66 "No," he returned, instantly. Why should I suspect you of anything so base?" Her throat was full, but she made out to say, "No, you are too generous, too good for such a thing"; and now she went on to eat humble pie with a self-devotion which few women could practise. "I know that if I don't like having her I have no one but myself to thank for it. If I had never written to that miserable Mr. Sterne, or answered his advertisement, he would never have heard of your play, and nothing that has happened would have happened." "Godolphin?" they both echoed. "Yes. He's given up the piece." The manager drew out a letter, which he handed to Maxwell, and which Louise read with her husband, over his shoulder. It was addressed to Grayson, and began very formally. DEAR SIR: "No matter. 66 I am to blame for the way it did happen; and now you will never hear another word from me. Would you like me to swear it?" "That would be rather unpleasant," said Maxwell. They both felt a great physical fatigue, and they neither had the wish to prolong the evening after dinner. Maxwell was going to lock the door of the apartment at nine o'clock, and then go to bed, when there came a ring at it. He opened it, and stood confronted with Grayson, looking very hot and excited. "Can I come in a moment? ager asked. "Are you alone? speak with you?" the man- "There is no one here but Mrs. Maxwell," said her husband, and he led the way into the parlor. "And if you don't like," said Louise, confessing to have overheard him by her words, as they shook hands, "you needn't speak before her even." Why, but he was here only a few hours ago, praising her to the skies," said Louise; and she hoped that she was keeping secret the guilty joy she felt; but probably it was not unknown to her husband. "Oh, of course," said Grayson, with a laugh, "that was Godolphin's way. He may have felt all that he said; or he may have been trying to find out what Mr. Maxwell thought, and whether he could count upon him in a move against her." "We said nothing," cried Louise, and she blessed heaven that she could truly say so, "which could possibly be distorted into that." "I didn't suppose you had," said the manager. "But now we have got to act. We have got to do one of two things, and Godolphin knows it; we have got to let Miss Havisham go, or we have got to let him go. For my part I would much rather let him go. She is a finer artist every way, and she is more important to the success of the piece. But it would be more difficult to replace him than it would be to replace her, and he knows it. We could get Miss Pettrell at once for Salome, and we should have to look about for a Hax ard. Still, I am disposed to drop Godolphin, if Mr. Maxwell feels as I do." He looked at Maxwell; but Louise lowered her eyes, and would not influence her husband by so much as a glance. It seemed to her that he was a long time in answering. "I am satisfied with Godolphin's Haxard much better than I am with Miss Havisham's Salome, strong as it is. On the artistic side alone, I should prefer to keep Godolphin and let her go, if it could be done justly. Then, I know that Godolphin has made sacrifices and borne losses on account of the play, and I think that he has a right to a share in its success, if it has a chance of succeeding. He's jealous of Miss Havisham, of course; I could see that from the first minute; but he's earned the first place, and I'm not surprised that he wants to keep it. I shouldn't like to lose it if I were he. I should say that we ought to make any concession he asks in that way." "Very well," said Grayson. "He will ask to have our agreement with Mrs. Harley broken; and we can say that we were compelled to break it. I feel as you do, that he has some right on his side. She's a devilish provoking woman-excuse me, Mrs. Maxwell!--and I've seen her trying to take the centre from Godolphin ever since the rehearsals began; but I don't like to be driven by him; still, there are worse things than being driven. In any case we have to accept the inevitable, and it's only a question which inevitable we accept. Good-night. I will see Godolphin, at once. Good-night, Mrs. Maxwell. We shall expect you to do what you can in consoling your fair neighbor and reconciling her to the inevitable." Louise did not know whether this was ironical or not, and she did not at all like the laugh from Maxwell which greeted the suggestion. "I shall have to reconcile Sterne, and I don't believe that will be half so easy." The manager's words were gloomy, but there was an imaginable relief in his tone and a final cheerfulness in his manner. He left the Maxwells to a certain embarrassment in each other's presence. Louise was the first to break the silence that weighed upon them both. "I am not such a fool," said Maxwell. "Because," she said, "if you did, you did very wrong, and I don't believe any good could come of it." Yet she did not seem altogether averse to the risks involved; and in fact she could not justly accuse herself of what had happened, however devoutly she had wished for such a consummation. XXV IT was Miss Havisham and not Godolphin who appeared to the public as having ended the combination their managers had formed. The interviewing on both sides continued