Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 720
“Sixteen? Sixteen plays?” Irvie looked more incredulous than surprised. “I don’t suppose you mean sixteen plays that were actually produced professionally, with professional actors and New York openings and all that — do you?”
“I seem to remember that they got at least that far, Irving.”
“You don’t say!” This wasn’t an animated exclamation of his; it was only a soothing one. He plainly thought that either my doddering memories were deceiving me, or if indeed my vaunted sixteen plays had actually seen “Broadway” they now belonged to a remote, unremembered past — an extinct era when nobody knew anything of consequence and nothing really counted. However, in thinking my poor old plays unremembered, as I was sure he did, he was all too right, and I didn’t hold it against him. “Sixteen — well, well!” he said indulgently, then spoke with the briskness of one who turns to a living topic. “This play of mine, now; I’d like to get your honest opinion of it. I’d like you to be frank about it.”
“Yes, of course, Irving.”
“This play of mine,” he said, “is right now in its incipient amorphous phase. It’s plastic, like a work of sculpture I keep molding between my hands, if you see what I mean.”
“Yes, I think I do, Irving.”
His brow showed a slight corrugation, not of thought but as a sign that we were now arriving at something serious. “You see, this performance I’m doing here is only a try-out. From the way some of the older people seem to be taking it — my father, for instance, and I don’t know a better literary or dramatic mind than he’s got — well, perhaps it sounds a bit giddy in an undergraduate; but I’d rather like to see the thing on Broadway, myself. That’s why I want to make a thorough test of it with these amateurs. Well, that means I’ve got a problem before me.”
“What’s the problem, Irving?”
“I’ve got to decide,” he said, “which way I’ll do the end. Emma tells me she’s given you an idea of the plot, its symbolic meanings, the characters and — —”
“She has indeed, Irving — at every meal. What’s your trouble about the end?”
“I’d hardly call it a trouble.” He made a negligent gesture with his pipe. “It’s just an argument with Edgar. You see, he’s made suggestions now and then while I was writing the piece; but sometimes he runs completely off the track. For instance, he wanted me to change quite a little of the phrasing, because people might get the idea I’m being too much like Bernard Shaw. Well, of course, even when I was a boy, I took quite an interest in moderns like Shaw and Wells and Ibsen; but what I’m really doing in this piece is shooting out in advance of that group’s psychology. I’d like to take a long progressive step forward, if you see what I mean.”
“What about the end?” I asked. “Was your argument with Edgar mainly about that?”
“In a way,” he said. “I’m sitting on the rock, you see, all alone in the dark and that’s where I have this soliloquy. You mightn’t have heard; but soliloquies are back now, you know. Until we hit me on the rock with the light, the audience gets just the voice coming out of the darkness.”
“Just the voice, Irving? Yours, you mean?”
“Yes. I make it just a slender voice, rather little and eerie, up to the cue for the reflector, and this slender, eerie little voice sums up the whole meaning — how I didn’t really care for ‘Nora’ at all and how to me all the older generations are just bunglers that have made life and the world nothing but a big sloppy mess.”
“I see,” I said. “What’s ‘Abercrombie Brown’ do about it, Irving?”
“I laugh,” he replied. “That’s where I stop using the eerie little slender voice, and the reflector comes on with me up on top of the rock, standing there laughing and laughing at everything. Well, Edgar keeps pecking at me to change all that and I think the whole play’ll be definitely lost if I do.”
“How’s Edgar want you to change it, Irving?”
“He thinks it’d be better if I’d be laughing at myself instead of at life and the world. He thinks I ought to change the soliloquy to show I’m finding out at last I’d been mistaken — all wrong about ‘Nora’ and the other characters and that everybody else was right and I’d been a fat-head about everything from the start; so ‘Abercrombie Brown’ would end the play by laughing at himself instead of at life and the world. I don’t like it. It’d change the psychology of the whole play. It’d be dangerous.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Definitely,” Irvie said. “Some people might like it; but on the other hand this isn’t a play for the groundlings. The idea of having me mistaken about everything and laughing at myself for a fool looks to me like giving up all the subtlety I want to bring out. The very point I’m definitely meticulous about is hitting a terrifically modern note. I’d lose it if I’d laugh at myself instead of at life and the world.”
