Not George Washington | Page 6

climax, the tremendous omissions
in the dialogue, the knack of stage characterisation--all these things are,
in some inexplicable way, outside me."
It was this letter that set me thinking. Ever since James had left the
island, I had been chafing at the helplessness of my position. While he
toiled in London, what was I doing? Nothing. I suppose I helped him in
a way. The thought of me would be with him always, spurring him on
to work, that the time of our separation might be less. But it was not
enough. I wanted to be doing something.... And it was during these
restless weeks that I wrote my play.

I think nothing will ever erase from my mind the moment when the
central idea of The Girl who Waited came to me. It was a boisterous
October evening. The wind had been rising all day. Now the branches
of the lilac were dancing in the rush of the storm, and far out in the bay
one could see the white crests of the waves gleaming through the
growing darkness. We had just finished tea. The lamp was lit in our
little drawing-room, and on the sofa, so placed that the light fell over
her left shoulder in the manner recommended by oculists, sat my
mother with Schopenhauer's Art of Literature. Ponto slept on the rug.
Something in the unruffled peace of the scene tore at my nerves. I have
seldom felt so restless. It may have been the storm that made me so. I
think myself that it was James's letter. The boat had been late that
morning, owing to the weather, and I had not received the letter till
after lunch. I listened to the howl of the wind, and longed to be out in
it.
My mother looked at me over her book.
"You are restless, Margie," she said. "There is a volume of Marcus
Aurelius on the table beside you, if you care to read."
"No, thank you, mother," I said. "I think I shall go for a walk."
"Wrap up well, my dear," she replied.
She then resumed her book.
I went out of our little garden, and stood on the cliff. The wind flew at
me like some wild thing. Spray stung my face. I was filled with a wild
exhilaration.
And then the idea came to me. The simplest, most dramatic idea.
Quaint, whimsical, with just that suggestion of pathos blended with it
which makes the fortunes of a play. The central idea, to be brief, of The
Girl who Waited.
Of my Maenad tramp along the cliff-top with my brain afire, and my

return, draggled and dripping, an hour late for dinner; of my writing
and re-writing, of my tears and black depression, of the pens I wore out
and the quires of paper I spoiled, and finally of the ecstasy of the day
when the piece began to move and the characters to live, I need not
speak. Anyone who has ever written will know the sensations. James
must have gone through a hundred times what I went through once. At
last, at long last, the play was finished.
For two days I gloated alone over the great pile of manuscript.
Then I went to my mother.
My diffidence was exquisite. It was all I could do to tell her the nature
of my request, when I spoke to her after lunch. At last she understood
that I had written a play, and wished to read it to her. She took me to
the bow-window with gentle solicitude, and waited for me to proceed.
At first she encouraged me, for I faltered over my opening words. But
as I warmed to my work, and as my embarrassment left me, she no
longer spoke. Her eyes were fixed intently upon the blue space beyond
the lilac.
I read on and on, till at length my voice trailed over the last line, rose
gallantly at the last fence, the single word _Curtain_, and abruptly
broke. The strain had been too much for me.
Tenderly my mother drew me to the sofa; and quietly, with closed
eyelids, I lay there until, in the soft cool of the evening, I asked for her
verdict.
Seeing, as she did instantly, that it would be more dangerous to deny
my request than to accede to it, she spoke.
"That there is an absence, my dear Margie, of any relationship with life,
that not a single character is in any degree human, that passion and
virtue and vice and real feeling are wanting--this surprises me more
than I can tell you. I had expected to listen to a natural, ordinary,
unactable episode arranged more or less in steichomuthics. There is no

work so scholarly and engaging as the amateur's. But in