The Story of a Play | Page 6

real
size, like a perfectly proportioned edifice.
Godolphin wanted the Maxwells to come to his hotel in Manchester,
but there were several reasons for their not doing this; the one Maxwell
alleged was that they could not afford it. They had settled for the
summer, when they got home after their brief wedding journey, at a
much cheaper house in Magnolia, and the actor and the author were
then only three miles apart, which Mrs. Maxwell thought was quite
near enough. "As it is," she said, "I'm only afraid he'll be with you
every moment with his suggestions, and won't let you have any chance
to work out your own conceptions."
Godolphin had not failed to notify the public through the press that Mr.
Brice Maxwell had severed his connection with the Boston Abstract,
for the purpose of devoting himself to a new play for Mr. Launcelot
Godolphin, and he thought it would have been an effective touch if it
could have been truthfully reported that Mr. Godolphin and Mr.
Maxwell might be seen almost any day swinging over the roads
together in the neighborhood of Manchester, blind and deaf to all the
passing, in their discussion of the play, which they might almost be said
to be collaborating. But failing Maxwell's consent to anything of the
sort, Godolphin did the swinging over the roads himself, so far as the

roads lay between Manchester and Magnolia. He began by coming in
the forenoon, when he broke Maxwell up fearfully, but he was retarded
by a waning of his own ideal in the matter, and finally got to arriving at
that hour in the afternoon when Maxwell could be found revising his
morning's work, or lying at his wife's feet on the rocks, and now and
then irrelevantly bringing up a knotty point in the character or action
for her criticism. For these excursions Godolphin had equipped himself
with a gray corduroy sack and knickerbockers, and a stick which he cut
from the alder thicket; he wore russet shoes of ample tread, and very
thick-ribbed stockings, which became his stalwart calves.
Nothing could be handsomer than the whole effect he made in this
costume, and his honest face was a pleasure to look at, though its
intelligence was of a kind so wholly different from the intelligence of
Maxwell's face, that Mrs. Maxwell always had a struggle with herself
before she could allow that it was intelligence at all. He was very polite
to her; he always brought her flowers, and he opened doors, and put
down windows, and leaped to his feet for every imaginable occasion of
hers, in a way that Maxwell never did, and somehow a way that the
polite men of her world did not, either. She had to school herself to
believe him a gentleman, and she would not accept a certain vivid
cleanliness he had as at all aristocratic; she said it was too fresh, and he
ought to have carried a warning placard of "Paint." She found that
Godolphin had one great and constant merit: he believed in Maxwell's
genius as devoutly as she did herself. This did not prevent him from
coming every day with proposals for changes in the play, more or less
structural. At one time he wished the action laid in some other country
and epoch, so as to bring in more costume and give the carpenter
something to do; he feared that the severity of the mise en scène would
ruin the piece. At another time he wanted lines taken out of the
speeches of the inferior characters and put into his own, to fatten the
part, as he explained. At other times he wished to have paraphrases of
passages that he had brought down the house with in other plays
written into this; or scenes transposed, so that he would make a more
effective entrance here or there. There was no end to his inventions for
spoiling the simplicity and truthfulness of Maxwell's piece, which he
yet respected for the virtues in it, and hoped the greatest things from.

One afternoon he arrived with a scheme for a very up-to-date scene in
the last act; have it a supper instead of a dinner, and then have a
skirt-dancer introduced, as society people had been having Carmencita.
"When Haxard dies, you know," he explained, "it would be
tremendously effective to have the woman catch him in her arms, and
she would be a splendid piece of color in the picture, with Haxard's
head lying in her lap, as the curtain comes down with a run."
At this suggestion Mrs. Maxwell was too indignant to speak; her
husband merely said, with his cold smile, "Yes; but I don't see what it
would have to do with the rest of the play."
"You