FullReads

“It’s there indeed that the difficulties begin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a little off her guard.

“How can you say that? It’s there that they end!”

“Ah, wait to see where they end!”

“I mean they’ll now be of a totally different order,” Wayworth explained. “It seems to me there can be nothing in the world more difficult than to write a play that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparison with them the complications that spring up at this point are of an altogether smaller kind.”

“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs. Alsager; “they’re discouraging, because they’re vulgar. The other problem, the working out of the thing itself, is pure art.”

“How well you understand everything!” The young man had got up, nervously, and was leaning against the chimney-piece with his back to the fire and his arms folded. The roll of his copy, in his fist, was squeezed into the hollow of one of them. He looked down at Mrs. Alsager, smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smile from eyes still charmed and suffused. “Yes, the vulgarity will begin now,” he presently added.

“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”

“I shall suffer in a good cause.”

“Yes, giving THAT to the world! You must leave it with me, I must read it over and over,” Mrs. Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw the copy, in its cover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic identity now to him, out of his grasp. “Who in the world will do it?–who in the world CAN?” she went on, close to him, turning over the leaves. Before he could answer she had stopped at one of the pages; she turned the book round to him, pointing out a speech. “That’s the most beautiful place–those lines are a perfection.” He glanced at the spot she indicated, and she begged him to read them again–he had read them admirably before. He knew them by heart, and, closing the book while she held the other end of it, he murmured them over to her–they had indeed a cadence that pleased him–watching, with a facetious complacency which he hoped was pardonable, the applause in her face. “Ah, who can utter such lines as THAT?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can you find to do HER?”

“We’ll find people to do them all!”

“But not people who are worthy.”

“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willing enough. I’ll work with them–I’ll grind it into them.” He spoke as if he had produced twenty plays.

“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.

“But I shall have to find my theatre first. I shall have to get a manager to believe in me.”

“Yes–they’re so stupid!”

“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shall have to watch and wait,” said Allan Wayworth. “Do you see me hawking it about London?”

“Indeed I don’t–it would be sickening.”

“It’s what I shall have to do. I shall be old before it’s produced.”

“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs. Alsager cried. “I know one or two of them,” she mused.

“Do you mean you would speak to them?”

“The thing is to get them to read it. I could do that.”

“That’s the utmost I ask. But it’s even for that I shall have to wait.”

She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. “You sha’n’t wait.”

“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.

“That is YOU may, but I won’t! Will you leave me your copy?” she went on, turning the pages again.

“Certainly; I have another.” Standing near him she read to herself a passage here and there; then, in her sweet voice, she read some of them out. “Oh, if YOU were only an actress!” the young man exclaimed.

“That’s the last thing I am. There’s no comedy in ME!”

She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his good genius. “Is there any tragedy?” he asked, with the levity of complete confidence.