1

FELIX, having torn up all his previous attempts, was again at work upon a play. It seemed clear to him now that plays were not written to please the author: they were written to please the public.

There was plenty of time to work, now. They were seeing hardly anybody that summer. Clive came occasionally, and they spent a few week-ends at his place in Woods Point. They did not see Phyllis, for she was still at the normal school, having heroically decided to shorten the term of her training by taking the summer course. Dorothy Sheridan came once or twice to their studio before leaving to spend the summer in some eastern fishing village where things were very “paintable.” Howard Morgan had dropped in one evening to smoke a cigarette with them. They had made the acquaintance of a taciturn etcher in the studio next door, and of an unhappily married boy-painter who lived around the corner and who used sometimes to take refuge from domestic infelicities in a cup of their coffee....

It seemed to Felix that in these idle summer months, with life flowing lazily past in the sunshine, he should be able to accomplish something in play-writing. Certainly there was nothing else to distract or excite him.

He went about his task soberly and conscientiously this time. He undertook to learn how plays were written. He read books on “play-construction.” He even, conquering his instinctive distaste, studied the methods of Pinero and H. A. Jones. Their plays bored him ineffably—they seemed trite, false, vulgar and dull. But the public had liked them, and doubtless they had something to teach him.

“Why don’t you write what you want to, in your own way?” Rose-Ann would ask impatiently.

But he did not want to write “in his own way.” The things he had written to suit himself that spring, the fantastic dramatic fragments which he had torn up in disgust, were too utterly freakish, too whimsical and absurd. He wanted to prove that he could write something else—something that was not so damnably “different.” He wanted to write a regular three-act play, of the sort that audiences liked, and he was going to learn to do it if it took five years.... It had taken Hawkins five years to get to a point where he could impress a manager—Hawkins, lending him a book on play—construction, had confessed as much.... And Hawkins was now on the verge of a brilliant success. He had gone to New York to collaborate with the manager on a few final changes.

It was slow going, this way; but Felix was not discouraged. It seemed good to struggle at an uncongenial task. Eventually he would conquer its difficulties. He might continue to “get by” with freakish criticism; but he was going to be a writer of plays that ordinary people could recognize as plays. It was not his business to please himself; Bernard Shaw might do that—but he, Felix, was not Bernard Shaw; it was his business to adapt himself to the realities of current play-writing.... He told all this to Rose-Ann, who listened in hostile silence.

Rose-Ann had changed, become less poignantly restless. She seemed to have discovered a new way of occupying herself—or rediscovered an old way, long since abandoned. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to read books all the time. I found them so much more satisfying than actual life. And then I stopped reading, and tried to live. I’ve hardly read anything since I came to Chicago.... So there’s lots of things I want to read.”

She read, day after day, from the time Felix rose from their breakfast of grapefruit and coffee and cigarettes, till afternoon, lying curled up among the pillows of the window seat; she went out for luncheon somewhere alone, and sat in the Park all afternoon or wandered through the Museum whose crumbling stucco porticos of nobly antique pattern looked themselves like relics of some departed race; taking with her a book, which she seldom opened, but which served for companionship—and a notebook, in which she wrote sentences and paragraphs which Felix found she would rather he did not read. “They seem just to belong to me,” she said, shyly.

She had retired into some inner chamber of her self, to think and dream; and the books, the walks, the wanderings among fragments of dead antiquity, the solitude, were all a part of this dream life.... The books which she read, a chapter or two at a time, putting one aside to take up another, were such as took the mind into strange worlds, like “Thais” and “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”; or those which told the adventures of a soul in contact with a new world which it finds strange and perilous, like “The Damnation of Theron Ware” and “The Red and the Black.” Or books of anthropology and of poetry, those two ideal guides of the stay-at-home traveller in quest of strangeness. So much Felix curiously noted, and reflected that he had been at home in those strange worlds all his life and was now trying a greater adventure—the discovery of the familiar and commonplace world in which he actually lived....

When Felix left the office, having hastily written “something light” for the editorial page, or furbished up a few paragraphs for the dramatic column, he would come home to the studio and work fiercely and painfully for two or three hours.

“But, Felix, you work too hard!” Rose-Ann had said to him. “That isn’t the way to work!” Whatever the way to work might be, he had not yet found it; but at least he could try.... And late in the afternoon, throwing down his pen with a sense of duty done, he would go to the Park, and find Rose-Ann waiting for him on a bench, with book and notebook in her lap. They would find some cool place to dine, and then walk for hours along the shore of the lake, talking.

Yes, Rose-Ann had changed, become less fiery and impatient, more calm. And coming at this hour out of that inner chamber of self in which she spent her days, she brought to him quaint and lovely thoughts, delicate and ironic fancies, things that charmed and allured his imagination. Sometimes she talked of the books she had been reading, and enriched their stories as she told them with a beauty that came from her own mind.

