously. But don't do it, even so. Take it from me, my dear boy, you can't accomplish anything worth while in this world,anything, whatever it is, unless you take your work seriously—at bottom."Harry did a good deal of serious thinking on the subject during the rest of the day, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Miss Bensel was right. He thought of Dickens' famous utterance on the subject of being flippant about one's life's work; he thought of the example of Congreve. Congreve, there was an appropriate warning! Congreve, whose life was a duel between the painstaking artist and the polished man-about-town, who never would speak other than lightly of his best work, whose boast and whose shame it was deliberately to stifle the fires of his own genius. Was he, Harry, guilty of something like the pose of Congreve? He thought of his attitude of exaggeratedcamaraderiewith the actors and managers, of his attitude toward his own work; he realized that frivolity had become not merely a pose, but a habit. Was he not, in such doings, following in the steps of Congreve—the man who insisted that the work that made him famous had been written for the sole purpose of whiling away the tedium of convalescence after an illness?As he watched his own play being enacted before his eyes that afternoon he realized that his work was, in the main, good, and that he had known it all along. He hadfelt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's astonishingly prompt (as he had since learned it to be) acceptance of it had given conclusive proof of it. If anything further was needed, he had it in the enthusiasm with which the actors played it and spoke of it. Somehow, by some incredible chance, the divine gift had fallen upon him. To belittle that gift, to fail to devote his best efforts to making the most of it, would be to shirk his life's duty.The third act, upon which most of the work of the afternoon was done, drew to its close. It had been immensely shortened by cuts; Harry was not sorry, though he missed some of what he had thought the best lines in the play. Then the heroine made her final exit, and Harry suddenly realized she had done so without her and the hero's having delivered two little speeches that ought to have come just before; speeches on which he had spent much care and labor. Those two lines had, in fact, contained the whole gist of the play, or at any rate driven home its thesis in a particularly striking way. The point of the play was that living was simply a system of chances, and these speeches made clear the distinction between the wrong kind of chancing, the careless, risking-all kind, whose final result was always ruin, and the sober, intelligent, prayerful kind, as shown in the lives of those who, after careful consideration of all the chances that may affect them, do what they decide is best and await the result with the calmness of a Mohammedan fatalist.Harry suddenly became imbued with the profound conviction that those two speeches were absolutely necessary to the understanding of his play. He hastily read over the last half of the act in his typewritten copy, and failed to see how any spectator could catch the true meaning of the work without them. Well, here was a chance to show how seriously he could take his art! The whole affair took on a new and strange momentousness; he stood at this instant, he told himself, at the very turning-point of his artistic career. He would not take the wrong road, cost him what it might; he would not be found wanting.Bachmann was in the theater, sitting in the back row of the orchestra, as was his custom. Harry determined to go straight to him and ask him to put those lines in again. As he walked up the aisle he thought feverishly of the tremendous import of this interview. Bachmannwould refuse at first, he knew that well enough. Bachmann would not easily be convinced by the opinion of an inexperienced scribbler. But Harry was determined not to be beaten; he was prepared to fight, prepared to make a scene, if necessary; prepared to sacrifice the production of his play, if it came to that. He could see Bachmann's slow smile as he reminded him of practical considerations. "Your contract?" "Damn the contract," Harry would reply. "Ha, ha! I've got the whip hand of you there, Mr. Bachmann! I can afford to break all the contracts I want!" "And your career?" retorted Bachmann, with a sneer, but turning ever so slightly pale. "Ho! my career! What the devil do I care for my career! I choose to write for all time, not for my own! I....""Vell, Mr. Vimbourne," Bachmann, the live, fleshly Bachmann, was saying in a startlingly mild and everyday tone of voice, "what can I do for you?""Oh ... I just wanted to speak to you about this last scene," said Harry, trying hard to keep his voice steady. "They've cut out two lines just before Miss Cleves' exit that I think ought to be kept.""Let's see."Harry handed him the manuscript and anxiously watched him as he glanced rapidly over the pages. "They're pretty important lines, really. They explain a lot; I'm afraid people won't understand...." He could feel his voice weakening and his knees trembling, but his determination remained."Burchard!" Bachmann bellowed, in the general direction of the stage."Yes!""What about those two speeches before Miss Cleves' exit?"There was a short and rather flurried silence from the stage, after which the voice of Burchard again emerged:"Miss Cleves said she couldn't make her exit on that line.""Where is she? Tell her to come back and try it."The battle was won without a shot being fired. Harry, almost literally knocked flat by the surprise and relief of the moment, sank into the nearest seat. Bachmann got up and lumbered off toward the stage; Harry leaned his head against the back of his chair and gave himself overto an outburst of internal mirth, at his own expense.He raised his eyes again to the stage. Curiously enough, the first person his glance fell on was Miss Bensel, with her trim little figure and humorously plain face. It seemed to him she was smiling out at him, with a mocking little smile that drew down the corners of her mouth.Everybody knows what happened to the play "Chances"; its history is a page of the American stage. Much has been said and written about it; it has been called a landmark, a stepping-stone, a first ditch, a guiding light, a moral victory, a glorious failure, a promising defeat and various similar things so often that people are tired of the very name of it. What actually happened to it can be told in a few words; it was well received, but not largely attended. It was withdrawn near the end of its fourth week.The critics were unanimous in praising it. Its dialogue was hailed as the ideal dialogue of contemporary comedy. The characterization, the humor of the lines, the universality of the theme, its wonderfully logical and convincing development all received their due meed of praise. It was compared to the comedies of Clyde Fitch, of Oscar Wilde, of Sheridan, and of Congreve—yes, actually Congreve! Harry smiled when he read that, and renewed his resolution never to let the comparison apply in a personal way. But to be seriously compared to Congreve, not Congreve the man but Congreve the author—! The thought made him fairly dizzy.But what took the eye of the critics, the best and soberest of them, that is, more than anything else was the mixture of the humorous and serious shown in the choice of the theme and its development. "To treat the element of humor," wrote one critic, "not as a colored glass through which to look at all life, as in farce, nor as a refreshing contrast to its serious side, as in the 'comic relief' of a host of plays from the Elizabethans down to the present day, but as part and parcel of the very essence of life itself, co-existent with its solemnity, inseparable from its difficulty, companion and friend to its unsolvable mystery; to put people in such a mood that they can laugh at the greatest things in their own lives, neither bitterly nor to give themselves Dutch courage, but for the pure, lifegiving, illuminating exaltation of laughing—this, we take it, is the whole essence and mission of comedy. And this—we say it boldly and in no spirit of empty flattery—is the type of comedy shown in Mr. Wimbourne's play."It is not hard to see how such words should bring joy to the heart of Harry and smiles of admiration and respect to the faces of his friends, from Leo Bachmann right up to Aunt Selina. But they did not bring people to the theater. For the first three performances the attendance was satisfactory; then it began steadily to fall off and by the end of the first week it became merely a question of how long it could survive.Leo Bachmann was, curiously enough, the least affected of all the theater crowd by the poor success of the work. He viewed the discouraging box office reports with an untroubled smile, and cheerfully began rehearsals for a new play. "Never you mind, my boy," he told Harry, "I knew I should not make money off your play. I told you so in the beginning. Never you mind! That is not your fault. It's just the way things go. I have only one word to say to you, and that is—write!" Even in his discouragement Harry could not help feeling that Mr. Bachmann was strangely calm and cheerful.Within a week from the end of the play's run a curious thing happened. A visiting English dramatist and critic, a confirmed self-advertiser, but a writer and thinker of unquestioned brilliancy, and a wit, withal, of international reputation, was greatly struck by the play and wrote an unsolicited letter about it which appeared in the pages of a leading daily."No more striking proof," wrote this self-appointed defender of Harry, "could be offered of the consanguinal intellectual stupidity of the Anglo-Saxon race than I received at a performance of Mr. Harold Wimbourne's play 'Chances' at the —— Theater last night. For the first time during my stay in this country as I looked over the almost empty stalls and realized that this, incomparably the best play running in New York, was also the worst attended, I could have fancied myself actually in my own country."What are the lessons or qualities in Mr. Wimbourne's play which the American people cannot stomach? I suppose, when all is said and done, he has committed the unpardonableoffense of giving them a little of their own medicine. He has rammed down their throats some few corollaries of the Calvinistic doctrines for which the ancestors of the very people who stay away from his play sailed an uncharted sea, conquered a wilderness, and spilt their blood to champion against a usurping power. The Pilgrim fathers founded the United States of America in order to publish the greatness of God and the littleness of man. Their descendants either ignore or condemn one of their number because he does not extol the greatness of man and the littleness of God. Because Mr. Wimbourne ventures to show, in a very mild—if very artistic and compelling way—how slight a hold man has on the moving force of