"All the same," Frohman continued, "I mean to be a playwright. Didn't Lester Wallack write 'Rosedale' and 'The Veteran'? Didn't Augustin Daly make splendid adaptations of German farces? Doesn't Belasco turn out first-class dramas? Then why not I? I mean to learn the game. Don't give me away, but watch my progress in play-making as we jog along through life."
He got his first tip from Pinero. "When I have sketched out a play," observed the author of "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray," "I go and live among the characters."
Frohman had no characters of his own, but he held in his brain a fabulous store of other people's plays. And whenever they had a historical or a literary origin he ran these origins to their lair. At Ferney, on the Lake of Geneva, he cared nothing about Voltaire; he wanted to see the place where the free-thinkers gathered in A. M. Palmer's production of "Daniel Rochat." At Geneva he was not concerned with Calvin, but with memories of a Union Square melodrama, "The Geneva Cross." At Lyons he expected the ghosts of Claude Melnotte and Pauline to meet him at the station. In Paris he allowed Napoleon to slumber unnoticed in the Invalides while he hunted the Faubourg Saint-Antoine for traces of "The Tale of Two Cities," and the Place de la Concorde for the site of the guillotine on which Sidney Carton died, and the Latin Quarter haunts of Mimi and Musette, and the Bal Bullier where Trilby danced, and the Concert des Ambassadeurs where Zaza bade her lover good-by.
Any production was an excuse for these expeditions. Sir Herbert Tree had staged "Colonel Newcome"; we had ourselves plotted a dramatization of "Pendennis"; Mrs. Fiske had given "Vanity Fair"; so off we went, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, searching for the place, duly placarded, where Thackeray lunched in the days of the "Paris Sketch-book" and the "Ballad of Bouillabaisse."
In the towns of Kent we got on the trail of Dickens with the enthusiasm of a Hopkinson Smith; in London, between Drury Lane and Wardour Street, we hunted for the Old Curiosity Shop; in Yarmouth we discovered the place where Peggotty's boat-hut might have lain on the sands. With William Seymour, who knew every street from his study of "The Rivals," we listened to the abbey bells of Bath. And when "Romeo and Juliet" was to be revived with Sothern and Marlowe, Frohman even proposed that we should visit Verona. He only abandoned the idea on discovering that the Veronese had no long-distance telephones, and that, while wandering among the tombs of the Montagus and Capulets, he would be cut off from his London office.
Having thus steeped himself in the atmosphere of his work, he set forth to learn the rules of the game. I met him in Paris on his return from New York. "How go the rules?" I asked.
"Rotten," said he. "Our American playwrights say there are no rules; with them it is all inspiration. The Englishmen say that rules exist, but what the rules are they either don't know or won't tell."
We went to the Concert Rouge. Those were the happy days when there were no frills; when the price of admission was charged with what you drank; when Saint-Saëns accompanied his "Samson and Delilah" with an imaginary flute obligato on a walking-stick; when Massenet, with his librettist, Henri Cain, dozed quietly through the meditation of "Thaïs"; when the students and their girls forgot frivolity under the spell of "L'Arlesienne."
In a smoky corner sat a group of well-known French playwrights, headed by G. A. Caillavet, afterward famous as author of "Le Roi." They were indulging in a heated but whispered discussion. They welcomed Frohman cordially, then returned to the debate.
"What are they talking about?" asked Frohman.