The Jewel Merchants

The Jewel Merchants

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Branch Cabell #7 in our series by James Branch Cabell
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Title: The Jewel Merchants A Comedy In One Act
Author: James Branch Cabell
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9829] [Yes, we are more than
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The Jewel Merchants A Comedy in One Act By
James Branch Cabell
_"Io non posso ritrar di tutti appieno: pero chi si mi caccia il lungo
tema, che molte volte al fatto il dir vieti meno."_

NEW YORK 1921

TO LOUISE BURLEIGH
_This latest avatar of so many notions which were originally hers._

THE AUTHOR'S PROLOGUE
Prudence urges me here to forestall detection, by conceding that this
brief play has no pretension to "literary" quality. It is a piece in its
inception designed for, and in its making swayed by, the requirements
of the little theatre stage. The one virtue which anybody anywhere
could claim for The Jewel Merchants is the fact that it "acts" easily and
rather effectively.
And candor compels the admission forthwith that the presence of this
anchoritic merit in the wilderness is hardly due to me. When
circumstances and the Little Theatre League of Richmond combined to
bully me into contriving the dramatization of a short story called
_Balthazar's Daughter_, I docilely converted this tale into a one-act
play of which you will find hereinafter no sentence. The comedy I
wrote is now at one with the lost dramaturgy of Pollio and of
Posidippus, and is even less likely ever to be resurrected for mortal

auditors.
It read, I still think, well enough: I am certain that, when we came to
rehearse, the thing did not "act" at all, and that its dialogue, whatever
its other graces, had the defect of being unspeakable. So at each
rehearsal we--by which inclusive pronoun I would embrace the actors
and the producing staff at large, and with especial (metaphorical) ardor
Miss Louise Burleigh, who directed all--changed here a little, and there
a little more; and shifted this bit, and deleted the other, and "tried out"
everybody's suggestions generally, until we got at least the relief of
witnessing at each rehearsal a different play. And steadily my
manuscript was enriched with interlineations, to and beyond the verge
of legibility, as steadily I substituted, for the speeches I had rewritten
yesterday, the speeches which the actor (having perfectly in mind the
gist but not the phrasing of what was meant) delivered naturally.
This process made, at all events, for what we in particular wanted,
which was a play that the League could stage for half an evening's
entertainment; but it left existent not a shred of the rhetorical fripperies
which I had in the beginning concocted, and it made of the actual first
public performance a collaboration with almost as many contributing
authors as though the production had been a musical comedy.
And if only fate had gifted me with an exigent conscience and a turn
for oratory, I would, I like to think, have publicly confessed, at that first
public performance, to all those tributary clarifying rills to the play's
progress: but, as it was, vainglory combined with an aversion to
"speech-making" to compel a taciturn if smirking acceptance of the
curtain-call with which an indulgent audience flustered the nominal
author of The Jewel Merchants.... Now, in any case, it is due my
collaborators to tell you that The Jewel Merchants has amply fulfilled
the purpose of its makers by being enacted to considerable
applause,--and is a pleasure to add that this _succès d'estime_ was very
little chargeable to anything which I contributed to the play.
For another matter, I would here confess