Lure Of The Play

( Originally Published 1912 )

THOUGH we had not Barrymore's training for it, we all wanted to write plays, and some of us tried to do it, seeing, as we wrote, visions of crowded houses, of long runs, and of riches unattainable in any other way. "The Play's the thing, whereby" — we'll fill our pockets and live ever after as well as the doctor, the lawyer, the broker, the packer, and the pill-maker.

What happened to us happens every day. The bundles of hopes and efforts left at the box office or the stage door nearly always come back to us after a long delay, or they are lost, with or without apologies, and we have not courage enough to repeat the work. Between the sanguine moment of deposit and the deferred return we have no peace. From day to day the manager says, "You shall have an answer tomorrow," and to-morrow again tells you "to morrow," until the word becomes the most repellant in the dictionary. He makes appointments which he does not keep, and you hang about the theatre, unable to fix your mind on the other things on which your bread and butter depend. You sit in the cryptic gloom of the "back of the house" iii the daytime, longing, fidgeting, sighing, while the hollow reverberations of a rehearsal drift from the stage, and the brusque doorkeeper transfixes you with instinctive suspicion and antipathy.

When you catch your man he is still in doubt --always in doubt, sure of nothing but that he is in doubt. But as you observe him rippling the pages of your manuscript and letting his eyes wander in abstraction over the old programmes and pictures of actors and actresses on the walls of the little room, you decide that suspense is more endurable than doom.

"I don't know, I don't know, he slowly and exasperatingly murmurs, shaking his head vaguely while you watch him as a weathercock veering in the wind, or as a leaf eddying at a sharp bend of a river. He is the image of vacillation, a creature of tormenting indecision, and while he pauses, you feel like taking him by the throat and crying, "Make up your mind and say 'yes,' or die!"

"I don't know, I don't know," he repeats in a sing-song voice.

He ought to know, for he has had the play for a year or more. But, of course, you control yourself. If he is a goose it must be remembered that he has been known to hatch golden eggs. You despise his irresolution, but by an effort keep your hands off him.

"I like the fourth act---"

Ah, the man has some sense after all ! You were convinced that he must see the strength of the situation in the fourth act. Your spirits rise with your respect for his intelligence.

"I like the fourth act, but I don't know — I don't know that it would go; no, I don't know."

You are sinking, and grasp at the last straw of elusive chance. He has closed the manuscript, and almost imperceptibly is pushing it over the table toward you.

You see it gliding toward you as Macbeth saw the dagger.

"Unless you're willing to leave it with me for a day or two longer. Perhaps Billy had better read it again, and I'd like to think it over myself."

"Billy," is his reader and adviser, and you are under no misapprehension as to what the "day or two longer" means: it means what no man can foretell, next month, next year, or never. But like a craven you yield to the outrageous procrastination, and weakly assent. "All right. No, I don't want to hurry you. Take your time by all means. It's very good of you to like the fourth act; very good of you."

Then you creep away, full of contempt for yourself, to make room for the lovely, palpitating, fluffy, flowery, feathery young lady, the next candidate for employment, who has been nervously preening herself and waiting for you to go, and who sits in your chair, facing the narrow, tarnished window, the shade of which he immediately raises so that all the light possible falls on her while he scrutinizes her, pathologically, with his back to it.

The next time you see him coming your way in the street, your heart thumps. You think he will stop and refer to the play, but he has nothing but a frosty nod for you, if his face does not crimp into a semblance of repudiation at the sight of you.

How you wait for the postman! And how your hand trembles whenever you receive a letter, and you scrutinize the corner and the seal for the imprint of that theatre. "My wind is turned to bitter North," sang Arthur Hugh Clough, and in that quarter it remains for you through spring and summer, and you feel like a disembodied soul floating among the nettles and mists of Purgatory. Not a word comes to relieve you. You write and are not answered. At last you call again, and this time "Billy " receives you, and greets you as "old man" in a propitiatory way, though you are almost a stranger to him. He is the personification of affability and good fellow-ship, and offers you a cigarette.

"How useful the cigarette habit is," a high official in London said to me not long ago. "Time was when it took twenty minutes or half an hour of polite preliminaries before I could find out what a caller wanted. Now I offer him a cigarette, which establishes an immediate intimacy, and we plunge into the heart of things, and begin to be immoral at once."

