The Story of a Play

The Story of a Play, by W. D.
Howells

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Title: The Story of a Play A Novel
Author: W. D. Howells
Release Date: December 30, 2006 [EBook #20225]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE STORY OF A PLAY

A Novel
BY
W. D. HOWELLS
AUTHOR OF "THE LANDLORD AT LION'S HEAD" "AN
OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY" ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK AND LONDON
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1898
W. D. HOWELLS'S WORKS.
IN CLOTH BINDING.
Copyright, 1898, BY W. D. HOWELLS.
Electrotyped by J. A. Howells & Co., Jefferson, Ohio.

THE STORY OF A PLAY.

I.
The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell's play had so
far made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt justified in
taking the road with a combination of his own. He met the author at a
dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they were introduced with
a facile flourish of praise from the journalist who brought them
together, as the very men who were looking for each other, and who
ought to be able to give the American public a real American drama.

The actor, who believed he had an ideal of this drama, professed an
immediate interest in the kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying
to do, and asked him to come the next day, if he did not mind its being
Sunday, and talk the play over with him.
He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at about the hour people were
getting home from church, and he asked the author to join him. But
Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he hid his impatience of the
actor's politeness as well as he could, and began at the first moment
possible: "The idea of my play is biblical; we're still a very biblical
people." He had thought of the fact in seeing so many worshippers
swarming out of the churches.
"That is true," said the actor.
"It's the old idea of the wages of sin. I should like to call it that."
"The name has been used, hasn't it?"
"I shouldn't mind; for I want to get a new effect from the old notion,
and it would be all the stronger from familiar association with the name.
I want to show that the wages of sin is more sinning, which is the very
body of death."
"Well?"
"Well, I take a successful man at the acme of his success, and study
him in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in
a way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings;
and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable
sort--a material success that is gross and palpable. I have to use a large
canvas, as big as Shakespeare's, in fact, and I put in a great many
figures."
"That's right," said the actor. "You want to keep the stage full, with
people coming and going."
"There's a lot of coming and going, and a lot of incidents, to keep the

spectator interested, and on the lookout for what's to happen next. The
whole of the first act is working up to something that I've wanted to see
put on the stage for a good while, or ever since I've thought of writing
for the stage, and that is a large dinner, one of the public kind."
"Capital!" said the actor.
"I've seen a good deal of that sort of thing as a reporter; you know they
put us at a table off to one side, and we see the whole thing, a great deal
better than the diners themselves do. It's a banquet, given by a certain
number of my man's friends, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, and you
see the men gathering in the hotel parlor--well, you can imagine it in
almost any hotel--and Haxard is in the foreground. Haxard is the hero's
name, you know."
"It's a good name," the actor mused aloud. "It has a strong sound."
"Do you like it? Well, Haxard," Maxwell continued, "is there in the
foreground, from the first moment the curtain rises, receiving his
friends, and shaking hands right