“Oh, yes.”
Brandon, startled by the sound of his own voice, had just enough courage to ask the doctor’s opinion of the play.
Dr. Thorp replied with a happy frankness: “Don’t laugh at me if I confess that to my mind it’s a sublime work.”
“You really think so?”
“I do, and I’ll tell you why. There’s such a great idea at the back of it, that I feel a better, a stronger, a saner man for having come in contact with it. That play takes one into another world. It draws aside the curtain, and gives us harassed mortals a peep into the kingdom of the Something Else. Nothing is but thinking makes it so. Believe me, that’s a sublime conception. And the Master has made us all feel here that we have a share in it. Shakespeare, Molière, Sophocles, Menander, and other august old gentlemen you saw round the fire in the other room, have all been consulted, and Beethoven has composed some enchanting music for it, so we can’t help thinking it wonderful.” The doctor’s laugh was now a note of pure joy. “Believe me, in its way, the whole thing is incomparable.”
“What is the title?”
“It is called, ‘A Play Without a Name,’ but I am convinced that it ought to be called, ‘The Something Else,’ or ‘The Power of Love.’ And although you’ll begin to doubt my sanity, I can’t help feeling that if the play were performed in every town in Europe at the present hour, it would be the beginning of a new era for the human race.”
“That is to say, the whole world might be born again through the power of the spoken word.”
“Exactly,” said the doctor, with enthusiasm. “And that, by the way, is what the author aims at. Of course you realize what his particular form of delusion is, and you will have noticed that he begins to bear a remarkable resemblance to his prototype.”
“Yes,” said Brandon, in a hushed, broken tone, “it’s quite uncanny.”