"Billy" skims the universe, and talks of all sorts of things : presses you to take another, and " old mans " you as though you were, of all his chums, the most welcome. He leaves you to speak of the play, and when you do speak of it he says, "Ah," and fumbles in drawers and among bundles of newspapers and other manuscripts, turning over all the litter in his search for the precious document, the ink of which has been drawn from your life-blood. Perhaps he fails, and in that case he tells you it must be in the safe, of which the manager has the key, and that it shall be sent to you by special messenger in the evening. If he produces it, you listen to him as the prisoner in the dock listens to the foreman of the jury. He slaps it with his hand, raising a cloud of dust.

"A bully good play, and you'll place it, sure. Take it to Frohman or Belasco: either of 'em will jump at it, both of 'em will jump at it. But the fourth act needs strengthening; it's the weakest. I'd rewrite that — Going? Here ! Have another cigarette."

That Iast cigarette is the token of the sympathy he does not express.

Perhaps, however, the wind softens just as patience has been drawn, like an elastic band, close to the point at which it must break and recoil. Not the subordinate but the manager summons you, and when you present yourself he is in his chair, as abstracted and distraught as ever. You smile abjectly, he thaws a little but only along the edges, the ice beyond revealing no "lead," such as polar explorers describe, through the hummocked barrier of frost. But you become subconscious in a dim, psychological way similar to that by which you sense spring in the air before a bud appears, that a change for the better impends, though the weathercock is not steady, and Hope whispers not that "he will" but that he "may." Why otherwise should he fetch the play out of the drawer again, and show the interlineations and queries in his own hand on the now soiled pages? You thank God that he does not see-saw more than twice or thrice in his wearisome negation, "I don't know." He is slow and hesitating, yet you see that he is making an effort to resolve himself into some sort of decision.

" Well, we'll try it. I don't think it will go, but we'll try it."

Then you reproach yourself and retract all the unholy, unjust, homicidal thoughts you have had of him, and you have difficulty in restraining a wild, Gallic impulse to embrace him. He isn't a palaverer, a flatterer, but a cautious, responsible, discriminating man, all the surer to lead you to success through his possession of those qualities. Your play has been in the crucible of his calm and scientific criticism, and triumphs because its merits have prevailed after the closest scrutiny and analysis, and are no longer open to criticism.

What heavenly music is it that falls on your ear? "Author!" "Author!" "Author!"

It is like trees swaying in the wind and mingling their voices with the patter of falling water. It is the applause of the audience in front, demanding your presence before the curtain at the end of the fourth act, on the first night. Anticipation runs away with you: beware lest she trips you short of the iridescent goal. There are pitfalls everywhere on the way.

You have frequent consultations with "Billy" now, which shake your faith in his competency, even in his sanity. He spoils the symmetry of the play; trans-poses the situations, or discards them, and blue pencils the most eloquent lines; pshaws! the sparkling epigrams you have excogitated with all the pains of parturition.

"No, old man ! That'll never do. They wouldn't stand it, never ! "

His elisions are hard enough to bear, but less annoying than his interpolations, which are perverted, tasteless, mechanical, and contrary to plausibility and reason. "Billy" has a bad reputation. His enemies say that when it suits him, he is not above using in any play he has in hand, ideas plagiarized from other plays which have been rejected. You groan at what you have to put up with in your intercourse with him, including his cigarettes and his fondness for cocktails and "high balls," but your conferences with him give you access to the theatre in the daytime — not merely to the auditorium during a performance, but to the arcana at the back of the house, that enchanting, esoteric region of mystery and twilight, where draughts blow, and the sounds are as spectral as those of the catacombs. The finest performance seen in all its completeness from the stalls is dull and commonplace compared with the view you get of it behind the scenes. The consciousness of privilege flatters you; participation in the creation of illusion is far more absorbing than subjection to it. The discipline of all who are producing it the stage manager, the property men, the electricians, the scene shifters and the actors themselves fill you with awe and admiration. They hang on words, and the moment the words are spoken they respond as instantaneously as galley slaves under the whip. They are alert, anxious, strained.

I have met many actors in their dressing-rooms between the acts — Edwin Booth, Richard Mansfield, Henry Irving, and Herbert Beerbohm Tree; yet I have never seen one who under the stress was quite at his ease, or who could do more than make a polite attempt to listen or talk to you, even when you have come at his bidding. Mansfield reproached me if he saw me in the audience and I failed to present myself to him and his devoted wife, Beatrice, before the close of the play; but if I went I always found him on needles and pins, sweating, petulant, tremulous, and agitated to the verge of prostration. So swift is the obedience to commands, so utterly devoted and concentrated on his task is every member of the company and every member of the staff, high and low, that I can think of nothing but the gun crew of a battleship in action as a parallel.

