Questionable Shapes | Page 9

seemed to be absolute trivialities
they were talking; so far as Hewson made out they got no deeper than
the new play which was then commanding the public favor apparently
for the reason that it was altogether surface, with no measure upwards
or downwards. Upon this surface the comment of the man on Miss
Hernshaw's right wandered indefatigably.
Hewson could not imagine of her sincerity a deliberate purpose of
letting the poor fellow show all the shallowness that was in him, and of

amusing itself with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside out
for her inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely interested, to be paying
him an unaffected attention; but when the lady across the table
addressed a word to him, Miss Hernshaw, as if she had been watching
for some such chance, instantly turned to Hewson.
"What do you think of 'Ghosts'?" she asked, with imperative
suddenness.
"Ghosts?" he echoed.
"Or perhaps you didn't go?" she suggested, and he perceived that she
meant Ibsen's tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a
shock, and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St.
Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to
vanish again when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before,
and he drew a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss
Hernshaw. "Ah, I see you did! Wasn't it tremendous? I think the girl
who did Regina was simply awful, don't you?"
"I don't know," said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary
associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of
discussing "Ghosts" with a young lady. But he pulled himself together,
and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave
room for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise
tabooed, if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. "I think
that the greatest miracle of the play--and to me it was altogether
miraculous"--
"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that!" cried the girl. "It was the greatest
experience of my life. I can't bear to have people undervalue it. I want
to hit them. But go on!"
Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential
violence: he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate
witnesses of "Ghosts" with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her
cobwebby handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp
gloves looking curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness.
"I was merely going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play
was among the actors--I won't venture on the spectators--"
"No, don't! It isn't speakable."
"It's astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen's has with the actors. They
can't play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and

women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He
deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with
themselves. They have to be, and not just seem."
Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. "I'm glad you think that," she said, and
Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it's what I always
shall do, I don't care what they say."
"But I don't know whether I understand exactly."
"Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really feel. Then they say
what they really feel."
There was an obscure resentment unworthily struggling at the bottom
of Hewson's heart for her long neglect of him in behalf of the man on
her left. "Yes," he said, "if they are capable of really feeling anything."
"What do you mean? Everybody really feels."
"Well, then, thinking anything."
She drew herself up a little with an air of question. "I believe
everybody really thinks, too, and it's your duty to let them find out what
they're thinking, by truly saying what you think."
"Then she isn't dealing quite honestly with him," said Hewson, with a
malicious smile.
The man at Miss Hernshaw's left was still talking about the play, and he
was at that moment getting off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the
lady across the table: just what everybody had been saying about it
from the first.
"No, I should think she was not," said the girl, gravely. She looked hurt,
as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate, and
Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had
had his revenge in making her realize the man's vacuity.
He tried to get her back to talk about "Ghosts," again, but she answered
with indifference, and just then he was arrested by something a