PREFACE.
This preface is one of a number[1] trying to show, each for its particular play, the manner of the play's conception, whether starting from a theme, a character, or a situation; the difficulty of the start and the larger problems of the story's development, together with the ways considered and chosen to answer them. It has been thought that such accounts might be of interest, and, in some instances, perhaps, helpful to others beginning on the same kind of work.
In the spring of 1891, Mr. Nat Goodwin was one of the most popular and successful, as well as one of the most skilful, of American actors. He had played lively and slight farces almost exclusively; but, having the ability for serious work as well, he was ambitious to try it. In a comedy by Brander Matthews and George H. Jessop, called "A Gold Mine," he had given one or two dramatic scenes most convincingly; and one sentimental soliloquy with a rose in exquisite tenderness. In person he is under the average height[2]; and then, was slight, graceful, and with a face capable of conveying the subtlest shades of feeling. The forehead was ample; the eyes were large and blue, clear and steady. The nose was mildly Roman; the hair was the colour of new hay. His voice was rich and modulated. These points are reported because they helped form the equipment of the "star," who wanted a serious play in which he should be the hero. The order was without other conditions; the play might be of any period and of any land.
My own ignorance fixed certain limitations. At that time I had acquaintance with no other countries than the United States and Canada. These I knew fairly well. I had travelled them with one-night theatrical companies; and also in newspaper assignments; and over restricted districts I had worked in the employment of a railroad company. I didn't care to write from books; so my Goodwin hero was to be perforce an American. It seemed best to make him an American of 1891. Other times and places were excluded and dismissed from mind.
Now, a blond hero five feet seven inches tall and weighing under one hundred and fifty-pounds—a Roman nose, and a steady, steel blue gaze!
I stood the Goodwin photograph on my table and looked at it until it talked to me. The slight physique couldn't explain the solid confidence of that look except there was behind it a gun. We were doing more man to man shooting in the country then than now; and my Western friendships made me more tolerant of the gun than some others were. Goodwin and a gun sent me searching mentally over the West from Colorado to the Coast, and through all occupations from bandit to fighting parson; and then my potential gallery, quite apart from any conscious effort of my own, divided itself into two kinds of gunpackers: the authorized and the others. I concluded that there would be less trouble, less "lost motion"—that was a phrase learned, and an idea applied in the old-fashioned composing-room—less lost motion, in portraying a lawful gun toter than in justifying an outlaw; and the Goodwin part was therefore to be either a soldier or a sheriff. I have said that he was thin, graceful—and he was, but he wasn't particularly erect. He was especially free from any suggestion of "setting-up:" sheriff was the way of least resistance.
My hero was a sheriff. You see how that clears the atmosphere. When you must, or may, write for a "star," it is a big start to have the character agreeably and definitely chosen.
There must be love interest, of course.
A sheriff would presumably be a bit of the rough diamond; contrast wherein "lieth love's delight" prompted a girl apparently of a finer strain than himself; and conflict necessitated a rival. The girl should be delicate and educated, the rival should be attractive but unworthy; and to make him doubly opposed to Goodwin I decided to have him an outlaw—someone whom it would be the sheriff's duty and business—business used in the stage sense—to arrest.
Four or five years before the Goodwin contract, I had been one of the Post-Dispatch reporters on the "Jim Cummings" express robbery. That celebrated and picturesque case was of a man who presented to an express messenger at the side door of his express car, just as the train was pulling from the St. Louis station, a forged order to carry the bearer, dead-head, to a certain distant point on the run. The messenger helped the dead-head into his car, and chummed with him, until about an hour later, when, as he was on his knees arranging some of his cargo, he found a pistol muzzle against his cheek, and his smiling visitor prepared to bind and gag him. Having done this, the stranger packed one hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a valise; and dropped off into the dark, when the train made its accustomed stop at a water-tank. The whole enterprise was so gentle, that the messenger was arrested and held as an accomplice, while the Pinkertons looked for the man with the money.