The operation of all the wonderful machinery, human and mechanical, is best disclosed during a regular performance or at the "dress reheasal," which immediately precedes the first presentation of a piece to the public; but daytime in the theatre has a spell of its own; then you are out of this world and in another — a place of stumblings and surprises; of choked passages and unexpected steps up and down; of dusky labyrinths, in which you lose and bruise yourself, and find yourself in perplexing recesses where you know you ought not to be. You knock against partitions, and look aloft to cloud-like hangings, guys, blocks, and pulleys like the standing and running gear of a ship. Here all the top-hamper seems to have come down on the run after a squall, and beyond are backgrounds the unilluminated scenery with splotchy colours like faded tapestries. A voice gathers volume and distinctness from the silence, and drones like that of a preacher heard from within in an empty and quiet church-yard. It is the manager catechising the fluffy, flowery, girlish aspirant in his sanctum. Afterward it rises angrily. He is scolding, yes actually scolding, nay, bullying, that pinnacled, magnificent, imperious creature, the leading man, whom you have regarded as a greater despot than the manager himself.

I have said "you" over and over again, but whose experience am I describing? Not yours alone, but the experience of most of the beginners who have ever passed the enchanted portals of the theatre to become familiar with its unbalanced pains and pleasures, its exaltation and its despair.

And, by the way, the matter of the contract has yet to be discussed. You will have views of your own about that, and will endeavour to slip them in somehow if you get the chance. You have heard of the terms exacted by Pinero, of his splendid percentages of the box-office receipts, of fortunes made out of a single play. But you know that you are not Pinero and your expectations are not exorbitant; probably you are ready, or too ready, to take whatever the manager offers. He is likely to propose buying the play outright instead of paying royalties on each performance of it, and you will say with a parched tongue in a quavering voice, "All right."

I remember Edgar Fawcett's experience with his first play, which A. M. Palmer of the old Union Square Theatre had read and liked. I waited in the vestibule while Edgar was closeted with him. I was as much interested in the result as if the play had been my own. When Edgar reappeared trembling with excitement he threw decision on me.

"William ! He says he will give me twenty-five dollars for every evening performance, and fifteen dollars for every matinée, or five hundred dollars down as a purchase price! Five hundred dollars down, William ! Down ! "

The emphasis on "down" was touching; the word never could have been used in a fuller sense than it was then. Both of us were needy, and were seldom if ever in possession of so vast a sum; it seemed like tempting Providence to refuse having it at once and all at once. What a dinner we could have at Delmonico's, or at his club, the Union, to which he had belonged since his twenty-first year, his father having "put him up" in boyhood ! Though he worked in an attic in Tompkins Square he was a frequenter of the fashionable and opulent Union and ruffled it with the best of them there.

I could see "down" casting its spell over the poor boy to the exclusion of other considerations. I was calmer than he was, and better able to weigh the alter-natives. There could be no question as to the probity of Palmer, one of the most intelligent and honourable of managers, who with such plays as "The Two Orphans" and "Led Astray" had, without previous theatrical experience, lifted the little Union Square into a high place. At that time he never made the mistakes which later on reversed his fortune. Each long run was followed by another as long or longer.

"If it should be a failure and run for only a month the royalties would amount to six hundred and sixty dollars," I figured.

"But it might run only a week, or never be produced at all. Lots of plays are accepted, and a few of them are announced on the bills, and then withdrawn. Five hundred dollars down ! Oh, William ! "

He reluctantly decided on the royalties, and his play, "A False Friend," filled the better part of a season, bringing him, with the added royalties from other theatres, nearer four thousand dollars than five hundred.

I had a curious little adventure of my own. I wrote a four-act comedy drama called "A Latter Day Gentle-man," the leading part in which I designed (with all his idiosyncrasies before me) for IL J. Montague, to whom, I think, the now hackneyed and tiresome epithet, a "matinée idol," was first applied. Women doted on him. His voice dripped tears like Bernhardt's when emotion was required; its cadences were as music. He was gentlemanly on and off the stage, not robust or virile enough for swaggering romantic parts, but perfect in garden and drawing-room scenes, appealing and irresistible in his beauty and his heaven-sent suavity. I visualized him in every word I wrote, conforming my character to all his abilities and to all his limitations. The part was that of a barrister of the Inner Temple: a heavy swell; a tame, purring sort of creature on the surface, but below that veneer a devil of a fellow, astute, ingenious, and courageous, with a tongue of wit and sarcasm which wiped out every adversary. The reader may smile, but he should remember that those were the days of Robertson, and that my hero was to be impersonated by Montague.