“Then Edgar’s idea is all wrong, is it?”
“It’s bright but it’s cheaper,” Irvie said. “I don’t deny I’ve been considering it; but it’d belittle my whole conception of ‘Abercrombie Brown’. No, it won’t do. I shan’t use it. I — —”
“Just a moment,” I interposed, and I ought to be ashamed to admit that my tone was gravely insidious. “Am I right in surmising your conception of ‘Abercrombie Brown’ to be somewhat in the nature of a self-portrait, Irving?”
“Oh, no doubt,” he said carelessly. “But of course myself seen objectively.” He slid his leg from the arm of the chair and rose. “I’d like to spend more time with you talking over things informally this way; but Father’s given me our old stable to make over into a playhouse, I’ve got ’em all working out there and I’d better toddle along to hold ’em down. They’re liable to run haywire building the proscenium.”
He returned his pipe to his jacket pocket, and, as he sauntered to the door, I comprehended that for an otherwise idle quarter of an hour or so of his all he’d desired me to be was an audience. “Glad to have you look in any time and see what we’re doing to the old place,” he said in farewell. “We may make the old Pease horse-barn the foundation of a Civic Theatre. The town needs one. ‘Bye-bye.”
Evidently he informed his company of players that he’d been in consultation with me. When I came downstairs I found Emma just entering the house and plainly fresh from stage carpentry; she had sawdust on her dress and a curl of wood-shaving in her hair. “I’m proud of you!” she cried. “Irvie says you agreed with him on all the points he consulted you about.”
“He what, Emma?”
“Consulted you about,” she said. “I think it’s just darling, and so are you!”
I didn’t explain to her that he hadn’t consulted me. In fact, she didn’t give me the opportunity. She was finding life and the world so excitingly beautiful that she was embracing even an uncle.
Chapter 5
THE PEASES’ NO-STYLED brick house, like my own of the same groping decade, was a product of the early Twentieth Century when the larger migrations out of downtown crowding and smoke began in most of our active cities. It was Will Pease’s father who built their house; and other families of that generation (my own) came one after another to build and live in the neighborhood. So, in this more amply spaced “residence section”, old intimacies were continued and, later, repeated among the children and grandchildren of the Nineteenth Century’s “prominent citizens”. Of this expanded group of several hundred people, the Pease family and its connections were the central cluster.
This wasn’t the result of conspicuous wealth or fashionableness; other families surpassed them in both and the Peases weren’t ambitious that way. They were important because Will Pease and his father, and his grandfather, too — a genial greybeard in black broadcloth, well-remembered from my boyhood — had always been known for their goodwill, good judgment and unalterable principles. They were kind, responsible men, respected for their abilities and loved for their charity of mind and of purse. Of all the Peases the present head of the family, Will, was the modest and worthy topmost; and if our big town recognized any one person as its “principal citizen”, that person was he. Add that if any one house was the special dispenser of hospitality and friendly discourse his was, and the stir made by his young son’s play becomes comprehensible as fanfare attending a distinguished event.
. . . Shaded by old forest trees behind the Peases’ tennis court, there stood a spacious brick stable. Will’s father had pioneered into this bosky region without an automobile and before the close of the horse-and-buggy age; but Will had built a garage closer to the house and more convenient of access. Now the long-vacant stable resounded to hammer and saw, as the exertions of the cast of “As If He Didn’t Know” and a pair of hired carpenters re-shaped the whole ground floor, “carriage-house”, box-stalls and all, into a recognizably modernist theatre — designed by Irving Millerwood Pease, so stated in the printed program.
Luck in weather was with Irvie. There was never a balmier coolness under a clear moon than on the night in the last week of that June when Harriet and I crossed through the shrubberies of our own back yard and followed a path to the Peases’ driveway. There we joined a scattered procession of our friends, relatives and acquaintances, moved with them toward a roseate effulgence among the big trees. It defined itself neatly as we passed beyond intervening foliage and saw the fiery lettering: “New Civic Theatre”.