life, God, the universe, a group of atoms—whatever you choose to call the world—he becomes a pariah. He has escaped easily after his first offense, but it will go hard with the Anglo-Saxon character if he is not stoned in the streets after the next one. America is a great and rich country; what does it care about religion or philosophy or art or any of that poppycock? Serious and devout thinking simplyare not done; it has become as great a solecism to mention the name of the Deity in society—except as the hero of a humorous story—as to talk about Kant or Hegel. Americans have lost interest in that sort of stuff; they do not need it. Why, now that they have become physically strong, should they bother about the unsubstantial kind of strength known as moral to which they were forced to resort when they were physically weak? Why, having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what upheld them when they were fieldmice?"Of course I should not have made such a point in favor of a play if it were not, technically and artistically speaking, a very good play. The truth when it is badly spoken hardly merits more attention than if it were not spoken at all. But 'Chances' is as beautifully constructed as it was conceived; it is a play that I should be proud to have written myself. Its technical perfections have already been praised, even by that class of people least calculated to appreciate them; I mean the critics. I will, therefore, mention but one small example, which I believe, in the presence of so many greater beauties, has been overlooked; namely, the short dialogue near the end of the first act in which Frances, in perhaps half a page of conversationwith the man to whom she is then engaged, realizes that her engagement is empty, that she has no heart for the man, that a new way of looking at love has transcended her life;—realizes all this, and betrays it to the audience without in the smallest degree giving herself away to the man with whom she is talking or saying a word in violation of the probability of their conversation. Such a feat in dramaturgy is, perhaps, appreciable only to those who have tried to write plays themselves. Still, whom does that not include?"But I do not expect Americans to appreciate artistic perfection any more than I expect Englishmen to. The shame, the disgrace to Americans in not appreciating this play lies in the fact that it is fundamentally American; American in its characters, in its setting, and above all in its motive principles, which are the principles to which America owes its very existence."Such opinions, appearing over a famous signature, could not but revive interest and talk about its subject, and the play experienced a slight boom during the last few days of its existence. Its run, indeed, would have been extended but for the fact that Bachmann had made all the arrangements for its successor and advertised the date of its appearance. Altogether the incident tended to show that if the play was a failure it was at least a dynamic failure, indicative of future success.Harry was as little elated by the praise of the foreigner as he was cast down by the condemnation of his countrymen. His demeanor all along, ever since the day of his interview with Miss Bensel, had been characterized by an observant calmness. He dissuaded as many of his relations and friends as he could from being present at the first performance of the play and ignored those who insisted on being there. He himself occupied an obscure seat in the gallery and listened with the greatest attention to the comments of those about him. He thereby began to form an idea of what the general public thought of his work; knowledge which, as he himself realized, would be of inestimable value if he could put it to use in his next play.A letter Harry wrote to his Uncle Giles just after the play was taken off expresses his state of mind at this time. "'Chances' has gone by the board," he wrote; "thatsplendid American institution, the Tired Business Man, would have none of it, and it has ceased to be Drama and has become merely Literature. But I have learned a lot during its brief existence, and this knowledge I shall, please God, make use of if I ever write another play. Which is a mere figure of speech, as I have started one already."I have learned the point of view of the Tired Business Man. That was what I wanted to know from the very first—not what the critics thought. They could do no more than say it was good, and I knew that already. And what the T. B. M. said was substantially, that my play was nice enough, but that it had nopunch. I don't know whether you recognize that expression or not; it is one of those vivid American slang words that English people are so fascinated by. People thought the play wasn't interesting enough, and that is the simple truth about it. Therefore it wasn't a good play. For my idea is that to be really good a play must hold the stage, at least at the time it is written. And if we are ever going to build up such a thing as the 'American drama' our critics are continually bellowing about, we've got to begin with our foundations. We can't create a full-fledged literary drama and then go to work and make the people like it; we've got to begin with what the people like and build up our drama on that. That's the way all the great 'dramas' of history have grown up—the Greek, the French, the Spanish and the Elizabethan; and it is interesting to notice that the drama that came nearest to being the product of a mere literary class, the French, is the weakest of the lot and is standing the test of time worst of them all."I may never write a more successful play than 'Chances'; I may never get another play on the stage at all. But one thing I am sure of; I shall never offer another play to the public without being convinced that it is a better stage play than 'Chances.'"Of course that a mere boy, fresh from college, with no practical experience of the stage whatever, should get a play produced at all was an unusual and highly gratifying thing. Harry became quite a lion that autumn, in a small way. He remained in New York till after the play was taken off, living with the James Wimbournes, and was the guest of honor at one or two of Aunt Cecilia's ratherdull but eminently important dinners. He became the object of the attention of reporters, and also of that section of metropolitanliteratiwho live in duplex apartments and wear strings of pearls in their hair and can always tell Schubert from Schumann. He was especially delighted with these, and determined some day to write a play or a novel portraying the inner side of their painstaking spirituality.He saw a good deal of James during those weeks; more than he had seen of him since their college days. James had been rather sparing of his week-end visits to New Haven since moving to New York; Harry noticed that. He was sorry, for he now found James a great help and stimulus. He discovered that a walk or a motor ride with James between the hours of five and seven would obliterate the effects of the caviar-est of luncheons and the pinkest of teas and give him strength with which to face evenings in the company of people who appeared unable even to perspire anything less exalted than pure Pierian fluid."Well, it's nice to meet some one who doesn't smell of Russian cigarettes," he observed one day as he took his place in the long, low, slightly wicked-looking machine in which James whiled away most of his leisure moments. "Do you know, sometimes I actually rush into the nursery at Aunt Cecilia's and kiss the youngest and bread-and-butteryest child there, just to get the Parnassian odors out of my lungs. Next to a rather slobby child, though, I prefer the society of an ex-All-American quarter-back.""Half," said James."Oh, were you? Well, you don't smell of anything æsthetic-er than the camphor balls you put that coat away for the summer in.... James, if you go round another corner at eighty miles an hour I shall leap out and telephone for a policeman!""Oh, that's all right. They all know me, anyway. They know I don't take risks.""Hm.... Well, it's all over for me next week, thank Heaven. I'm going back to Aunt Selina and Sunday night suppers, and Ishallbe glad!""Well, I will say," said James slowly and carefully, with the air of one determined to do the most meticulousjustice, "that you have kept your head through it all pretty well.""Oh, it's not hard, when you come right to it," said Harry, laughing. "Of course there are moments when I wonder if I'm not really greater than Shakespeare. And it does seem funny to realize that the rising genius, the person people are all talking about, and poor little Me are the same. But then I remember what a failure my play was, and shrivel into the poor graduate student.... After I've written a successful play, though, I won't answer for myself. And after I've written 'Hamlet,' as I mean to some day, I shall be simply unbearable. You won't own me then.""Watch-chain round your neck?" suggested James."Oh, worse than that—diamond bracelets! And corsets—if necessary. I saw a man wearing both the other day, I really did.""A man?""Well, an actor. That's the sort of thing they run to now-a-days. Long hair and general sloppiness are quite out of date—among the really ultra ones, that is.""Well," said James, "I give you permission to be as ultra as you like, after you've written 'Hamlet.'""That helps, of course. I daresay I'm lacking in proper seriousness, but it seems to me that if the choice were offered me, right now, between being the author of 'Hamlet' and being also an ultra, and not writing 'Hamlet' and staying as I am, I would choose the latter. I don't know what my point of view may be at some future time, but that's what it is now, or at least I think it is. And after all, nobody can get nearer the truth than saying what he thinks his point of view at any given moment is, can he, James?"
Mother of men, grown strong in givingHonor to them thy lights have led,
Mother of men, grown strong in givingHonor to them thy lights have led,
sang the men. Yes, thought Harry, there was plenty of honor to give. Would that he might ever be one of those to whom such honor was due, but that was not to be thought of. It was enough for him to be one of those who were led by those lights. Yes, that was the first step, steadfastly to follow the light that the grave Mother held above and before him; to keep his eyes constantly on it, never looking down or behind.
Rich in the toil of thousands living,Proud of the deeds of thousands dead,
Rich in the toil of thousands living,Proud of the deeds of thousands dead,
Deeds, deeds! That was what counted; any one could see visions and dream dreams; the veriest fool could meanwell. Oh, might a merciful Heaven help him to convert into deeds the lofty ideals that now surged within his brain!—What a ripping song that was, and how well it sounded to hear a thousand men singing it together! He forgot Aunt Cecilia for a moment, and checked his pace near the door to hear the last verse.
Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging,Under whose feet the years are cast,Heir to an ageless empire, rangingOver the future and the past—
Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging,Under whose feet the years are cast,Heir to an ageless empire, rangingOver the future and the past—
Half blinded with tears he staggered out into the empty vestibule and steadied himself for a second against a pillar. He never had realized before how much it all meant to him, how he loved what he was leaving. And yet—"Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging"—he had never quite caught the full meaning of those words. They now seemed, in a way, to soften the pain of parting, to give him comfort and strength with which to face the years. Surely growing old would not be so bad if one could think of the spirit of youth as still there, alive, unchanging, spreading joy and hope through the world!
And then, sweet and sudden as a breeze at sundown came the thought to him that here lay his life's work, his own little mission in the world: in using his intelligence and his power of interpretation, the only gifts he could discover himself as possessing, to guide and assist those who happened to come a little after him in the long procession of human life—in becoming, in short, a teacher. A sudden feeling of calmness and surety took possession of him; he was able to consider himself and his place in the world with a more complete detachment than he had ever before attained. He found himself able, for the moment, to rate his powers and limitations exactly as an unprejudiced observer might have done. Within him he suddenly, unmistakably felt those qualities of priest and prophet which, combined with that of the scholar, make up the ideal teacher.
"Spirit of youth," he whispered, "to you I dedicate myself, such as I am, and my life, such as it may be."
He stood still for a moment and listened as the great chorus behind the closed door brought the song to a finish, ending on a note both solemn and exalted. For a secondor two there was silence, and then there burst forth the sound of the Yale cheer. The contrast between the last notes of the song and the brazen bellow of that cheer, hallowed by the memories of a hundred close-fought fields, struck Harry as both dramatic and comic, and caused a corresponding change in his own mood.
"Spirit of youth, alive, unchanging!" he quoted again, laughing. Then he hurried off to say good-by to his aunt.
CAN LOVE BE CONTROLLED BY ADVICE?
Madge Elliston lived alone with her mother in a small house on an unpretentious but socially unimpeachable side street, just off one of the main avenues. Their means, as Madge has already intimated, were modest—"modest," as the young lady sprightly put it, "to the point of prudishness." Joseph Elliston, her father, had been a brilliant and promising young professor when her mother married him, with, as people said, a career before him. If by career they meant affluence, they were wholly right in saying it was all before him. But though the two married on his prospects, they could not fairly have been said to have made an unwise venture. Nothing but death had kept Joseph Elliston from becoming a popular and respected teacher, a foremost authority on economics, the author of standard works on that subject, and the possessor of a comfortable income. But he had died when Madge, his only child, was five years old, leaving his small and sorrowing family barely enough to live on.
The straitened circumstances in which the sad event threw Mrs. Elliston and her daughter were somewhat relieved by the generosity of the only sister of the widow, Eliza Scharndorst, herself a widow and the possessor of a large fortune. She was extremely fond of Madge, who always got on beautifully with her "Aunt Tizzy"—an infantile corruption allowed to survive into maturity—having more in common with her, if the truth must be known, than with her mother. She was a festive soul, much given to entertaining, and she was not long in discovering that the assistance of her niece was a distinct asset in making her home attractive to guests. It is not to be wondered at that Madge's occasional services in the way of decorating a dinner table or brightening up an otherwise stodgy reception would redound to her materialbenefit as well as to her spiritual welfare. Such good things as trips to Bermuda, occasional new frocks and instruction under the best music masters, came her way so frequently that by the time we next meet her, nearly five years after our last sight of her, Madge was a far better dowered young woman, socially speaking, than the penniless orphaned daughter of a college professor could normally hope to be.
For when we next see her Miss Elliston is—and in no mere figurative sense—holding the center of the stage. A real stage in a real theater, under the full blaze of real footlights, and if no real audience sits on the other side of those footlights, it is no great matter, for a very real audience will sit there soon enough. On Friday night, to be exact, and this is Tuesday. To be even more exact, it is the first formal, dress rehearsal of an amateur performance of "The Beggar's Opera" (immortal work!) organized primarily for charitable purposes by a number of prominent citizens, among them Mrs. Rudolph Scharndorst, and secondarily, if we are to give any weight to the opinion of those present at the rehearsal, for the purpose of giving scope to the talents of Mrs. Rudolph Scharndorst's niece.
For Madge is cast for the part of Polly Peachum, heroine of the piece. And if there was originally the slightest doubt as to the wisdom of such an assignment, it has vanished into thin air before now. For Madge is lovely—! It is not merely a matter of voice; there never was any doubt but that she had the best voice available for the part. What the scattered few in the dark auditorium are busy admiring now is the extraordinary charm, grace, actual beauty, even, of the girl performing before them. The more so because it is all so unattended; no one thought that she would give that effect on the stage. Of a type usually described as "attractive," slight and rather short, with hair sandy rather than golden, and a face distinguished only by a nice pair of blue eyes and a particularly ingratiating smile, Madge could not fairly be expected to turn herself into a vision of commanding beauty and charm with the slight external aids of paint and powder and a position behind a row of strong lights.
The only unimpressed and indifferent person in the theater was the coach. That was quite as it should be, ofcourse; coaches must not exhibit bursts of enthusiasm, like common people. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the coach in question made none of his frequent interruptions during the first few moments of Polly's presence on the stage, but sat silently biting his pencil and frowning in the back row of the theater till after she had finished her second song.
"One moment!" he cried, running down the aisle. "I'm going to change that song." He exchanged a few whispered remarks with the leader of the orchestra, who had charge of the musical side of the production. "All right—never mind now—go on with the act ... No, don't cross there, Mrs. Peachum; stay where you are, and Miss Elliston! what are the last words of the second line of that song?"
"'Mothers obey.'"
"All right—let's have 'em. I didn't get them that time. Go on, please."
The act continued, and admiration grew apace. When at length the act reached its close there was a faint but spontaneous outburst of applause from the almost empty theater.
"Well, what do you think of Madge?" asked Mrs. Scharndorst, waylaying the coach on his progress down the aisle.
"Oh, she'll do! There's a lot there to improve, though.—Strike for the second act—drinking scene!" This last uttered in a shout as he rushed on down to the stage. Not very fulsome praise, to be sure, but Mrs. Scharndorst knows her man, and is satisfied. Indeed, she respects him the more for not being fulsome.
So do the other members of the cast and chorus; at least, if they do respect him, it cannot be for the enthusiasm of his approval. His demeanor, as he stands there on a chair in the orchestra pit, shouting directions to his minions, is not indicative of very profound satisfaction with the progress of the rehearsal.
"Thompson! If you're going to use your spot on Polly's entrance, for Heaven's sake keep it on her face and not on her feet! I didn't see a thing but her shoes then ... No, you there, that table way down front—so, and oh, Mrs. Smith! is that Tilman's idea of a costume for an old woman, middle class?... I thought so ... no, I'm afraid not! That train might be quite suitable for aduchess, but it won't do for a robber's wife. You see Miss Banks about it, will you please?... Mr. Barnaby! I want to get you and Miss Elliston to go through the business of that Pretty Polly song once again—you're both as stiff as pokers still.... No, just the motions. No, stand on both feet and keep your chest out while you're singing your part, and when she comes in, 'Fondly, fondly,' you half turn round, so—so that when she falls back on your arm she'll have a chance to show more than her chin to the audience.... No, I think I'll have you wait till the encore before you kiss her—it looks flat if you do it too often, and by the bye, Mr. Barnaby, will you make an appointment with Mrs. Adams for to-morrow to get up a dance for that prison scene—'How happy could I be with either'.... Four o'clock—all right.... What song?"
This last is in answer to an inquiry from Miss Elliston.
"Oh, of course—'Can love be controlled by advice'.... Come down here and we'll talk it over. Careful, step in the middle of that chair and you'll be all right ... there!" And Miss Elliston and the great man sit down companionably in the places belonging respectively to the oboe and the trombone, just as though they had been friends from earliest youth.
If there is one thing we despise, it is transparent roguishness on the part of an author. Let us hasten to admit, then, that the coach is none other than our friend Harry; a Harry not changed a particle, really, from his undergraduate days, though a Harry, to be sure, in whom the passage of five years has effected certain important developments. Such, for instance, as having become able to coach an amateur production of a musical show. These will be described and accounted for, all in good time. The story cannot be everywhere at once.
"About that song ... I know nothing about music, of course, but it struck me to-night that that was rather a good tune—one of the best in the show.... It may have been the singing, of course."
"Not a bit of it—it's a ripping tune!—Let's see what the trombone part for it looks like.... There isn't any—just those little thingumbobs. Oh, the accompaniment is all on the strings, of course; I forgot."