She told him one day the story of a “girl-goldsmith,” a figure that seemed to have captured her imagination, in a book called “Klaus Hinrich Bass,” by a German clergyman named Frenssen—a startling story to be written by a clergyman, Felix thought; but, reflecting upon Rose-Ann’s father, he remembered that he knew very little about clergymen after all. It was the story of a girl who believed in the truth and goodness of her instincts; Rose-Ann told it with such zest and poetic feeling that he read it one afternoon, when she was away in the Park, for himself; and he found that she had re-created it in her own imagination, giving to Frenssen’s idyl of sweet and fearless love some motives and meanings which it did not seem to him to possess as he read it in the pages of the book; it was as if Rose-Ann knew some things about that girl-goldsmith which Frenssen himself had not guessed.... And sometimes, when Rose-Ann told some story she had read, and Felix asked her whose it was, she pretended to have forgotten—and he wondered if it were not her own. But he feared to demand the truth, lest the shy beginnings of creative effort be frightened by his questioning.

It was strange sometimes to feel that she was entering the world of dreams just as he was leaving it.

One hot July evening, when he wanted to work on his play, she insisted on his coming outdoors with her. “You don’t want to work,” she said. “You know it!”

“Isn’t that a good reason for working, perhaps?” he said. He had that day had a note from Hawkins in New York, and Hawkins’s patient plodding and prospective success were making him feel ashamed of his own laziness.

She showed a touch of her old impatience. “Has it come to this!” she said. “Felix, do you really think the way to be an artist is to do all the things you don’t want to do? I wonder if you take our marriage in the same spirit! Am I a duty, too?”

“Ridiculous child!” he said, and went out with her.

“We’re going to take a ride on the lagoon,” she said, and led him to the landing place, where a little launch presently chugged up and discharged its dozen passengers. Felix and Rose-Ann clambered in, and sat in the bow. The other waiting people followed them, and the boat started slowly out into the mysterious islanded waters, stabbing with its searchlight into the warm thick darkness and revealing with that unearthly light, here and there, some place of trees bending to dip their boughs into the water—the edge of one of the islands around and past which they steered slowly, turning and winding about until they seemed to be exploring a vast islanded wilderness. The breeze stirred faintly the hair of their bared heads. The others of the party appeared to be lovers happily entranced with love and with the mysterious beauty of this realm which it seemed could hardly exist in the confines of a mere park. No one spoke, except in whispers.

“Life ought to be like this,” whispered Rose-Ann, taking his hand. “Not arranged and planned!”

A little later, she whispered fiercely: “Felix, are you thinking of that damned play? Then stop it!”

It was true. Felix had been thinking of his play. He became annoyed with her. She wanted him to write plays, to be a personage—and now, when he tried....

As if in reply to his thought, she bent and said in his ear, “Felix, if you write a conventional play like Hawkins’s, and make a success of it, I shall leave you!”

He was inwardly dismayed.

“I wonder—” said Rose-Ann aloud, and then stopped, as if startled at hearing her voice.

“Yes?” said Felix.

“Nothing,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you afterward.”

And afterward, in a cafÉ where they had stopped for a cool drink before going home to bed, she told him that she did not want him to be successful—that she meant it quite seriously.

“It would spoil everything,” she said.

“Never fear, I shan’t be so successful as that,” he said glumly.

“But that’s just what I’m afraid of—that you will!” she said. “I looked at your scenario the other day when you were at the office; and it’s—well, I’ve seen that play a hundred times; it’s what they call sure-fire stuff.”

She said this reproachfully, but Felix was elated. That was exactly what he had been trying to make it. “Do you really think so!” he asked.

“I do,” she said. “And I know that if you keep on long enough, you’ll succeed. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Felix, that play isn’t true—not as we see truth. It makes people behave as people think they ought to—not as we know they feel. You deal in conventional emotions entirely. The only interesting person in the play is the wicked woman—and you know she isn’t wicked at all, Felix, you only pretend to think so to please your audience.”

“You mean the woman who tries to take the other woman’s husband away from her? Oh, I know—it’s stupid stuff, but—”

“Well, then, why do you do it? If you want to write about a girl who’s in love with another woman’s husband, why don’t you do it honestly? You and I don’t believe in those silly old notions. Why pretend that you think she is wicked? Just to make money? I’d rather we starved than have you write plays like that.”

It was at once an immense relief to be told that he need not try any longer to write that stupid play, and a profound humiliation to be scolded by his wife. He did not know whether to be angry or ashamed. His eyes filled with tears, and he reached across the table and laid his hand in hers in silence.

“What was it you were going to tell me there in the Park,” he said after a while.

“I was thinking about ‘duty,’” she said. “Your attitude toward life reminds me of a little story I read the other day—I think it was in Anatole France ... a curious little story.... If you want to hear it?”

“Yes, tell me.”