"Don"t be vulgar, Brice," said Louise, and she laughed rather forlornly.
"I don"t see how you have the heart to joke, if you think it"s so bad as you say."
"I haven"t. I"m joking without any heart." He stood up. "Let us go and take a bath."
She glanced at him with a swift inventory of his f.a.gged looks, and said, "Indeed, you shall not take a bath this morning. You couldn"t react against it. You won"t, will you?"
"No, I"ll only lie on the sand, if you can pick me out a good warm spot, and watch you."
"I shall not bathe, either."
"Well, then, I"ll watch the other women." He put out his hand and took hers.
She felt his touch very cold. "You are excited I can see. I wish--"
"What? That I was not an intending dramatist?"
"That you didn"t have such excitements in your life. They will kill you."
"They are all that will keep me alive."
They went down to the beach, and walked back and forth on its curve several times before they dropped in the sand at a discreet distance from several groups of hotel acquaintance. People were coming and going from the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind them, with its tufts of coa.r.s.e silvery-green gra.s.ses. The Maxwells bowed to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were pa.s.sing ball near them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot. Dogs ran barking vaguely about, and children with wooden shovels screamed at their play.
Far off shimmered the sea, of one pale blue with the sky. The rooks were black at either end of the beach; a line of sail-boats and dories swung across its crescent beyond the bathers, who bobbed up and down in the surf, or showed a head here and there outside of it.
"What a singular spectacle," said Maxwell. "The casting off of the conventional in sea-bathing always seems to me like the effect of those dreams where we appear in society insufficiently dressed, and wonder whether we can make it go."
"Yes, isn"t it?" His wife tried to cover all the propositions with one loosely fitting a.s.sent.
"I"m surprised," Maxwell went on, "that some realistic wretch hasn"t put this sort of thing on the stage. It would be tremendously effective; if he made it realistic enough it would be attacked by the press as improper and would fill the house. Couldn"t we work a sea-bathing scene into the "Second Chapter"? It would make the fortune of the play, and it would give G.o.dolphin a chance to show his n.o.ble frame in something like the majesty of nature. G.o.dolphin would like nothing better. We could have Atland rescue Salome, and G.o.dolphin could flop round among the canvas breakers for ten minutes, and come on for a recall with the heroine, both dripping real water all over the stage."
"Don"t be disgusting, Brice," said his wife, absently. She had her head half turned from him, watching a lady who had just come out of her bath-house and was pa.s.sing very near them on her way to the water.
Maxwell felt the inattention in his wife"s tone and looked up.
The bather returned their joint gaze steadily from eyes that seemed, as Maxwell said, to smoulder under their long lashes, and to question her effect upon them in a way that he was some time finding a phrase for.
He was tormented to make out whether she were a large person or not; without her draperies he could not tell. But she moved with splendid freedom, and her beauty expressed a maturity of experience beyond her years; she looked young, and yet she looked as if she had been taking care of herself a good while. She was certainly very handsome, Louise owned to herself, as the lady quickened her pace, and finally ran down to the water and plunged into a breaker that rolled in at the right moment in uncommon volume.
"Well?" she asked her husband, whose eyes had gone with hers.
"We ought to have clapped."
"Do you think she is an actress?"
"I don"t know. I never saw her before. She seemed to turn the sunshine into lime-light as she pa.s.sed. Why! that"s rather pretty, isn"t it? And it"s a verse. I wonder what it is about these people. The best of them have nothing of the stage in them--at least, the men haven"t. I"m not sure, though, that the women haven"t. There are lots of women off the stage who are actresses, but they don"t seem so. They"re personal; this one was impersonal. She didn"t seem to regard me as a man; she regarded me as a house. Did you feel that?"
"Yes, that was it, I suppose. But she regarded you more than she did me, I think."
"Why, of course. You were only a matinee."
They sat half an hour longer in the sand, and then he complained that the wind blew all the warmth out of him as fast as the sun shone it into him. She felt his hand next her and found it still cold; after a glance round she furtively felt his forehead.
"You"re still thinking," she sighed. "Come! We must go back."