"Well, what I want to get at is, do you think Gay's words are up to it?"
"Nowhere near. I'd much rather sing some of yours, if that's what you're getting at.... They're not quitejeune fille, either; I just discovered that to-day."
"There's a great deal in this show that isn't. We've cut most of it, but there's a good bit left, only no one who hasn't studied the period can spot it.... You needn't tell any one that.—Well, let's see about some words. 'Can love be controlled by advice, will Cupid our mothers obey'—we'll keep that, I think ..."
He produced a scrap of paper from his pocket and scribbled rapidly on it. In a minute or two he had evolved the following stanzas, retaining the first four lines of Gay's original song:
Can love be controlled by advice?Will Cupid our mothers obey?Though my heart were as frozen as iceAt his flame 'twould have melted away.Now love is enthroned in my heartAll your threats and entreaties are in vain;His power defies all your art,And chiding but adds to my pain.Ah, mother! if ever in youthYour heart by love's anguish was wrung;If ever you thrilled with its truthToo sweet to be spoken or sung;If ever you've longed for life's best,Nor reckoned the issue thereof;If heart ever beat in your breastHave pity on me—for I love!
Can love be controlled by advice?Will Cupid our mothers obey?Though my heart were as frozen as iceAt his flame 'twould have melted away.Now love is enthroned in my heartAll your threats and entreaties are in vain;His power defies all your art,And chiding but adds to my pain.
Ah, mother! if ever in youthYour heart by love's anguish was wrung;If ever you thrilled with its truthToo sweet to be spoken or sung;If ever you've longed for life's best,Nor reckoned the issue thereof;If heart ever beat in your breastHave pity on me—for I love!
"There!" said he, handing it to the prima donna; "see what you think of that."
"Oh ... much better! There'll be much more fun in singing it."
"It isn't much in the way of poetry," explained Harry, "but it gives a certain dramatic interest to the song, which is the main thing. You can change anything you want in it, of course; I daresay some of those words are quite unsingable on the notes of the song."
"No—I think they'll be all right. Thank you very much; it was hard to make anything out of the other words. Also, I shall be able to tell Mama that you've cut out some of Gay's naughty words and put in some innocent ones of your own instead. She's been just a little worried lately, I think; she seems to have an idea that 'The Beggar's Opera' isn't quite a nice play for a young lady to act in!"
"Well, one can hardly blame her...." This sentence trailed off into inaudibility as Harry turned to give his attention to some one else coming up with a question at the moment. Perhaps Miss Elliston did not even hear the beginning of the sentence; it is easier to believe that she did not, in view of what followed. Certainly every extenuating circumstance is needed, on both sides, to help account for the fact that so trivial conversation as that which just took place should have led directly to unpleasantness and indirectly to consequences of a far-reaching kind. It is easier to comprehend, also, if one remembers that Miss Elliston's thoughts when she was left alone by Harry occupying the position of the trombone, remained on, or at any rate quite near, the point at which the conversation broke off, whereas Harry's had flown far from it. So that when, after an interval of a few minutes, Harry's voice again became articulate to her in the single isolated sentence "given her something to say to her old frump of a mother," addressed to the leader of the orchestra, she at first misconstrued his meaning, interpreting his remark not as he meant it, as referring to her stage mother, Mrs. Peachum, but as referring to quieting the puritanical scruples of her own mother, Mrs. Elliston.
The whole affair hung on an incredibly slender thread of coincidence. If Harry had not unconsciously raised his voice somewhat on that one phrase, if he had not happened to use the word "frump," which might conceivably be twisted into applying to either mother, Miss Elliston would never, even for a moment, have been tempted to attribute the baser meaning to his words. As it was the thought did not remain in her head above five seconds, at the outside; she knew Harry better than to believe seriously that he would say such a thing. But by another unfortunate chance Harry happened to be looking her way during those few seconds, and marked her angry flush and the instantaneous glance of indignation and contempt that she shot toward him. He saw her flush die down and her expression soften again, but the natural quickness that had made him realize her state of mind was not long in giving him an explanation of it.
All might yet have been well had not Harry's sense of humor played him false. As usually happened at these evening rehearsals he escorted Miss Elliston home, herhouse lying on the way to his. In the course of the walk an unhappy impulse made him refer to the little incident, which had struck him as merely humorous.
"By the way," said he "your sense of filial duty almost led you astray to-night, didn't it?"
"Filial duty?"
"Yes—you thought I was making remarks about your mother to-night when I was talking to Cosgrove about Mrs. Peachum and that song...."
"Oh, that—!" Any one who knew her might have expected Miss Elliston to laugh and continue with something like "Yes, I know; wasn't it ridiculous of me?" since she really knew perfectly well that Harry was talking about Mrs. Peachum. That she did not is due partly to the fatigue incident to rehearsing a leading part in an opera in addition to teaching school from nine till one every day, and partly to the eternally inexplicable depths of the feminine nature. She had been very much ashamed of herself for having even for a moment done that injustice to Harry, and she wished intensely that the affair might be buried in the deepest oblivion. Harry's opening of the subject, consequently, seemed to her tactless and a trifle brutal. She had done penance all the evening for her after all very trifling mistake; why should he insist upon humiliating her this way?... Obviously she was very tired!
"Yes," went on Harry, "don't expect me to believe that you were angry on behalf of Mrs. Peachum!"
"No. I suppose I had a right to be angry on behalf of my own mother, if I wanted to, though."
"But I wasn't talking about your mother—you know that!"
"Oh, weren't you?"
"Well, do you think so?"
"How should I know? I was only eavesdropping, of course, I have no right to think anything about it."
"Madge, don't be silly."
"Well?"
"Do you really, honestly think that I am guilty of having spoken slightingly of your mother? Just answer me that, yes or no."
"As I say, I have no right to any opinion on the subject. I only heard something not intended—"
"Oh, the—" The remainder of this exclamation was fortunately lost in the collar of Harry's greatcoat. "You had better give me back that song—I presume you won't want to sing it now."
"Why not? Art is above all personal feelings." It was mere wilfulness that led her to utter this cynical remark. What she really wanted to say was "Of course I want to sing it, and I know you meant Mrs. Peachum," but somehow the other answer was given before she knew it.
"Madge, you may not know it, but you are positively insulting."
"Oh, Harry—! Who began being insulting? Not that I mind your insulting me...."
"Oh. That's the way it is, is it? I see." They were now standing talking at the foot of Madge's front steps. Harry continued, very quietly: "Now perhaps you'd better give me back that song."
"I don't see the necessity."
"I'll be damned if you shall sing it now!" His voice remained low, but passion sounded in it as unmistakably as if he had shouted. The remark was, in fact, made in an uncontrollable burst of anger, necessitating the severing of all diplomatic relations.
"Just as you like, of course." Madge's tone, cold, expressionless, hopelessly polite, is equivalent to the granting of a demanded passport. "Here it is. Good-night."
"Good-night."
So they parted, in a white heat of anger. But being both fairly sensible people, in the main, beside being the kind of people whose anger however violently it may burn at first, does not last long, they realized before sleep closed their eyes that night that the quarrel would not last over another day.
Morning brought to Harry, at any rate, a complete return of sanity, and before breakfast he sat down and wrote the following note:
Dear Madge:I send back the song merely as a token of the abjectness of my submission—I don't suppose you will want to sing it now. I can't tell you how sorry I am about my behavior last night; I can only ask you to attribute asmuch, of it as possible to the fatigue of business and forgive the rest!Harry.
Dear Madge:
I send back the song merely as a token of the abjectness of my submission—I don't suppose you will want to sing it now. I can't tell you how sorry I am about my behavior last night; I can only ask you to attribute asmuch, of it as possible to the fatigue of business and forgive the rest!
Harry.
which he enclosed in an envelope with the words of the song and sent to Madge by a messenger boy.
Madge received it while she was at breakfast. She went out and told the boy to wait for an answer, and went back and finished her breakfast before writing a reply. Her face was noticeably grave as she ate, and it became even graver when at last she sat down at her desk and started to put pen to paper. She wrote three pages of note-paper, read them, and tore them up. She then wrote a page and a half, taking more time over them than over the three. This she also tore up. Then she sat inactive at her desk for several minutes, and at last, seeing that she was due at her school in a few minutes, she took up another sheet of paper and wrote: "All right—my fault entirely. M. E.," and sent it off by the boy.
When Harry saw her at the rehearsal that evening she greeted him exactly as if nothing had happened. She had rather less to say to him than was customary during rehearsals, but Harry was so busy and preoccupied he did not notice that. He did notice that she sang the original words to the disputed song, which, as he told himself, was just what he expected.
