"That is why my influence is destructive," he added, and was reassured in the justice of his resolution to take himself out of Helen's life. "Everything I stand for is inimical to her interests. To follow my path is to eat dry crusts, to be without comfort. To amuse this great, moiling crowd, to dance for them like a monkey, to pander to their base passions, this means success, and so long as her acting does not smirch her own soul what does it matter?" In such wise he sometimes argued in his bitterness and wrath.
From the brilliant street, from the gay crowds rolling on in search of witless farce-comedy and trite melodrama, the brooding idealist climbed one night to the gallery to overlook a gloomy, empty auditorium. Concealing himself as best he could, he sat through the performance, tortured by some indefinable appeal in Helen's voice, hearing with cold and sinking heart the faint applause from the orchestra chairs which used to roar with bravos and sparkle with the clapping of white and jewelled hands.
There was something horrifying in this change. In his morbid and overwrought condition it seemed murderous. At last a new resolution set his lips in a stern line, and when the curtain fell on the last act his mind was made up. "I will write one more play for the sensation-loving fools, for these flabby business men and their capon-stuffed wives. I will mix them a dramatic cocktail that will make them sit up. I will create a dazzling rôle for Helen, one that will win back all her old-time admirers. They shall come like a roaring tide, and she shall recoup herself for every loss—in purse and prestige."
It was this night, when his face was white with suffering, that Helen caught a glimpse of him hanging across the railing of the upper balcony.
He went no more to see her play. In his small, shabby room in a musty house on one of the old side streets he set to work on his new plan. He wrote now without fervor, without elation, plodding along hour after hour, erasing, interlining, destroying, rewriting. He toiled terribly. He permitted himself no fancy flights. He calculated now. "I must have a young and beautiful duchess or countess," he mused, bitterly. "Our democratic public loves to see nobility. She must peril her honor for a lover—a wonderful fellow of the middle-class, not royal, but near it. The princess must masquerade in a man's clothing for some high purpose. There must be a lord high chamberlain or the like who discovers her on this mission to save her lover, and who uses his discovery to demand her hand in marriage for his son—"
In this cynical mood he worked, sustained only by the memory of "The Glittering Woman" whose power and beauty had once dazzled him. Slowly the new play took shape, and, try as he might, he could not keep out of it a line now and then of real drama—of literature. Each act was designed to end with a clarion call to the passions, and he was perfectly certain that the curtain would rise again and again at the close. At every point was glitter and the rush of heroics.
He lived sparely, seeing no one, going out only at night for a walk in the square. To send to his brother or his father for money he would not, not even to write his wonder-working drama. His letters home, while brief, were studiedly confident of tone. The play-acting business and all those connected with it stood very remote from the farming village in which Dr. Donald Douglass lived, and when he read from his son's letters references to his dramas his mind took but slight hold upon the words. His replies were brief and to the point. "Go back to your building and leave the play-actors to themselves. They're a poor, uneasy lot at the best." To him an architect was a man who built houses and barns, with a personal share in the physical labor, a wholesome, manly business. The son understood his father's prejudices, and they formed a barrier to his approach when in need.
On the morning of the fifteenth day Alessandra went to the type-writer, and the weary playwright lifted his head and took a full, free breath. He was convinced beyond any question that this melodrama would please. It had all the elements which he despised, therefore it must succeed. His desire to see Helen now overpowered him. Worn with his toil and exultant in his freedom, he went out into the street to see what the world was doing.
Enid's Choice was still running. A slight gain at the end of the first week had enabled Helen to withhold her surrender to mammon. The second week increased the attendance, but the loss on the two plays was now very heavy, and Hugh and Westervelt and all her friends as well urged her to give way to the imperious public; but some deep loyalty to Douglass, some reason which she was not free to give, made her say, "No, while there is the slightest hope I am going to keep on." To her mother she said: "They are associated in my mind with something sweet and fine—a man's aspiration. They taste good in my mouth after all these years of rancid melodrama."
To herself she said: "If they succeed—if they win the public—my lover will come back. He can then come as a conqueror." And the hope of this, the almost certain happiness and honor which awaited them both led her to devise new methods of letting the great non-theatre-going public know that in George Douglass's Enid they might be comforted—that it was, indeed, a dramatic sign of promise. "We will give it a faithful trial here, then go on the road. Life is less strenuous in the smaller towns—they have time to think."