The Whirligig of Time Part 30

"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 accomplishes a 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 att.i.tude 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Devons.h.i.+re parsonage is beloved and wooed by a Scotch moor, but turns him down for a Louis Onze chateau with a Le Notre garden. She discovers, just in time, that his intentions are not honorable, and is rescued by a Montana prairie, who happens along 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 h.e.l.l, 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. Pa.s.sed 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 his _vis-a-vis_, who said with a dispa.s.sionate 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 finally _be_ that 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 pa.s.s 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 table meditatively 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 embarra.s.sment 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 d.i.c.kens' 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 att.i.tude of exaggerated _camaraderie_ with the actors and managers, of his att.i.tude 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 had felt it while he was writing it; Bachmann's astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 s.h.i.+rk 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. Bachmann would 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?" "d.a.m.n 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 ma.n.u.script 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 over to 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 gla.s.s through which to look at all life, as in farce, nor as a refres.h.i.+ng 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, life giving, 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 unpardonable offense 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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, G.o.d, 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 poppyc.o.c.k? Serious and devout thinking simply _are 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 cla.s.s 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 conversation with 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.