For the next two days he was fairly buried in responsibility and detail and hardly conscious of any feeling whatever beyond an intense desire to have the performance over. It was not until this desire was partially fulfilled, the curtain actually risen on the Friday night and the performance well under way, that he was able to sit back and draw a free breath. The moment came when, having seen that all was well behind the scenes, he dropped into the back of the box occupied by Aunt Selina and one or two chosen friends to watch the progress of the play from the front.
Then, for the first time, he was able to look at it more from the point of view of a spectator than that of a creator. Now that his work was completed and must stand or fall on its own merit, he could watch from a wholly detached position. On the whole, he rather enjoyed the sensation. It occurred to him, for instance, as quite a new thought,that the excellent make-up of the stolid Mr. Dawson in the part of Peachum very largely counteracted his vocal "dulness"; and that Mrs. Smith as Mrs. Peachum, in spite of the innumerable sillinesses and bad tricks that had been his despair for weeks, was making an extremely good impression upon the audience.
Then Madge made her entrance, and he saw at a glance, as he had never seen it before, just how good Madge was. She had a certain way of carrying her head, a certain sureness in adjusting her movements to her speech, a certain judgment in projecting her voice that went straight to the spot. Madge was a born actress, that was all there was to it; she ought to have made the stage her profession. He smiled inwardly as he thought how many people would make that remark after this performance. Then his amusement gave place to a sudden and strange resentment against the very idea of Madge's going on the stage; a resentment he made no effort either to understand or account for....
The strings in the orchestra quavered a few languorous notes and Madge started her song "Can love be controlled by advice." Her voice was a singularly sweet one, of no great volume and yet possessed of a certain carrying quality. The excellence of her instruction, combined with her own good taste, had brought it to a state of what, for that voice, might be called perfection. She also had the good sense never to sing anything too big for her. But though her voice might not be suited to Wagner or Strauss it was far better suited to certain simpler things than a larger voice might have been, and the song she was singing now was one of these. Probably no more happy combination could be effected between singer and song than that of Madge and the slow, plaintive, seventeenth-century melody of "Grim king of the ghosts," which Gay had the good sense to incorporate into his masterpiece.
To say that the audience was spellbound by her rendering of the song would be to stretch a point. It sat, for the most part, silently attentive, enjoying it very much and thinking that it would give her a good round of applause and an encore at the end. Harry, standing in the obscurity of the back part of Aunt Selina's box, was of very much the same mind. For about half of the song, that is. For near the end of the first verse he suddenlyrealized that Madge was singing not Gay's words, but his own.
It was absurd, of course, but at that realization the whole world seemed suddenly to change. The floor beneath his feet became clouds, the theater a corner of paradise, the people in it choirs of marvelous ethereal beings, Mrs. Peachum (alias Smith) a ministrant seraph, Madge's voice the music of the spheres, and Madge herself, from being an unusually nice girl of his acquaintance, became....
What nonsense! he told himself; the idea of getting so worked up at hearing his own words sung on a stage!—You fool, replied another voice within him, you know perfectly well that that's not it at all.—Don't tell me, replied the other Harry, the sensible one; such things don't happen, except in books; they don't happen to real people—ME, for instance.—Why not? obstinately inquired the other; why not you, as well as any one else?—Well, I can't stop to argue about it now, the practical Harry answered; I've got to go out and see that people are ready for their cues.
He went out, and found everything running perfectly smoothly. People were standing waiting for their entrances minutes ahead of time, the electricians were at their posts, the make-up people had finished their work, the scene-shifters and property men had put everything in readiness for setting the next scene; no one even asked him a question. He flitted about for a few moments on imaginary errands, asking various people if all was going well; but the real question that he kept asking himself all the time was Is this IT? Is this IT?
"I don't know!" he said at last, loudly and petulantly, and several people turned to see whom he was reproving now.
When he got back to the box he found Madge still singing the last verse of her song. He wondered how many times she had had to repeat it, and hoped Cosgrove was living up to his agreement not to give more than one encore to each song. In reality this was her first encore; his hectic trip behind the scenes had occupied a much shorter time than he supposed. Madge was making a most exquisite piece of work of her little appeal to maternal sympathy; she was actually taking the second verse sitting down, leaning forward with her arms on a table in an attitude of conversationalpleading. He had not told her to do that; it was so hard to make effective that he would not have dared to suggest it. When she reached the line, "If heart ever beat in your breast" she suddenly rose, slightly threw back her arms and head, and sang the words on a wholly new note of restrained passion, beautifully dramatic and suggestive. The house burst into applause, but Harry was seized with a fit of unholy mirth at the irony of the situation—Madge, perfectly indifferent, singing those words, while he, their author, consumed with an all-devouring flame, stood stifling his passion in a dark corner. An insane desire seized him to run out to the middle of the stage and shout at the top of his voice "Have pity on me, for I love!" It would be true then. He supposed, however, that people might think it peculiar.
From then on, as long as Madge held the stage, he stood rooted to the spot, unable to lift his eyes from her. Presently her lover came in, and they started the lovely duet, "Pretty Polly, say." At the end of the encore, according to Harry's instructions, Barnaby leaned over and kissed his Polly on the mouth. A sudden and intense dislike for Mr. Barnaby at that moment overcame Harry....
The act ended; the house went wild again; the curtain flopped up and down with no apparent intention of ever stopping; ushers rushed down the aisles with great beribboned bunches of flowers. This gave Harry an idea; as soon as the second act was safely under way he rushed out to the nearest florist's shop and commandeered all the American Beauty roses in the place, to be delivered to Miss Elliston with his card at the end of the next act.
As he was going out of the shop he stopped to look at some peculiar little pink and white flowers in a vase near the door.
"What are those?" he asked.
"Bleeding hearts," said the florist's clerk. "Just up from Florida; very hard to get at this time of year."
Harry stood still, thinking. If he sent those—would she Know—Of course she would, answered the practical Harry immediately; she would not only Know but would call him a fool for his pains.—Oh, shut up! retorted the other.
"I'll have these then, instead of the roses, please," he said aloud. "All of them, and don't forget the card."
They did not meet till after the performance was over. He caught sight of her making a sort of triumphal progress through the back of the stage, on her way to the dressing rooms, and deliberately placed himself in her path. She was looking rather surprisingly solemn, he noticed. Her face lighted up, however, when she saw him. She smiled, at least.
"Well, what didyouthink of it?" she asked.
"I think the performance was very creditable," he answered. "To say what I think of you would be compromising."
She laughed and went on without making any reply. He could not see her face, but something gave him the impression that her smile did not last very long after she had turned away from him.
He walked home alone through the crisp March night, breathing deeply and trying to reduce his teeming brain to a state of order and clarity. The walk from the theater home was not sufficient for this; he walked far beyond his house and all the way back again before he could think clearly enough. At last he raised his eyes to the comfortable stars and spoke a few words aloud in a low, calm voice.
"I really think," he said, "that this is IT. I really do think so ... But I must be very careful," he added, to himself; "verycareful. I must take no chances—this time. Both on Madge's account and on mine."
"No," he added after a moment; "not on my account. On Madge's."
CONGREVE
Little had happened to mark the greater part of the time that had elapsed since Harry's graduation. For three years he had studied hard for his doctor's degree, and during the fourth year he had been set to teaching English literature to freshmen, which task, on the whole, he accomplished with marked success. But during the fifth year, the year in which we next see him, he was not teaching freshmen, though he was still living in New Haven, and working, according to his own accounts, like a galley slave. The events which led up to this state of things form a matter of some moment in his career.
These began with the production, during his fourth year out of college, of a play of his by the college dramatic association. Or, to be more exact, it really began some months before that, when Harry, leaving a theater one evening after witnessing a poor play, had remarked to his companion of the moment: "I actually believe that I could write a better play than that." To which the friend made the obvious answer, "Why don't you, then?" "I will," replied Harry, and he did.
It was his first venture in that field of composition. In all his literary activities he had never before, to borrow his own phrase, committed dramaturgy. To the very fact that his maiden effort came so late Harry was wont, in later years, to attribute a large measure of his success. His idea was that if he had begun earlier his first results would have been so excruciatingly bad as to discourage him from sustained effort in that direction.
