As we sat in that little white-tiled restaurant, I couldn't help watching Edwards. I don't know how to make this plain to you, but our talk, which was cheerful enough, was the least important part of the occasion. Talk tells so little, anyway: most of it's a mere stumbling in an almost foreign tongue when it comes to expressing the inward pangs and certainties that make up life. I had a feeling, as I saw those two, that I was coming closer than ever before to something urgent and fundamental in the human riddle. I thought that I had never seen a man so completely in love. When he looked at her there was a sort of—well, a sort of possession upon him, an enthusiasm, in the true sense of that strange word. I thought to myself that Keats must have looked at Fanny Brawne in just that way. And—you know what writers are—I must confess that my observation of these two began to turn into “copy” in my mind. I was wondering whether they might not give me a hint for my stalled novel.
There are some engaged couples that make it a point of honour to be a bit off-hand and jocose when any one else is with them. Just to show, I suppose, how sure they are of each other. And somehow I had expected actors, to whom the outward gestures of passion are a mere professional accomplishment, to be a little blasé or polished in such matters. But there was a perfect candour and simplicity about them that touched me keenly. Their relation seemed a lovely thing. Too lovely, and too intense perhaps, to be entirely happy, I thought, for I could see in Edwards's face that his whole life and mind were wrapped up in it. I may have been fanciful, but at that time I was seeing the human panorama not for itself but as a reflection of my own amateurish scribblings. In my novel I had been working on the theory—not an original one, of course—that the essence of tragedy is fixing one's passion too deeply on anything in life. In other words, that happiness only comes to those who do not take life too seriously. Destiny, determined not to give up its secrets, always maims or destroys those who press it too closely. As we laughed and enjoyed ourselves over our meal, I was wondering whether Edwards, with his strange air of honourable sorrow, was a proof of my doctrine.
Of course we talked about the new play. Edwards had persuaded Upton to give Miss Cunningham a place in the cast, and she was radiant about it. Her eyes were like pansies as she spoke of it. I remember one thing she said:
“Isn't it wonderful? Morgan and I are together again. You know how much it means to us, for if the show has a run we can get married this winter.”
“This fall,” Edwards amended.
“Morgan's part is fine,” she went on, after a look at him that made even a hardened reporter feel that he had no right to be there. “It's really the big thing in the play for any one who can understand. It's just made for him.”
She was thoughtful a moment, and then added: “It's too much made for him, that's the only trouble. You're living with him, Mr. Roberts. Don't let him take it too hard. He thinks of nothing else.”
I made some jocular remark, I forget what. Edwards was silent for a minute. Then he said: “If you knew how I've longed for a part like that—a part that I could really lose myself in.”
“I shouldn't care,” I said, “to lose myself in a part. Suppose I couldn't find myself again when the time came?”
He turned to me earnestly.