XXXII. Duty
1
FELIX, having torn up all his previous attempts, was again at work upon a play. It seemed clear to him now that plays were not written to please the author: they were written to please the public.
There was plenty of time to work, now. They were seeing hardly anybody that summer. Clive came occasionally, and they spent a few week-ends at his place in Woods Point. They did not see Phyllis, for she was still at the normal school, having heroically decided to shorten the term of her training by taking the summer course. Dorothy Sheridan came once or twice to their studio before leaving to spend the summer in some eastern fishing village where things were very “paintable.” Howard Morgan had dropped in one evening to smoke a cigarette with them. They had made the acquaintance of a taciturn etcher in the studio next door, and of an unhappily married boy-painter who lived around the corner and who used sometimes to take refuge from domestic infelicities in a cup of their coffee....
It seemed to Felix that in these idle summer months, with life flowing lazily past in the sunshine, he should be able to accomplish something in play-writing. Certainly there was nothing else to distract or excite him.
He went about his task soberly and conscientiously this time. He undertook to learn how plays were written. He read books on “play-construction.” He even, conquering his instinctive distaste, studied the methods of Pinero and H. A. Jones. Their plays bored him ineffably—they seemed trite, false, vulgar and dull. But the public had liked them, and doubtless they had something to teach him.
“Why don’t you write what you want to, in your own way?” Rose-Ann would ask impatiently.
But he did not want to write “in his own way.” The things he had written to suit himself that spring, the fantastic dramatic fragments which he had torn up in disgust, were too utterly freakish, too whimsical and absurd. He wanted to prove that he could write something else—something that was not so damnably “different.” He wanted to write a regular three-act play, of the sort that audiences liked, and he was going to learn to do it if it took five years.... It had taken Hawkins five years to get to a point where he could impress a manager—Hawkins, lending him a book on play—construction, had confessed as much.... And Hawkins was now on the verge of a brilliant success. He had gone to New York to collaborate with the manager on a few final changes.
It was slow going, this way; but Felix was not discouraged. It seemed good to struggle at an uncongenial task. Eventually he would conquer its difficulties. He might continue to “get by” with freakish criticism; but he was going to be a writer of plays that ordinary people could recognize as plays. It was not his business to please himself; Bernard Shaw might do that—but he, Felix, was not Bernard Shaw; it was his business to adapt himself to the realities of current play-writing.... He told all this to Rose-Ann, who listened in hostile silence.
Rose-Ann had changed, become less poignantly restless. She seemed to have discovered a new way of occupying herself—or rediscovered an old way, long since abandoned. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to read books all the time. I found them so much more satisfying than actual life. And then I stopped reading, and tried to live. I’ve hardly read anything since I came to Chicago.... So there’s lots of things I want to read.”