However this may be, the play was judged the best of those submitted in a competition organized by the dramatic association, and was produced by it during the following winter with a very fair amount of success. Nobody could fairly have called it a remarkable play, but neither could any one have been justified in calling it a bad one. Its theme was, apart from its setting, singularly characteristic of the subsequent style of its author and may be said tohave struck the tragi-comic note that sounded through all his later work. It concerned the experiences of a struggling young English author, poor, but of gentle birth, who is first seen inveighing against the snobbery, coldness and indifference shown toward him by people of wealth and position, and later, after coming unexpectedly into a peerage and a large fortune, is horrified to find himself forced into displaying the very qualities which he had so fiercely condemned in others. The machinery of the play was somewhat artificial, but the characterization and dramatic interest were skilfully worked out. The dialogue was everywhere delightful and the contrast afforded between the conscientious, introspective sincerity of the young author and the gaily unscrupulous casuistry of his wife was a forecast, if not actually an early example, of his best work.
Harry was never blind to the faults of the play, but he remained convinced that it was good in the main, and, what was more important, retained his interest in dramatic composition. He worked hard during the following spring and summer and at length evolved another play, which he called "Chances" and believed was a great improvement upon his first work. Early in August he sent the play to a New York manager to whom he had obtained an introduction and after a week or two made an appointment with him.
The secret trepidation with which he first entered the office of the great, the redoubtable Leo Bachmann was largely allayed by the appearance of the manager. He was a large flabby man, with scant stringy hair and a not unpleasant smile. He sat heavily back in an office chair and puffed continually at a much-chewed cigar, the ashes of which fell unnoticed and collected in the furrows of his waistcoat. He spoke in a soft thick voice, with a strong German accent. Harry did not see anything particularly terrifying about him.
"Ah, yes, Mr. Vimbourne," said the manager when Harry had made himself known. "You have sent me a play, yes? Ah, here it is.... Unfortunately I have not had time to read it; I am very, very busy just now, but my man Jennings has read it and tells me it is very nice. Very nice, indeed ..." he puffed in ruminative silence for a few seconds. "Could you come back next week, sayFriday, Mr. Vimbourne? and we will talk it over. I am sorry to trouble you, but you see I am so very, very busy...."
Harry made another appointment and left, not wholly dissatisfied. He returned, ten days afterward, to his second interview, which was an almost exact replica of the first. He allowed himself to be put off another ten days, but when he returned for the third time and was greeted by precisely the same soft words he was irritated and hardly able to conceal the fact.
"Ah, yes, your play," said the manager, as though he had just heard of it for the first time. "Jennings was speaking to me of it only the other night. I am sorry to say I have not read it yet." He took the manuscript from a pile on his desk and turned over the leaves. "I am sorry—very sorry—I have so little time...."
"I don't believe you, Mr. Bachmann," said Harry.
"Ah?" said the manager, without the slightest apparent interest. "Why not, Mr. Vimbourne?"
"Well, you turned straight to the best scene in it just now, for one thing.... Beside, you wouldn't keep me hanging on this way if you didn't see something in it, and if you see anything in it of course you've read it. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bachmann, that isn't my idea of business."
Mr. Bachmann's next remark was so unexpected that Harry nearly swooned in his chair. "I read it the day after it came," he said softly.
"Then why on earth didn't you say so in the first place?" stammered Harry.
The manager made no reply for some moments, but sat silently puffing and turning over the pages of Harry's manuscript.
"I like to know people," he murmured at last, very gently and with apparent irrelevance. Harry, however, saw the bearing of the remark and suddenly felt extraordinarily small. He had been rather proud of his little burst of spirit and independence; he now saw that Leo Bachmann had drawn it from him with the ease and certainty of touch with which a musician produces a note from a flute. He wondered, abjectly, how many other self-satisfied young authors had sat where he sat and been played upon by that great puffing mass of pulp.
Bachmann was the next to speak. "I like your play very much, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "It is very nice—some things in it not so good, but on the whole, it is very nice. I think I vill try to produce it, Mr. Vimbourne, but not yet—not till I see how my September plays go. I shall keep yours in reserve, and then, later, we may try it. About the first of November, when the Fifth Avenue crowd comes back to town...." He smiled slightly. "They are the people that vill vant to see it. Not Harlem. Not Brooklyn. The four hundred. Even so," he continued, ruminatively, "even so, I shall not make on it."
This seemed to Harry a good opening for a proposition he had been longing to make since the very first but had never quite dared. "If you want me to put anything up on it, Mr. Bachmann, why—I...."
"No," said Mr. Bachmann gently; "I never do that, I produce my own plays, for my own reasons. I vill pay you a sum, down. And a small royalty, perhaps—after the hundredth performance."
Harry looked up and smiled, and the manager smiled back at him. His smile grew quite broad, almost a laugh, in fact. Then he rose from his chair—the first time Harry had seen him out of it—and clasped Harry's hand between his two large plump ones.
"I think we shall get on very well, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "Very well, indeed. I vill let you know when rehearsals begin. And you must write more—a great deal more. But—vait till after the rehearsals!"
"Yes, I think I understand you," said Harry, laughing. "I'll wait. And I'll come to the rehearsals, too!"
In October the rehearsals actually started, and Harry began to see what he told Mr. Bachmann he thought he understood. Day after day he sat in the dark draughty theater and watched the people on the stage slash and cut and change his carefully constructed dialogue without offering a word of remonstrance. At first the pleasure of seeing his own work take tangible form, on a real professional stage and by the agency of real professional actors more than made up for the loss. Then as the rehearsals went on, he perceived that there was a very real reason for every cut and change, and that the play benefited tremendously thereby. He began to see how acting accomplishesa great deal of what he had always considered the office of dialogue. A dialogue of five speeches, to take a concrete example, on the probable reasons why a certain person did not arrive when he was expected was made unnecessary by one of the characters crossing the stage and looking out of a window at just the right moment and with just the right facial expression.
Harry made no secret of his conviction that his play improved immensely under the care of Bachmann and his people. His attitude was that they knew everything about play-producing and he knew nothing, and that the extraordinary thing was that he had been able to provide them with any dramatic material whatever. He joked about it with the actors and managers, when occasion offered, as callously as if he had been a third person, and rather surprised himself by the light-heartedness he displayed. Whether this was entirely genuine, whether it did not contain elements of a pose, a desire to appear as a man of the theatrical world, a fear of falling into all the usual errors of youthful playwrights, he did not at first ask himself.
One day, about a week before the opening night, he received a jolt that made him look upon himself and his calling in rather a new light. This came through an unexpected agent—none other, indeed, than a woman of the cast, and not the player of the principal female part at that, but a lesser light, Bertha Bensel by name, a plain but pleasant little person of uncertain age. Harry was lunching alone with her and carrying on in what had become his customary style when talking of his play.
"You know," he was saying, "I thought at one time I had written a play, but I haven't, I've written a moving picture show. Everybody is writing movies these days, even those that try to write anything else, which just shows. I'm going regularly into the movie business, after this. Seriously. And I intend to write the real kind of movies, the kind that don't bother about the characters at all, but just dramatize scenery. I shall call things by their proper names, too. Let's see—a Devonshire parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for a Louis Onze château with a Le Nôtre garden. She discovers, just in time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana prairie, who happensalong just at the right moment. The situation is still awkward, however, because the parsonage finds that her prairie has a wife living, a New York gambling hell, whom he hates but who won't release him. So the parsonage refuses his disinterested offers and starts life for herself. After various adventures with a South Carolina plantation, an Indian Ocean trawler, an Argentine pampas and the Scala theater at Milan, the poor parsonage ends up in a London sweat shop, to which she is at last discovered by the Scotch moor, who had been looking for her all these years. Embrace. Passed by the national board of censors."
Miss Bensel smiled, but did not seem to see much humor in this foolery. That was due, thought Harry, to the fatigue of her long morning's work, and he determined not to bother her with any more nonsense. The silence which he allowed to ensue, however, was broken by an unexpected remark from hisvis-à-vis, who said with a dispassionate air:
"I think, Mr. Wimbourne, you stand in a great danger."
"Danger?"
"Yes, that is, I hope you do. If not, I'm very much disappointed in you."
"Thank you so much, but just how?"
"You're in danger of getting to take your art as lightly as you talk about it. Then you'll be lost, for good. It's a real danger. I've seen the thing happen before, to people of as much talent as you, or nearly so."
Harry looked at her in blank astonishment, and she went on:
"If you go on talking that way about your profession, you'll get to think that way and finallybethat way. All roses and champagne—nothing worth while. You may go on writing plays, but they'll get sillier and sillier, even if they get more and more popular. So your life will pass away in frivolity and popularity.... That's not your place in the world, Mr. Wimbourne. You've got talent—perhaps more. You know that? This play, now. I say nothing about the dialogue, because good dialogue is not so rare—though yours is the best I've seen for some time—but how about the rest of it, the story, the ideas? It's good stuff—you know it is."