until the interest of the quarrel was lost in that of the first presentation of the play, when the impression that Miss Havisham had been ill-used was effaced by the impression made by Miss Pettrell in the part of Salome. Her performance was not only successful in the delicacy and refinement which her friends expected of her, but she brought to the work a vivid yet purely feminine force which took them by surprise and made the public her own. No one in the house could have felt, as the Maxwells felt, a certain quality in it which it would be extremely difficult to characterize without overstating it. Perhaps Louise felt this more even than her husband, for when she appealed to him, he would scarcely confess to a sense of it; but from time to time in the stronger passages she was aware of an echo, to the ear and to the eye, of a more passionate personality than Miss Pettrell's. Had Godolphin profited by his knowledge of Miss Havisham's creation, and had he imparted to Miss Pettrell, who never saw it, hints of it which she used in her own creation of the part? If he had, just what was the nature and the measure of his sin? Louise tormented herself with this question, while a sense of the fact went as often as it came, and left her in a final doubt of it. What was certain was that if Godolphin had really committed this crime, of which he might have been quite unconsciously guilty, Miss Pettrell was wholly innocent of it; and, indeed, the effect she made might very well have been imagined by herself, and only have borne this teasing resemblance by pure accident. Godolphin was justly punished if he were culpable, and he suffered an eclipse in any case which could not have been greater from Miss Havisham. There were recalls for the chief actors at every fall of the curtain, and at the end of the third act, in which Godolphin had really been magnificent, there began to be cries of "Author! Author!" and a messenger appeared in the box where the Maxwells sat and begged the author, in Godolphin's name, to come behind at once. The next thing that Louise knew the actor was leading her husband on the stage and they were both bowing to the house, which shouted at them and had them back once and twice, and still shouted, but now with a certain confusion of voices in its demand, which continued till the author came on a fourth time, led by the actor as before, and himself lead ing the heroine of his piece. Then the storm of applause left no doubt that the will of the house had been rightly interpreted. Louise sat still, with the tears blurring the sight before her. They were not only proud and happy tears, but they were tears of humble gratitude that it was Miss Pettrell, and not Mrs. Harley, whom her husband was leading on to share his triumph. She did not think her own desert was great; but she could not tax herself with any wrong that she had not at least tried to repair; she felt that what she had escaped she could not have borne, and that heaven was merciful to her weakness, if not just to her merit. Perhaps this was why she was so humble and so grateful. There arose in her a vague fear as to what Godolphin might do in the case of a Salome who was certainly no more subordinated to his Haxard than Miss Havisham's, or what new demands he might not make upon the author; but Maxwell came back to her with a message from the actor, which he wished conveyed with his congratulations upon the success of the piece. This was to tell her of his engagement to Miss Pettrell, which had suddenly taken place that day, and which he thought there could be no moment so fit to impart to her as that of their common triumph. Louise herself went behind at the end of the piece, and made herself acceptable to both the artists in her cordial good wishes. Neither of them resented the arch intention with which she said to Godolphin, “I suppose you won't mind such a beautiful Salome as Miss Pettrell has given us, now that it's to be all in the family." Miss Pettrell answered for him with as complete an intelligence: "Oh, I shall know how to subdue her to his Haxard, if ever she threatens the peace of the domestic hearth." That Salome has never done so in any serious measure Maxwell argues from the fact that, though the Godolphins have now been playing his piece together for a whole year since their marriage, they have not yet been divorced. THE END. THE POINT OF VIEW Τ HE isolation of the scholar is notorious. One of the most characteristic attributes of those that are devoted to their classics is too often a contempt for and neglect of the things of immediate contemporary interest; and seeing scholars assume this posture, many of little learning affect it. Nowhere is this more an attribute of the most highly educated classes than in matters concerning the drama. I do not refer to the ridiculous extreme of those who think the only legitimate play is one that is bookish, and the only great play one that is in blank verse. But I should like to protest against the almost universal theory that things of local and ephemeral interest and importance are undignified upon the stage. For this feeling is almost universal; many, the majority even, of those to whom a local allusion appeals vividly, laugh shamefacedly, and feel