VI
IFF?
Late that night, Staff drifted into the smoking-room, which he found rather sparsely patronised. This fact surprised him no less than its explanation: it was after eleven o’clock. He had hardly realised the flight of time, so absorbed had he been all evening in argument with Alison Landis.
There remained in the smoking-room, at this late hour, but half a dozen detached men, smoking and talking over their nightcaps, and one table of bridge players—in whose number, of course, there was Mr. Iff.
Nodding abstractedly to the little man, Staff found a quiet corner and sat him down with a sigh and a shake of his head that illustrated vividly his frame of mind. He was a little blue and more than a little distressed. And this was nothing but natural, since he was still in the throes of the discovery that one man can hardly with success play the dual rôle of playwright and sweetheart to a successful actress.
Alison was charming, he told himself, a woman incomparable, tenderly sweet and desirable; and he loved her beyond expression. But ... his play was also more than a slight thing in his life. It meant a good deal to him; he had worked hard and put the best that was in him into its making; and hard as the work had been, it had been a labour of love. He wasn’t a man to overestimate his ability; he possessed a singularly sane and clear appreciation of the true value of his work, harbouring no illusions as to his real status either as dramatist or novelist. But at the same time, he knew when he had done good work. And A Single Woman promised to be a good play, measured by modern standards: not great, but sound and clear and strong. The plot was of sufficient originality to command attention; the construction was clear, sane, inevitable; he had mixed the elements of comedy and drama with the deftness of a sure hand; and he had carefully built up the characters in true proportion to one another and to their respective significance in the action.
Should all this then, be garbled and distorted to satisfy a woman’s passion for the centre of the stage? Must he be untrue to the fundamentals of dramaturgic art in order to earn her tolerance? Could he gain his own consent to present to the public as work representative of his fancy the misshapen monstrosity which would inevitably result of yielding to Alison’s insistence?
Small wonder that he sighed and wagged a doleful head!
Now while all this was passing through a mind wrapped in gloomy and profound abstraction, Iff’s voice disturbed him.
“Pity the poor playwright!” it said in accents of amusement.