I sent him a scenario, and though the accompanying letter was written on editorial note-paper he did not, strange to say (for editorial note-paper is not often ignored), pay any attention to it. Perhaps his answer miscarried, but I, twenty-three, and more important than I have been since, did not deign to inquire. I was on the eve of departure as special correspondent of the New York Times with the Wheeler Expedition, a military survey of the unmapped regions of Arizona, southern Colorado, and New Mexico, and a little of the "ready," as the English call it, was very desirable for my equipment. So I despatched my play to Arthur Cheney, who had an excellent stock company at the Globe Theatre, in Boston and offered to sell it to him for what a manuscript of equal length would "fetch" from Harper's Magazine or Scribner's Monthly. He took it so quickly that I at once suspected I liad thrown my work away and been foolish in not asking for more: my refilled purse, comforting as it was, should have been fuller of bills of larger denominations. ][t is imprudent, however, to haggle about the price of a gun with the man who, in a safe place himself, offers it to you while the wolf is at the door. Ah, those wolves at the door ! How many of them one encounters on the thorny trails of a literary career! What an uneasy time you have between them and the missing ships for which you wait in vain !

Before the field season was over, and while I was still among the lava beds, the mesas and cañons of the Southwest, Cheney died, and also the fascinating Montague. A year or so afterward I was lunching with Mr. Palmer at the Union Square Hotel, and W. R. Floyd, who had been the stage manager of Cheney's theatre, sat down with us. I asked him about my play.

"I can tell you all about it," he said, though that was saying too much. "Cheney bought it to sell again to Montague. That part — what's his name? — might have been written for poor old Harry. It would have fitted him like a glove. Then we passed it on to Lester Wallack, and he thought of doing it, but was dissuaded. The part was too juvenile for him, of course, but Lester didn't see that, poor old chap. He'd act Cupid, with golden wings and a waxed moustache if anybody encouraged him. Now the story grew in interest as it approached the climax! Floyd aimed a finger at Palmer.

"Now, Palmer, you've got it. When Wallack returned it, it was sent to you. Own up."

Palmer had no recollection of it, not even of the title. Perhaps Cazauran had it "Caz," Palmer's factotum, a little dark man of many languages, a master of theatrical devices, the David Belasco of that era, who worked plays over and made them presentable by changes which, however they displeased the authors, suited the public. I have not an ill word for "Caz," though there were some who disliked him. He had a genius for theatrical situations of the kind which thrill audiences and fill the house — situations which I believe the majority will long prefer to the documentary, undemonstrative, rational plays insisted upon by the few zealots of the new drama. He was friendly to me, and I had as little reason to question his honesty as Mr. Palmer's. "The Latter Day Gentleman" could not be found, nor has it ever been found to my knowledge up to the present. Possibly it fell into the hands of some "Billy," and, renamed, reconstructed, its scenes transplanted, its characters Americanized or Australianized, it was somewhere and somehow in some degree a success, though not such a success as it could have been had the curled Montague taken the principal part and delivered its lines in that melodious, melting, tender voice of his which seemed to trickle down the hearer's spine.

When I told a veteran who had written many plays that I was writing one, he said, "Don't do it. They (the people of the theatre) will wear your heart out." But some hearts endure as long as breath lasts, and no grindstone ever wears them out.

From this by-path I must return to you, quivering, dry-mouthed, in your chair in that dark, stuffy little room, and watching furtively the manager's eyes roving from you to the stained portraits and programmes on the walls as though he were disturbed by other and far more important matters than you and your work. You are afraid that if you stand off he will back out. You know that you are not Pinero, and the man opposite knows that he holds the trump cards. A nervous cough be-trays you. He who, unaffiicted with a cold, coughs in that way during a business negotiation marks himself as one whose hand is weak, and who can be either cajoled or browbeaten. It is a case of take it or leave it, and at a sign of impatience from him you precipitately surrender, repeating, "All right," and adding, "Thanks. So much obliged." Thus it ends : the play becomes his, and the money yours. He is not wanting in sagacity in preferring to buy a piece outright on the basis of possible failure than to pay royalties proportioned to possible success.