The robber was a kind-hearted person; and, being really grieved over the detention of an innocent man, wrote several exculpating letters to the papers, enclosing rifled express envelopes to prove his peripatetic identity. These letters were signed "Jim Cummings," a nom de guerre borrowed from an older and an abler offender of the Jesse James vintage.
After he was arrested and in his cell in the St. Louis jail, "Jim Cummings" and I became friends, as criminals and newspaper men sometimes do, and as criminals and I always have done, everywhere, most easily. The details of his arrangements, both before and after his draft on the company, were minutely in my mind, and were so very vital that, with the first need for a drama criminal, I took him. Goodwin's rival should be Jim Cummings; a glorified and beautiful and matinée Cummings, but substantially he.
This adoption rescued the girl and the sheriff from the hazy geography of the mining camps, and fixed the trio in Missouri.
After Cummings had dropped from the express car, he had walked some fifteen miles to the Missouri River, near St. Charles, and had then gone north on a train through Pike County. I had more than once made the same trip on freight trains; and I had a liking for the county as the home district of Champ Clark, a politico-newspaper comrade of several legislative sessions and conventions. Newspaper experience in those days, before the "flimsy" and the "rewrite," emphasized the value of going to the place in order to report the occurrence; and I knew that, aside from these three characters and their official and sentimental relationships, the rest of my people and my play were waiting for me in Bowling Green.
In those days, Mrs. Thomas and I used to hold hands on our evening promenades; but I think it was really our foolish New York clothes that made the blacksmith smile. At any rate, we stopped at his door and talked with him. He knew Champ Clark and Dave Ball—another Missouri statesman—and had the keenest interest in the coming convention for the legislative nomination. It was fine to hear him pronounce the state name, Mizzoura, as it was originally spelt on many territorial charts, and as we were permitted to call it in the public schools until we reached the grades where imported culture ruled. The blacksmith's helper, who was finishing a wagon shaft with a draw knife, was younger and less intelligent, and preferred to talk to Mrs. Thomas. It is distracting to listen at the same time to three persons; but I learned that "You kin make anything that's made out o' wood with a draw knife;" and over the bench was the frame for an upholstered chair. A driver brought in a two-horse, side seated, depot wagon on three wheels and a fence rail. The fourth wheel and its broken tire were in the wagon; and the blacksmith said he'd weld the tire at five-thirty the next morning.
We went without breakfast to see him do it. He was my heroine's father by that time; a candidate for the legislature; and I was devising for him a second comedy daughter, to play opposite to the boy with a draw knife. That day I also found the drug-store window and the "lickerish" boxes that Cummings should break through in his attempted escape; and I recovered the niggers, the "dog fannell," the linen dusters, and the paper collars which, in my recent prosperity, I'd forgotten. I also nominated Goodwin for the legislature, which increased his importance, and gave him something to sacrifice for the girl's father. But it was all so poverty-stricken, as I glimpsed it through the blacksmith shop and the little house I'd chosen for its consort. I yearned for some money; not much, but enough to afford "a hired girl," and for some means of bringing the money into the story. When we left Bowling Green, I had given Goodwin a substantial reward for the robber's capture; but he wouldn't accept it. That was a mere dramatist's device; and my quiet sheriff was already above it; besides, he wasn't sure that he'd hold the fellow. His wish to please the girl was already debating the matter with his duty.
On the way back to St. Louis, the conductor, who took our tickets, recognized me. Charlie Church had been a freight brake-man when I was in the St. Louis yards. He was proud of his advancement to a passenger conductorship—proud of his train—proud of the new Wabash road-bed on the single track line. This road-bed was made of macadam-looking metal, clean and red as the painted bricks in the local Dutch women's gardens, and hard as flint. When we gave the right-of-way, and ran in on a siding, Church brought us up a few pieces to the back platform; and with one of them scratched my initials on the glass window. "What was it, iron ore?—no, that mud that the river leaves when it rises—'Gumbo' the people call it. Some fellow found by accident that it became red flint when fired, and was making a fortune selling it to the railroad." To burn it, he used the slack coal from the Jonesburg mines nearby, which until then had also been waste. I put a handful of the stuff in my pocket; and, after the conductor left us, I turned the whole enterprise over to the Goodwin part. When the play ended, the audience should feel sure that he and Kate need never want for a dollar. I knew also where he had accidentally burnt his first sample, and made his discovery; in the blacksmith shop.