“Irvie’s done just everything!” Harriet said, exhilarated but nervous. “Think of his having even that neon sign over the old carriage-house doors. Really now, you’ll have to admit that’s wonderful. I do hope she won’t forget any of her lines; she’s so excited I don’t know what she’ll do! She wouldn’t eat a thing, just rushed over here at six o’clock to begin being made up. Think of her trying to look like Mary Reame’s mother!”
“She won’t, Harriet. If she wears that grey wig she’ll look a lot older than Mrs. Reame. When girls under twenty make themselves up to look forty they — —”
Harriet, of course, wasn’t listening. She made a dart away from me and caught at the arm of a friend. “Carrie Reame! Isn’t it exciting? I know your Mary’ll be perfectly splendid. We’re all so delighted she’s playing ‘Nora’. Emma says ‘Nora’s’ a perfectly Ibsenesque part. Doesn’t Mary love it?”
“Wild over it!” Mrs. Reame laughed. “Of course it’s rather short for a leading part, especially in her scenes with the hero, and she’s worried over what to do with her hands during his longer speeches; but she adores every word of the play. She thinks the audience is going to find it marvelous.”
“So does Emma — too marvelous for words!”
Harriet fluttered back to me as we turned pink with our near approach to the neon light. Then we passed the portal of the “New Civic Theatre” and were within the somewhat odorously new-painted auditorium, which was already half-filled and murmurous with congenial chatter. “A hundred and eighty invitations,” Harriet said, as we found seats among cousins of ours. “Irvie’s worked so hard, I do hope they’ll all come.” They all did, almost. By eight o’clock, the initial dramatic moment, all but three or four of the hired chairs were occupied, and, looking about me, I saw no face that wasn’t amiably expectant. Two of those faces were, indeed, touchingly so, I thought, as I caught a glimpse of them between intervening heads. The shining eyes and flushed cheeks of Will and Evelyn Pease betokened a tender pride already too effervescent to be decorously concealed.
Three formal resounding knocks behind the scenes brought the proper hush upon the spectators; chords from a piano were heard, accompanying a young male voice, and, when the yellow denim curtains had yielded to insistence and jerked apart, an interior “set” was disclosed wherein I recognized several articles of furniture of my own. More conspicuous, however, was Evelyn Pease’s piano at which Irvie sat playing rather sparsely and singing a song to Mary Reame. (Words and music by Irving Millerwood Pease, the program imparted in an asterisked note.)
Mary, as “Nora”, was a pretty picture in pink organdy; but probably only the eyes of her immediate family lingered upon her. Irvie was all in white with a red rose in his buttonhole; his voice, not large, was a tenor with the unforgettable vibrancy that stirs the heart; and the song, though completely of that beginning of the “crooning” epoch, was as honeyed as its title: “My Apple Blossom, You”.
Inconsistently, just after the song, Irvie, as “Abercrombie Brown”, began to deride “Nora” for being a creature of the sentimental era— “a mere saccharine echo of the Gay Nineties” he called her, presumably because he perceived that she’d fallen in love with him while he sang.
“Did you ever see anything so artistic?” the woman in front of me leaned back to whisper to Harriet. “I mean the way Irvie checked the applause after his song — just the slightest movement of his hand. If he weren’t really an artist he’d have wanted it. My Tommy’s got only a bit-part and he’s scared to death; but Irvie’s as cool as cool! I do hope these people appreciate what he’s giving them.”