Probably months pass before you hear of it again; it may be announced in the bills, and even then postponed, owing to an unexpectedly long run of the piece on the boards, or because from London, Paris, or Berlin comes an assured success by some well-known dramatist, to delay it; the purchaser may decide after all that it will not do, and sacrifice the small amount of his check rather than take too many chances with it; it may be buried in a cupboard, a drawer, or the safe, to the end of your days : everybody but you may forget all about it, and you alone may worry and protest, the sole sufferer of gnawing uncertainty. Worry you must; no effort of the mind, not all the "science" of all psycho-therapists can save you, and whatever you attempt in the vocation that has previously engaged you loses its spontaneity and drags like shackles of the soul.

Let us suppose, however, that after the delay it is put in rehearsal. It is doubtful whether it is "Billy's" work or yours when he is done with it, and other changes are made in the manuscript as the rehearsals proceed. The cast is chosen, orders are given to the property man and the scene painter, "I want for the first act," says the manager to the painter, "a scene in the diamond fields of South Africa; for the second, the exterior of an Elizabethan house; for the third, a handsome library; and, for the fourth, a conservatory. The diamond fields must be shown as at evening, the house and the library must be characteristic of the home of an old and prosperous family, and the conservatory must be as fine a 'set' as you can paint."

The painter then submits a number of plates to the manager: a picture from the Illustrated London News or the Graphic may give a suggestion of what is wanted for the scene at the diamond fields; the illustrations of a work on the baronial homes of England may include such a library and exterior as would suit: and perhaps for the conservatory he submits a hasty water-colour drawing of his own or a design from some book on architecture.

"That's the thing," says the manager, pointing to selections from these, and he picks out the plates which fit his idea of what the scenes should be; and the artist gives him an estimate of the cost of production, specifying the quantities of lumber, canvas, and paint that will be required to build up a diamond gully, the Elizabethan mansion, and the conservatory. Perhaps the estimate is too large and is reduced, but he, more probably, is told to prepare his models with few limitations as to cost.

Now the property man is consulted. The rocks that will lie about the stage in the diamond field, the cataract in the background, the implements of the miners, the tents and the wagons, the furniture in the library, and all the appurtenances of the conservatory are to be made or procured by him and disposed of on the stage before the performance begins. The rocks are to be of papier-maché, and the cataract is to be simulated by a revolving drum of tinsel or glass beads with a strong light upon it. It is his business, or the mechanician's, to construct them, and the artist's to paint them. Every article used on the stage is in the property man's charge. The crowns of kings, the cross of Richelieu, the whip of Tony Lumpkin, the bleached skull of Yorick, the bell which the victorious hero strikes before having the discomfited villain shown to the door, and the fat purse with its crackling bank-notes and jingling coin which the honest but virtuous clerk refuses in the face of temptation all belong to the property man's department. The demands on his ingenuity and research take him into every kind of shop in every quarter of the city. He has dealings with ironmongers, milliners, upholsterers, and merchants of curios. The magnificent and costly suite of carved oak in the library scene, which is not veneer but substantial furniture, and the most trivial objects a handbag or a hatrack he must secure and put, night after night, in the exact place which the stage directions have prescribed. Each new play re-quires, of course, some new articles, and the accumulated stock is uniquely various from which the accoutrements of princes and potentates, beggars and nobles, soldiers and lackeys, priests and highwaymen, the riotously anachronistic material of a fancy-dress ball, may be gathered.

The scene painter is provided at the preliminary consultation with a "scene plot," wherein the exits and entrances, the doors, windows, and other openings necessary in the action of the play are specified, and at the same time a "property plot" is handed to the property man. As I have said, each article has an appointed place in which he must keep it, and we all know the embarrassing consequences of any negligence of his, as when the leading actor sits at a table to sign away his birthright and can find neither the pen nor the ink which the property plot calls for.

Another person has to be considered in mounting the play, and that is the carpenter, who builds up the frame-work of the scene and constructs the mechanical appurtenances, such as the flight of steps down the rocks in the diamond gully, the galleries in the library, the balustrade in the conservatory, and all the doors and windows.