Harry leaned back in his chair and tapped the tablemeditatively with a spoon. He had the lack of self-consciousness that enables a person to take blame exactly in the spirit in which it is given, with no alloying mixture of embarrassment or resentment.
"Yes," he said after a while, "I suppose you're right about it. I have a certain responsibility.... I suppose the stuff is good, when all is said and done—though I don't dare to think it can be."
Miss Bensel leaned forward with her elbows on the table and allowed her face to relax into a smile, a curious little smile that did not part her lips but drew down the corners of her mouth.
"That's it—I thought that probably was it! You're so modest you're afraid to take yourself seriously. Well, that's a pretty good fault; I think on the whole it's better than taking yourself too seriously. But don't do it, even so. Take it from me, my dear boy, you can't accomplish anything worth while in this world,anything, whatever it is, unless you take your work seriously—at bottom."
Harry did a good deal of serious thinking on the subject during the rest of the day, and the more he thought about it the more convinced he became that Miss Bensel was right. He thought of Dickens' famous utterance on the subject of being flippant about one's life's work; he thought of the example of Congreve. Congreve, there was an appropriate warning! Congreve, whose life was a duel between the painstaking artist and the polished man-about-town, who never would speak other than lightly of his best work, whose boast and whose shame it was deliberately to stifle the fires of his own genius. Was he, Harry, guilty of something like the pose of Congreve? He thought of his attitude of exaggeratedcamaraderiewith the actors and managers, of his attitude toward his own work; he realized that frivolity had become not merely a pose, but a habit. Was he not, in such doings, following in the steps of Congreve—the man who insisted that the work that made him famous had been written for the sole purpose of whiling away the tedium of convalescence after an illness?
As he watched his own play being enacted before his eyes that afternoon he realized that his work was, in the main, good, and that he had known it all along. He hadfelt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's astonishingly prompt (as he had since learned it to be) acceptance of it had given conclusive proof of it. If anything further was needed, he had it in the enthusiasm with which the actors played it and spoke of it. Somehow, by some incredible chance, the divine gift had fallen upon him. To belittle that gift, to fail to devote his best efforts to making the most of it, would be to shirk his life's duty.
The third act, upon which most of the work of the afternoon was done, drew to its close. It had been immensely shortened by cuts; Harry was not sorry, though he missed some of what he had thought the best lines in the play. Then the heroine made her final exit, and Harry suddenly realized she had done so without her and the hero's having delivered two little speeches that ought to have come just before; speeches on which he had spent much care and labor. Those two lines had, in fact, contained the whole gist of the play, or at any rate driven home its thesis in a particularly striking way. The point of the play was that living was simply a system of chances, and these speeches made clear the distinction between the wrong kind of chancing, the careless, risking-all kind, whose final result was always ruin, and the sober, intelligent, prayerful kind, as shown in the lives of those who, after careful consideration of all the chances that may affect them, do what they decide is best and await the result with the calmness of a Mohammedan fatalist.
Harry suddenly became imbued with the profound conviction that those two speeches were absolutely necessary to the understanding of his play. He hastily read over the last half of the act in his typewritten copy, and failed to see how any spectator could catch the true meaning of the work without them. Well, here was a chance to show how seriously he could take his art! The whole affair took on a new and strange momentousness; he stood at this instant, he told himself, at the very turning-point of his artistic career. He would not take the wrong road, cost him what it might; he would not be found wanting.
Bachmann was in the theater, sitting in the back row of the orchestra, as was his custom. Harry determined to go straight to him and ask him to put those lines in again. As he walked up the aisle he thought feverishly of the tremendous import of this interview. Bachmannwould refuse at first, he knew that well enough. Bachmann would not easily be convinced by the opinion of an inexperienced scribbler. But Harry was determined not to be beaten; he was prepared to fight, prepared to make a scene, if necessary; prepared to sacrifice the production of his play, if it came to that. He could see Bachmann's slow smile as he reminded him of practical considerations. "Your contract?" "Damn the contract," Harry would reply. "Ha, ha! I've got the whip hand of you there, Mr. Bachmann! I can afford to break all the contracts I want!" "And your career?" retorted Bachmann, with a sneer, but turning ever so slightly pale. "Ho! my career! What the devil do I care for my career! I choose to write for all time, not for my own! I...."
"Vell, Mr. Vimbourne," Bachmann, the live, fleshly Bachmann, was saying in a startlingly mild and everyday tone of voice, "what can I do for you?"
"Oh ... I just wanted to speak to you about this last scene," said Harry, trying hard to keep his voice steady. "They've cut out two lines just before Miss Cleves' exit that I think ought to be kept."
"Let's see."
Harry handed him the manuscript and anxiously watched him as he glanced rapidly over the pages. "They're pretty important lines, really. They explain a lot; I'm afraid people won't understand...." He could feel his voice weakening and his knees trembling, but his determination remained.
"Burchard!" Bachmann bellowed, in the general direction of the stage.
"Yes!"
"What about those two speeches before Miss Cleves' exit?"
There was a short and rather flurried silence from the stage, after which the voice of Burchard again emerged:
"Miss Cleves said she couldn't make her exit on that line."
"Where is she? Tell her to come back and try it."
The battle was won without a shot being fired. Harry, almost literally knocked flat by the surprise and relief of the moment, sank into the nearest seat. Bachmann got up and lumbered off toward the stage; Harry leaned his head against the back of his chair and gave himself overto an outburst of internal mirth, at his own expense.
He raised his eyes again to the stage. Curiously enough, the first person his glance fell on was Miss Bensel, with her trim little figure and humorously plain face. It seemed to him she was smiling out at him, with a mocking little smile that drew down the corners of her mouth.
Everybody knows what happened to the play "Chances"; its history is a page of the American stage. Much has been said and written about it; it has been called a landmark, a stepping-stone, a first ditch, a guiding light, a moral victory, a glorious failure, a promising defeat and various similar things so often that people are tired of the very name of it. What actually happened to it can be told in a few words; it was well received, but not largely attended. It was withdrawn near the end of its fourth week.
The critics were unanimous in praising it. Its dialogue was hailed as the ideal dialogue of contemporary comedy. The characterization, the humor of the lines, the universality of the theme, its wonderfully logical and convincing development all received their due meed of praise. It was compared to the comedies of Clyde Fitch, of Oscar Wilde, of Sheridan, and of Congreve—yes, actually Congreve! Harry smiled when he read that, and renewed his resolution never to let the comparison apply in a personal way. But to be seriously compared to Congreve, not Congreve the man but Congreve the author—! The thought made him fairly dizzy.
But what took the eye of the critics, the best and soberest of them, that is, more than anything else was the mixture of the humorous and serious shown in the choice of the theme and its development. "To treat the element of humor," wrote one critic, "not as a colored glass through which to look at all life, as in farce, nor as a refreshing contrast to its serious side, as in the 'comic relief' of a host of plays from the Elizabethans down to the present day, but as part and parcel of the very essence of life itself, co-existent with its solemnity, inseparable from its difficulty, companion and friend to its unsolvable mystery; to put people in such a mood that they can laugh at the greatest things in their own lives, neither bitterly nor to give themselves Dutch courage, but for the pure, lifegiving, illuminating exaltation of laughing—this, we take it, is the whole essence and mission of comedy. And this—we say it boldly and in no spirit of empty flattery—is the type of comedy shown in Mr. Wimbourne's play."
It is not hard to see how such words should bring joy to the heart of Harry and smiles of admiration and respect to the faces of his friends, from Leo Bachmann right up to Aunt Selina. But they did not bring people to the theater. For the first three performances the attendance was satisfactory; then it began steadily to fall off and by the end of the first week it became merely a question of how long it could survive.
Leo Bachmann was, curiously enough, the least affected of all the theater crowd by the poor success of the work. He viewed the discouraging box office reports with an untroubled smile, and cheerfully began rehearsals for a new play. "Never you mind, my boy," he told Harry, "I knew I should not make money off your play. I told you so in the beginning. Never you mind! That is not your fault. It's just the way things go. I have only one word to say to you, and that is—write!" Even in his discouragement Harry could not help feeling that Mr. Bachmann was strangely calm and cheerful.
Within a week from the end of the play's run a curious thing happened. A visiting English dramatist and critic, a confirmed self-advertiser, but a writer and thinker of unquestioned brilliancy, and a wit, withal, of international reputation, was greatly struck by the play and wrote an unsolicited letter about it which appeared in the pages of a leading daily.