She needn’t have worried about that; old Joe Erb hadn’t come, and, in the audience of this overwhelmingly one-boy play, I was, all by myself, the whole of the cold-hearted minority. Like many another actor Irvie seemed to feel that the presence of an audience demanded from him a sonorous and yet elegant artificiality. Thus his voice became richly musical and his pronunciation execrable. He’d blur one r, burr the next, and what he did to short a’s and broad a’s made my head swim, for I’m cursed with a sensitive ear. Once he said, “I awsked you not to ahsk me to ask that of myself”; I’ll swear that was the “line” and how he spoke it. While he talked and talked and talked, his posture never failed in picturesqueness — as when he stood framed in a rear doorway and took the rose from his buttonhole to toss it scornfully to “Nora”. Most of the time he had his fellow-actors’ backs or profiles to the audience while he held the center of the stage, a process notoriously damaging to any dramatic simulation of reality. Altogether I thought that seldom in amateur theatricals, and even in the saddest professional experiences of my own theatrical past, had I seen worse acting.
The play itself, as I’d already gathered, was of an old vintage frequently rediscovered by the young; it was Bernard Shaw filtered down to platitudinous lees. Nothing was plausible; nothing could be believed. No group of human beings in the world would have stood about a room, motionless and dumb, to be as incessantly scored upon, victoriously insulted and mocked as were the subordinates in this play — all except “Abercrombie Brown” himself being of course subordinates. The meekest of stodgy souls would have ganged up on “Abercrombie Brown” and thrown him out long before the end of the first act.
By that time I was myself too drearily an old stodgy soul to be amused — and yet, round about me, were a hundred and eighty people, more than half of them of mature age, all listening submissively. Submissive? They sat entranced, many of them leaning forward, hanging upon every word from the stage; and, when the pair of curtains twitched to a juncture, closing the act, the “New Civic Theatre” resounded. Old Janet Millerwood could be heard shouting “Brava! Brava!” through an uproar of applause that was unmistakably spontaneous and genuine.
Chapter 6
THE DEMONSTRATION SWELLED until Irving Millerwood Pease had twice stepped forth between the curtains and twice gravely bowed with the reticence appropriate to an artist who receives impersonally a tribute to his art.
The woman in front of me, Ella Pease Martin, a widowed relative of Harriet’s and mine, squirmed round, tilted her chair backward and seized Harriet’s hand rapturously. “Isn’t it just beyond words!” she cried. “Could anybody believe he’s still only a boy in college? I thought my Tommy did awfully well, too, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have known he was scared, would you?”
“No, not the least bit.” Harriet was ecstatically responsive. “Of course some New York manager’ll gobble this up. It’s ‘way beyond the professional plays being put on nowadays; but I do hope Irvie won’t decide to be an actor. He must just write, write, write! Weren’t you astonished to see how almost middle-aged Emma really did make herself look? Of course she had only the one line in this act; but I do think — —”
I got up and went outdoors to smoke. Other people were standing about under the moonlit trees, similarly taking advantage of the intermission, and I heard them murmuring to one another adjectives of delight. Wondering what was the matter with me — grotesquely critical of a boy’s show in a barn — I kept away from them, and did again, half an hour later, after Irvie’d been brought out four times at the conclusion of the second act.
It was the final act that brought me my two surprises. The first was Edgar Semple, who hadn’t made his appearance in the play until then, though “Abercrombie Brown” had several times satirically referred to the tinsel soul of “Octavius Thompson”, the banker, “Nora’s” father. Edgar now came upon the stage as “Octavius Thompson”, and for the first time that evening there seemed to be a convincingly actual, quiet-spoken, unstuffed person in this play.
His “make-up” as a middle-aged stoutish businessman was so real that I’d hardly have known him, and he made everything that he did and said seem what we call “natural”. I thought it fortunate for the almost operatic Irvie that this excellent actor hadn’t appeared earlier in the piece, and, when the star negligently knocked him down in the top moment of the climax, my perverted sympathies were all with the fallen banker.
I had my second surprise a few moments later when Irvie began his soliloquy in the suddenly darkened modernistic woodland that was the “set” for that act. Instead of using the end he’d originally written for the play— “Abercrombie Brown’s” summing up everything except himself as a mess and “just laughing and laughing at life and the world” — the author had switched to Edgar Semple’s suggestion. The soliloquy, avoiding its original self-celebration, dealt with “Abercrombie Brown’s” discovery that all through the play he’d been not a heroic intellect mocking fools but a vainglorious ass.