But what accident brought the raw gumbo there? Perhaps the wheels of the stage-coach; but that wasn't definitely Goodwin. The soft gumbo is not unlike putty; it would make a fair cushion for a broken limb: but I didn't want to halt my story with anybody crippled to that extent; and then I remembered the yellow dog drinking from the blacksmith's tub. I broke his leg and had Goodwin carry him miles in the stage, with his poor paw in a poultice of gumbo. It was a counter-pointing touch to a sheriff with two guns; it gave him an effective entrance; and it coupled in a continuous train, the sheriff, the bad man who sneered at it, the blacksmith and his motherly wife who sympathized and helped in a better dressing, the forge where a piece of the discarded gumbo should fall amongst the coke, the helper who should pump the bellows for another and verifying bake: and last, and best of all, it gave me a "curtain" for a second act; when, perturbed and adrift after being temporarily rejected by the girl, Goodwin should turn in an undefined but natural sympathy to the crippled dog in his box under the helper's bench.
That illustrates one of the dramatist's discovered rules: "If you use a property once use it again and again if you can." It is a visual thing that binds together your stuff of speech like a dowel in a mission table.
There are few better places than a railroad train for building stories; the rhythmic click of the wheels past the fish-plates makes your thoughts march as a drum urges a column of soldiers. A tentative layout of the story established in the first act, the educated Kate, discontented in her blacksmith father's surroundings; the flash fascination of our transient robber; the robber's distinct lead over Goodwin's accustomed and older blandishments. The second act saw Goodwin turned down and the robber preferred. The third act should see the robber's apprehension and arrest. I milled around the question of his identification as Illinois and Indiana went past the Pullman window; and then the one sure and unfailing witness for that purpose volunteered—the express messenger himself. There was no reason why this young man shouldn't be a native of Bowling Green, and come home from St. Louis at the end of certain runs. He would know Goodwin and the blacksmith's family; but, to put him nearer to them, more "into the story" sentimentally, I gave Goodwin a little sister, and made the messenger her accepted lover, with his arrest and detention postponing the wedding. This need to free his sister's fiancé gave the sheriff hero a third reason for getting the real robber; the other two being his official duty and the rivalry for Kate. The messenger and the sheriff's sister, the helper and the comedy daughter, and Goodwin and Kate, made three pairs of young lovers. This number might easily lead to a disastrous diffusion of interest unless the playwright were careful always to make the work of each couple, even when apparently about their own personal affairs, really to the forward trend of the story.
I doubt if the production of novels, even to the writer temperamentally disposed to that form of expression, is as absorbing as play-making. The difference between the novel and the play is the difference between was and is. Something has happened for the writer of the novel and for his people. He describes it as it was; and them as they were. In the play something is happening. Its form is controversial—and the playwright, by force of this controversy, is in turn each one of his characters, and not merely a witness of their doings. When they begin to take hold of him, their possession is more and more insistent—all interests in real life become more and more secondary and remote until the questions in dispute are not only decided, but there is also a written record of the debates and the decision.
By the time our train pulled into New York, I was impatient to make a running transcript of speeches of my contending people. But that is a relief that must be deferred. Like over-anxious litigants, the characters are disposed to talk too much, and must be controlled and kept in bounds by a proportioned scenario, assigning order, and respective and progressive values to them. That was the work of a day by that time, and then, with the material gathered, and the intimacy with the people and the places, the play was one that wrote itself.
AUGUSTUS THOMAS.
[Footnote 1: The Witching Hour; Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots; The Earl of Pawtucket; The Harvest Moon; Oliver Goldsmith [Published by Samuel French].]
[Footnote 2: Written before the death of Mr. Goodwin.]