"No more striking proof," wrote this self-appointed defender of Harry, "could be offered of the consanguinal intellectual stupidity of the Anglo-Saxon race than I received at a performance of Mr. Harold Wimbourne's play 'Chances' at the —— Theater last night. For the first time during my stay in this country as I looked over the almost empty stalls and realized that this, incomparably the best play running in New York, was also the worst attended, I could have fancied myself actually in my own country.
"What are the lessons or qualities in Mr. Wimbourne's play which the American people cannot stomach? I suppose, when all is said and done, he has committed the unpardonableoffense of giving them a little of their own medicine. He has rammed down their throats some few corollaries of the Calvinistic doctrines for which the ancestors of the very people who stay away from his play sailed an uncharted sea, conquered a wilderness, and spilt their blood to champion against a usurping power. The Pilgrim fathers founded the United States of America in order to publish the greatness of God and the littleness of man. Their descendants either ignore or condemn one of their number because he does not extol the greatness of man and the littleness of God. Because Mr. Wimbourne ventures to show, in a very mild—if very artistic and compelling way—how slight a hold man has on the moving force of life, God, the universe, a group of atoms—whatever you choose to call the world—he becomes a pariah. He has escaped easily after his first offense, but it will go hard with the Anglo-Saxon character if he is not stoned in the streets after the next one. America is a great and rich country; what does it care about religion or philosophy or art or any of that poppycock? Serious and devout thinking simplyare not done; it has become as great a solecism to mention the name of the Deity in society—except as the hero of a humorous story—as to talk about Kant or Hegel. Americans have lost interest in that sort of stuff; they do not need it. Why, now that they have become physically strong, should they bother about the unsubstantial kind of strength known as moral to which they were forced to resort when they were physically weak? Why, having become mountain lions, should they continue to practise what upheld them when they were fieldmice?
"Of course I should not have made such a point in favor of a play if it were not, technically and artistically speaking, a very good play. The truth when it is badly spoken hardly merits more attention than if it were not spoken at all. But 'Chances' is as beautifully constructed as it was conceived; it is a play that I should be proud to have written myself. Its technical perfections have already been praised, even by that class of people least calculated to appreciate them; I mean the critics. I will, therefore, mention but one small example, which I believe, in the presence of so many greater beauties, has been overlooked; namely, the short dialogue near the end of the first act in which Frances, in perhaps half a page of conversationwith the man to whom she is then engaged, realizes that her engagement is empty, that she has no heart for the man, that a new way of looking at love has transcended her life;—realizes all this, and betrays it to the audience without in the smallest degree giving herself away to the man with whom she is talking or saying a word in violation of the probability of their conversation. Such a feat in dramaturgy is, perhaps, appreciable only to those who have tried to write plays themselves. Still, whom does that not include?
"But I do not expect Americans to appreciate artistic perfection any more than I expect Englishmen to. The shame, the disgrace to Americans in not appreciating this play lies in the fact that it is fundamentally American; American in its characters, in its setting, and above all in its motive principles, which are the principles to which America owes its very existence."
Such opinions, appearing over a famous signature, could not but revive interest and talk about its subject, and the play experienced a slight boom during the last few days of its existence. Its run, indeed, would have been extended but for the fact that Bachmann had made all the arrangements for its successor and advertised the date of its appearance. Altogether the incident tended to show that if the play was a failure it was at least a dynamic failure, indicative of future success.
Harry was as little elated by the praise of the foreigner as he was cast down by the condemnation of his countrymen. His demeanor all along, ever since the day of his interview with Miss Bensel, had been characterized by an observant calmness. He dissuaded as many of his relations and friends as he could from being present at the first performance of the play and ignored those who insisted on being there. He himself occupied an obscure seat in the gallery and listened with the greatest attention to the comments of those about him. He thereby began to form an idea of what the general public thought of his work; knowledge which, as he himself realized, would be of inestimable value if he could put it to use in his next play.
A letter Harry wrote to his Uncle Giles just after the play was taken off expresses his state of mind at this time. "'Chances' has gone by the board," he wrote; "thatsplendid American institution, the Tired Business Man, would have none of it, and it has ceased to be Drama and has become merely Literature. But I have learned a lot during its brief existence, and this knowledge I shall, please God, make use of if I ever write another play. Which is a mere figure of speech, as I have started one already.
"I have learned the point of view of the Tired Business Man. That was what I wanted to know from the very first—not what the critics thought. They could do no more than say it was good, and I knew that already. And what the T. B. M. said was substantially, that my play was nice enough, but that it had nopunch. I don't know whether you recognize that expression or not; it is one of those vivid American slang words that English people are so fascinated by. People thought the play wasn't interesting enough, and that is the simple truth about it. Therefore it wasn't a good play. For my idea is that to be really good a play must hold the stage, at least at the time it is written. And if we are ever going to build up such a thing as the 'American drama' our critics are continually bellowing about, we've got to begin with our foundations. We can't create a full-fledged literary drama and then go to work and make the people like it; we've got to begin with what the people like and build up our drama on that. That's the way all the great 'dramas' of history have grown up—the Greek, the French, the Spanish and the Elizabethan; and it is interesting to notice that the drama that came nearest to being the product of a mere literary class, the French, is the weakest of the lot and is standing the test of time worst of them all.
"I may never write a more successful play than 'Chances'; I may never get another play on the stage at all. But one thing I am sure of; I shall never offer another play to the public without being convinced that it is a better stage play than 'Chances.'"
Of course that a mere boy, fresh from college, with no practical experience of the stage whatever, should get a play produced at all was an unusual and highly gratifying thing. Harry became quite a lion that autumn, in a small way. He remained in New York till after the play was taken off, living with the James Wimbournes, and was the guest of honor at one or two of Aunt Cecilia's ratherdull but eminently important dinners. He became the object of the attention of reporters, and also of that section of metropolitanliteratiwho live in duplex apartments and wear strings of pearls in their hair and can always tell Schubert from Schumann. He was especially delighted with these, and determined some day to write a play or a novel portraying the inner side of their painstaking spirituality.
He saw a good deal of James during those weeks; more than he had seen of him since their college days. James had been rather sparing of his week-end visits to New Haven since moving to New York; Harry noticed that. He was sorry, for he now found James a great help and stimulus. He discovered that a walk or a motor ride with James between the hours of five and seven would obliterate the effects of the caviar-est of luncheons and the pinkest of teas and give him strength with which to face evenings in the company of people who appeared unable even to perspire anything less exalted than pure Pierian fluid.
"Well, it's nice to meet some one who doesn't smell of Russian cigarettes," he observed one day as he took his place in the long, low, slightly wicked-looking machine in which James whiled away most of his leisure moments. "Do you know, sometimes I actually rush into the nursery at Aunt Cecilia's and kiss the youngest and bread-and-butteryest child there, just to get the Parnassian odors out of my lungs. Next to a rather slobby child, though, I prefer the society of an ex-All-American quarter-back."
"Half," said James.
"Oh, were you? Well, you don't smell of anything æsthetic-er than the camphor balls you put that coat away for the summer in.... James, if you go round another corner at eighty miles an hour I shall leap out and telephone for a policeman!"
"Oh, that's all right. They all know me, anyway. They know I don't take risks."
"Hm.... Well, it's all over for me next week, thank Heaven. I'm going back to Aunt Selina and Sunday night suppers, and Ishallbe glad!"
"Well, I will say," said James slowly and carefully, with the air of one determined to do the most meticulousjustice, "that you have kept your head through it all pretty well."
"Oh, it's not hard, when you come right to it," said Harry, laughing. "Of course there are moments when I wonder if I'm not really greater than Shakespeare. And it does seem funny to realize that the rising genius, the person people are all talking about, and poor little Me are the same. But then I remember what a failure my play was, and shrivel into the poor graduate student.... After I've written a successful play, though, I won't answer for myself. And after I've written 'Hamlet,' as I mean to some day, I shall be simply unbearable. You won't own me then."
"Watch-chain round your neck?" suggested James.
"Oh, worse than that—diamond bracelets! And corsets—if necessary. I saw a man wearing both the other day, I really did."
"A man?"
"Well, an actor. That's the sort of thing they run to now-a-days. Long hair and general sloppiness are quite out of date—among the really ultra ones, that is."
"Well," said James, "I give you permission to be as ultra as you like, after you've written 'Hamlet.'"
"That helps, of course. I daresay I'm lacking in proper seriousness, but it seems to me that if the choice were offered me, right now, between being the author of 'Hamlet' and being also an ultra, and not writing 'Hamlet' and staying as I am, I would choose the latter. I don't know what my point of view may be at some future time, but that's what it is now, or at least I think it is. And after all, nobody can get nearer the truth than saying what he thinks his point of view at any given moment is, can he, James?"