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The Bolted Door
by
It was dated about four weeks back, under the letter-head of “The Diversity Theatre.”
“MY DEAR MR. GRANICE:
“I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month, and it’s no use–the play won’t do. I have talked it over with Miss Melrose–and you know there isn’t a gamer artist on our stage–and I regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn’t the poetry that scares her–or me either. We both want to do all we can to help along the poetic drama–we believe the public’s ready for it, and we’re willing to take a big financial risk in order to be the first to give them what they want. BUT WE DON’T BELIEVE THEY COULD BE MADE TO WANT THIS. The fact is, there isn’t enough drama in your play to the allowance of poetry– the thing drags all through. You’ve got a big idea, but it’s not out of swaddling clothes.
“If this was your first play I’d say: TRY AGAIN. But it has been just the same with all the others you’ve shown me. And you remember the result of ‘The Lee Shore,’ where you carried all the expenses of production yourself, and we couldn’t fill the theatre for a week. Yet ‘The Lee Shore’ was a modern problem play–much easier to swing than blank verse. It isn’t as if you hadn’t tried all kinds–“
Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the envelope. Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every phrase in it by heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night after night, stand out in letters of flame against the darkness of his sleepless lids?
“IT HAS BEEN JUST THE SAME WITH ALL THE OTHERS YOU’VE SHOWN ME.”
That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting work!
“YOU REMEMBER THE RESULT OF ‘THE LEE SHORE.'”
Good God–as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all now in a drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his sudden resolve to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand dollars of his inheritance on testing his chance of success–the fever of preparation, the dry-mouthed agony of the “first night,” the flat fall, the stupid press, his secret rush to Europe to escape the condolence of his friends!
“IT ISN’T AS IF YOU HADN’T TRIED ALL KINDS.”
No–he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the light curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois- realistic and the lyrical-romantic–finally deciding that he would no longer “prostitute his talent” to win popularity, but would impose on the public his own theory of art in the form of five acts of blank verse. Yes, he had offered them everything– and always with the same result.
Ten years of it–ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure. The ten years from forty to fifty–the best ten years of his life! And if one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams, assimilation, preparation–then call it half a man’s life-time: half a man’s life-time thrown away!
And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had settled that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the clock. Ten minutes past eight–only ten minutes had been consumed in that stormy rush through his whole past! And he must wait another twenty minutes for Ascham. It was one of the worst symptoms of his case that, in proportion as he had grown to shrink from human company, he dreaded more and more to be alone. . . . But why the devil was he waiting for Ascham? Why didn’t he cut the knot himself? Since he was so unutterably sick of the whole business, why did he have to call in an outsider to rid him of this nightmare of living?