"Yes. That girl won"t be out of the water for half an hour yet; and we couldn"t wait to see her clothed and in her right mind afterwards."
"What makes you think she"s a girl?" asked his wife, as they moved slowly off.
He did not seem to have heard her question. He said, "I don"t believe I can make the new play go, Louise; I haven"t the strength for it. There"s too much good stuff in Haxard; I can"t throw away what I"ve done on it."
"That is just what I was thinking, Brice! It would be too bad to lose that. The love-business as you"ve remodeled it is all very well. But it _is_ light; it"s comedy; and Haxard is such splendid tragedy. I want you to make your first impression in that. You can do comedy afterwards; but if you did comedy first, the public would never think your tragedy was serious."
"Yes, there"s a law in that. A clown mustn"t prophesy. If a prophet chooses to joke, now and then, all well and good. I couldn"t begin now and expand that love-business into a whole play. It must remain an episode, and G.o.dolphin must take it or leave it. Of course he"ll want Atland emaciated to fatten Haxard, as he calls it. But Atland doesn"t amount to much, as it is, and I don"t believe I could make him; it"s essentially a pa.s.sive part; Salome must make the chief effect in that business, and I think I"ll have her a little more serious, too. It"ll be more in keeping with the rest."
"I don"t see why she shouldn"t be serious. There"s nothing ign.o.ble in what she does."
"No. It can be very impa.s.sioned."
Louise thought of the smouldering eyes of that woman, and she wondered if they were what suggested something very impa.s.sioned to Maxwell; but with all the frankness between them, she did not ask him.
On their way to the cottage they saw one of the hotel bell-boys coming out. "Just left a telegram in there for you," he called, as he came towards them.
Louise began, "Oh, dear, I hope there"s nothing the matter with papa! Or your mother."
She ran forward, and Maxwell followed at his usual pace, so that she had time to go inside and come out with the despatch before he mounted the veranda steps.
"You open it!" she entreated, piteously, holding it towards him.
He pulled it impatiently open, and glanced at the signature. "It"s from G.o.dolphin;" and he read, "Don"t destroy old play. Keep new love-business for episode. Will come over this afternoon." Maxwell smiled. "More mind transference."
Louise laughed in hysterical relief. "Now you can make him do just what you want."
VI.
Maxwell, now, at least, knew that he had got his play going in the right direction again. He felt a fresh pleasure in returning to the old lines after his excursion in the region of comedy, and he worked upon them with fresh energy. He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential n.o.bleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise. He was doubtful whether the mingling of characteristics would not end in unreality, but she was sure it would not; she said he was so much like a woman in the traits he had borrowed from himself that Salome would be all the truer for being like him; or, at any rate, she would be finer, and more ideal. She said that it was nonsense, the way people regarded women as altogether different from men; she believed they were very much alike; a girl was as much the daughter of her father as of her mother; she alleged herself as proof of the fact that a girl was often a great deal more her father"s daughter, and she argued that if Maxwell made Salome quite in his own spiritual image, no one would dream of criticising her as unwomanly. Then he asked if he need only make Atland in her spiritual image to have him the manliest sort of fellow. She said that was not what she meant, and, in any case, a man could have feminine traits, and be all the nicer for them, but, if a woman had masculine traits, she would be disgusting. At the same time, if you drew a man from a woman, he would be ridiculous.
"Then you want me to model Atland on myself, too," said Maxwell.
She thought a moment. "Yes, I do. If Salome is to be taken mostly from me, I couldn"t bear to have him like anybody but you. It would be indelicate."
"Well, now, I"ll tell you what, I"m not going to stand it," said Maxwell. "I am going to make Atland like Pinney."
But she would not be turned from the serious aspect of the affair by his joking. She asked, "Do you think it would intensify the situation if he were not equal to her? If the spectator could be made to see that she was throwing herself away on him, after all?"
"Wouldn"t that leave the spectator a little too inconsolable? You don"t want the love-business to double the tragedy, you want to have it relieved, don"t you?"
"Yes, that is true. You must make him worth all the sacrifice. I couldn"t stand it if he wasn"t."