that they are doing a sort of dramatic slumming. The Decadence of the Local Allusion. Now a review of the great classics of the world literature will show one thing more prominent than almost anything else, and that is the vital interest the makers of these classics took in their own times. To the greatest Greeks and Romans the town-life of Athens and Rome was the life of the world. They would have rated it utter folly had anyone conceived the idea that the mention of a man or a place or an event within the personal ken of the audience was any thing but the proper thing; made right by all the claims a work of art has upon an artist's clientage. What was Aristophanes but a burlesquer extraordinary and plenipotentiary? The golden era of our own English letters shows the same spirit, in equal force. The vast activity and zeal in good and bad of the Elizabethan times so interested the people in everything about them, and gave them such respect for themselves and theirs, that they could not weary of seeing the least characteristic of their day turned neatly into stage use. The greatest dramatists wrote plays whose only reason for being was their mass of local allusions, from satire in the large to minutest comments on the fashions and fopperies of the time. The most learned of the Elizabethan playwrights, Ben Jonson, was the most local in his hits; his two plays about Every Man in and out of his Humour are simply local allusions hung, almost to breaking, on a slender thread of plot. His "Alchemist" was a local satire on a folly that was not new, indeed, but was raging with particular violence. His "Cynthia's Revels," with its Roman deities and Latin persons of the drama, is only a vehicle for satire on London. "The Poetaster," with Horace and Virgil and Ovid among the characters, is the medium for thrusts at all the rivals of Jonson; and "Bartholomew Fair" was one great series of jabs at the Puritans. Beaumont and Fletcher's " Knight of the Burning Pestle " was also a work of amazing devotion to the things of the day. To name the others would be only to catalogue a large part of Elizabethan comedy. But they were not satisfied with writing plays especially for satire on the town; the Italian people of their romantic dramas were rarely more than Londoners under an alias. A local quip or a serious local allusion was considered always in good taste. "Romeo and Juliet" was not too romantic, nor Tamburlaine" too serious. Anachronism was no obstacle to local allu The Drama and the sion; in fact, it is to be doubted that they and manners. These scenes occur in tragedy Ben Jonson was scholar enough to be careful of his chronology when he wanted to be. But in the local allusions in two of his most careful plays he makes anachronistic slips, referring in "Catiline" to the shifting of a scene, because Inigo Jones, later his dear enemy, had recently made use of movable scenery; and in “Sejanus," glancing at the then notorious inaccuracy of pocketwatches. In "The Poetaster," for all the delicacy with which he has veiled contemporary satire under the personality of Rome, he puts in references to the bass-viol, almost as popular then as the pipe, and to Goose Fair and the Bear Garden. So Marlowe puts into his Scythian Play, “Tamburlaine," these lines: devoted half his life to thought upon his lovelocks, his combs, his case of pick-tooths (the public use of which is still preserved, like many other early English things, in America), his jingling spurs, his ribands, the starching and cut of his beard (you remember Touchstone's use of the cut of a man's beard for his delicious discourse on the technic of quarrelling). The importation of tobacco was one of the wonders of their nine days, and its picturesque strangeness could not fail to excite the attention of the impressionable Elizabethan dramatists. One reads in Ben Jonson of “the tobacco face," as who should say a bicycle face. They "drank" tobacco in those days, and they “droned " it, and when they inhaled it they called it the whiffle;" and there were three kinds of tobacco, cane, and leaf, and pudding. One could read in these plays the whole Elizabethan art of tobacco-smoking. And small wonder that the drama should reek of the weed when the gallants of the day sat on the stage and puffed their insolent smoke in the faces of the actors. The slang of the day was of vital interest to the dramatists then; there is "your citymannerly word, forsooth;" and everyone knows the plays upon the word "protest." The quacks and criminals whom one might call the slang of history, occur constantly: among many quotables, the famous Amazon, Marie Ambree, and Nomentack, the Indian chief brought from America. 46 The commonest and most local amusements are given the same interest in the play that they must have had to the towns-people; the famous bear-garden, the Paris garden," appears everywhere. One even learns the names of two favorite bears, "Ned Whiting" and "George Stone." Then there were other curiosities, Lipsius's automatic fly, that could wend its way around the table (convivas circumvolitavit). There was the bull with five legs and the great hog, and the dogs that danced the morrice, and the elephant, and the ape; Holden's camel, and Captain Pod's pup |