The artist, the property man, and the machinist are together the craftsmen of the drama, and when they have been fully instructed — when the artist has his plot, the property man his, and the machinist his, and when the painter's models have been approved by the manager — the actors are called to hear the play read. A parenthesis is necessary here as to what the scene painter's models are, for the term is misleading: He has a small stage upon which he paints and sets each scene exactly as it is to appear on the larger one, except that it is on the reduced scale of half an inch or less to the foot of actual space; and the miniature, which is called a model, serves to guide him in his work and to give the manager a preliminary glimpse of what the finished scene will be.

Somewhere against the wall in a mysterious precinct hangs a board or a glass case in which the official notices of the management are exhibited; and one day a written slip is pinned or pasted in it which contains these words : "Company called for 'A Lame Excuse' at 10 A.M. Monday," "A Lame Excuse" being your play. There have been rumours of "something underlined" among the actors already, and when the call is made, the nature of the work, who of the company will be in it, what parts there are, and the probabilities of success, are discussed with much volubility.

If you were Pinero you would at this point become the despot of the stage. In all of his later productions he has insisted on the prerogative denied altogether or conceded only occasionally to other authors, of choosing the interpreters of his work and instructing them in every detail without deference to any other instruments than his own will and purpose, to which both manager and actor must surrender. I can remember him when he himself was a minor actor at the Lyceum under Henry Irving, where the author was expected to submit to every change and every choice which the manager thought desirable. Irving was the autocrat there, and it was the author, whether he was obscure and diffident or as illustrious and exacting as Tennyson himself, who had to submit to the discretion of the great actor-manager. There are few, if any, managers who, though entirely destitute of Irving's genius to justify it, do not attempt to exercise a similar tyranny, or will grant to the author more than the liberty of appeal and suggestion. Probably Sir Arthur is the only living dramatist who has so completely reversed the relations in this respect of the manager and the author. The play must be produced as he has written it, the various parts assigned to the actors who are physically and temperamentally closest to his conception. These are bitter and irksome conditions to those who are in the habit of recognizing no authority above their own, and Sir Arthur may be said to stand in "splendid isolation" in his ability to exact them. Nor is anything lost to art or of commercial advantage by the transfer of authority. With his intimate and practical knowledge of the technicalities of the stage and his psychological divinations, he has a genius for the selection of those actors who by art and nature are capable of merging their individualities in the parts they are engaged for.

Being but a novice you may not be consulted at all. The first rehearsal is "with parts"— that is to say, the company appear in their street clothes, and without acting read the lines from typed copies in ordinary conversational tones — and while this is in progress the manager has in his hands the complete play interleaved with blank pages, upon which he notes any further alterations that seem to be desirable. The effect on an unfamiliar observer of that rehearsal "with parts" is grotesque. The leading lady sits in a chair and swings her parasol and chats with her neighbour, while one of the gentlemen opposite to her reads a declaration of love in a sing-song voice from a roll of paper in his hand. Another member of the company has the lines : "Here for centuries the Mordaunts have lived the simple and honourable lives of English country gentlemen; here they have been born; here they have died; and among them all not one of them has ever done aught mean or base. Here, in this grand old hall, a reputation has been built which the proudest of nobles envy "; and should the spectator, following the wave of the actor's hand, look for the hall to which the speech refers, he would only discover the stage before him, with no scene set upon it, with the wings and the "flats" stacked up at the rear, the company scattered near the centre, and a few gas or electric lamps, paled by the rays of daylight issuing from a yellowish window. The heroine at another point, wandering, as the lines suppose, about the ample gardens of the Elizabethan house at twilight, bids her lover come and hear the cuckoo, but it is only the knocking of the machinist's hammer and the voices of the property men and the scene painter, who are working in the "flies" high above the proscenium, that are audible, and not the note of a bird.

At each rehearsal, something is added in gesture and tone, which strengthens the representation. The toil, perseverance, and discipline which are entailed cannot be imagined by one who has not traced the progress of a new play at a good theatre. Whenever it seems that the most has not been made of a line or a situation it is repeated again and again. The "business" is gradually improved, and the author sees the company working with greater fluency at each trial.

On the first night the theatre is filled to the doors. There is a murmur of interest and curiosity. No one is more excited than the manager and you are. You, if you can stand the strain at all, hide yourself in a box or in the "wings"; if you cannot stand it, you absent yourself from the theatre and wait for the verdict at a distance in an agony of suspense like that of the uxorious young husband in Barrie's story, who paces the streets in trepidation while he wonders whether it will be a boy, a girl, twins, triplets, or nothing worth mentioning.