Read-Aloud Plays Part 11

Really?

THE MAN

Really and truly. You've no idea what a useless misfit I was.

THE BOY

But I read somewhere you had always been brilliant, even as a boy.

THE MAN

Unfortunately ... yes. That was what made it so hard for me. Shall I tell you about it?

THE BOY

I wish you would!

THE MAN

Brilliance--I'll tell you what that was, at least for me. I wrote several things that people called "brilliant." One in particular, a little play of decadent epigram. It was acted by amateurs before an admiring "select"

audience. That was when I was twenty-one. From about sixteen on I had been acutely miserable--physically miserable. I never knew when I wouldn't actually cave in. I felt like a bankrupt living on borrowed money. Of course, it's plain enough now--the revolt of starved nerves. I cared only for my mind, grew only in that, and the rest of me withered up like a stalk in dry soil. So the flower drooped too--in decadent epigram. But n.o.body pointed out the truth of it all to me, and I scorned to give my body a thought. People predicted a brilliant future--for me, crying inside! Then I married. I married the girl who had taken the star part in the play. According to the logic of the situation, it was inevitable.

Everybody remarked how inevitable it was. A decorative girl, you know. She wanted to be the wife of a great man.... Well, we didn't get along. There was an honest streak in me somewhere which hated deception. I couldn't play the part of "brilliant" young poet with any success. She was at me all the while to write more of the same thing. And I didn't want to. The difference between the "great" man I was supposed to be and the sick child I really was, began to torture. I knew I oughtn't to go on any further if I wanted to do anything real. Then one night we had an "artistic" dinner.

My wife had gotten hold of a famous English poet, and through him a publisher. The publisher was her real game. I drank champagne before dinner so as to be "brilliant." I was. And before I realized it, Norah had secured a promise from the publisher to bring out a book of plays. I remember she said it was practically finished. But it wasn't, only the one, and I hated that. But I sat down conscientiously to write the book that she, and apparently all the world that counted, expected me to write.

Well, I couldn't write it. Not a blessed word! Something inside me refused to work. And there I was. In a month or so she began to ask about it.

Norah thought I ought to turn them out while she waited. I walked up and down the park one afternoon wondering what to tell her.... And when I realized that either she would never understand or would despise me, I grew desperate. I wrote her a note, full of fine phrases about "incompatibility," her "unapproachable ideals," the "soul's need of freedom"--things she _would_ understand and wear a heroic att.i.tude about--and fled. I came here....

THE BOY

Of course. But didn't she follow you? Didn't they bother you?

THE MAN

Not a bit. Norah preferred her lonely heroism. In a few months I was quite forgotten. That was one of the healthful things I learned. Well, I was a wreck when I came here, I wanted only to lie down under a tree.... And there it was, under that tree yonder, my salvation came.

THE BOY

Your salvation?

THE MAN

Hunger. That was my salvation. Simple, elemental, unescapable appet.i.te.

You see I had no servant, no one at all. So I had to get up and work to prepare my food.... It was very strange. Compared with this life, my life before had been like living in a locked box. Some one to do everything for me except think, and consequently I thought too much. But here the very fact of life was brought home to me. I spent weeks working about the house and grounds on the common necessities. By the time winter came on the place was fit to live in--and I was enjoying life. All the "brilliance"

had faded away; I was as simple as a blade of gra.s.s.

For a year I didn't write a word. I had the courage to wait for the real thing, n.o.body pestering me to be a "genius"! Some day you may read that first book. People said I had re-discovered the virtue of humility. I had.

THE BOY

I will read it! And how much more it will mean to me now!

THE MAN

I suppose you know the theory about vibrations--how if a little push is given a bridge, and repeated often enough at the right intervals, the bridge will fall?

THE BOY

Yes.

THE MAN

Well, that's the whole secret of what you have been looking for--what you found in my poems.

THE BOY

I don't understand.

THE MAN

A man's life is a rhythm. Eating, sleeping, working, playing, loving, thinking--everything. And when we live so that each activity comes at the right interval, we gain power. When one interrupts another, we lose.

Weakness is merely the thrust of one impulse against another, instead of their combined thrust against the world. When I came here, feeling like a criminal, I was obeying the one right instinct in a welter of emotions. It was like the faintest of heart beats in a sick body. I listened to that.

Then I learned physical hunger, then sleep, and so on. It's incredible how stupid I was about the elemental art of living! I had to begin all over from the beginning, as if no one had ever lived before.

THE BOY

That's what you meant in your poems about religion.

THE MAN

Exactly! I learned that "good" is the rhythm of the man's personal nature, and that "evil" is merely the confusion of the same impulses. As time went on it became instinctive to live for and by the rhythm. Everything about my life here was caught up and used in the vision of power--drawing water, cutting wood, digging in the garden, dawn. It was all marvelous--I couldn't help writing those poems. They are the natural joys and sorrows of ten years. As a matter of fact, though, I grew to care less and less about writing, as living became fuller and richer. People write too much.

They would write less if they had to make the fire in the morning.

THE BOY

The first impulse ... I see. Oh, life might be so simple!

THE MAN

Why not? The animals have it. Men have it at times, but we make each other forget. If we could only be each other's reminders instead of forgetters!

THE BOY

Yes! But I see the only thing to do is to go away, like you.

THE MAN

Not necessarily, I was merely a bad case, and required a desperate remedy, earth and air and freedom from others' will. I need the country, but the next man might require the city as pa.s.sionately. Don't imagine that only the hermits, like me, live instinctively. It can be done in New York, too, only one mustn't be so sensitive to others.... After all, friend, we were wrong in saying that this power lies outside the world of skysc.r.a.pers and business. It doesn't lie outside nor inside. It cuts across everything.

Do you see? For it's all a matter of the man's own soul.