At the theater Sheila met Reben in a morning-after mood. He had had little sleep and he was sure that the play was hopeless. The only thing that could have cured him would have been a line of people at the box-office. The lobby was empty, and few spaces can look quite so empty as a theater lobby. The box-office man spoke to him, too, with a familiarity based undoubtedly on the notices.
One of the papers published a fulsome eulogy that Starr Coleman would not have dared to submit. Of the opposite tenor was the slashing abuse of a more important paper that nursed one of those critics of which each town has at least a single specimen—the local Archilochus whose similar ambition seems to be to drive the objects of his satire to suicide.
His chief support is his knowledge that his readers enjoy his vigor in pelting transient actors as a small boy throws rocks at express trains. His highest reward is the town boast, “We got a critic can roast an actor as good as anybuddy in N’York, and ain’t afraid to do it, either.”
As children these humorists first show their genius by placing bent pins on chairs; later they pull the chairs from under old ladies and start baby-carriages on a downward path. Every day is April fool to them.
Reben was always arguing that critics had nothing to do with success or failure and always ready to document his argument, and always trembled before them, none the less. It is small wonder that critics learn to secrete vitriol, since their praise makes so little effect and only their acid etches.
Reben had tossed aside the paper that praised his company and his play, but he clipped the hostile articles. The play-roaster began, as usual, with a pun on the title, “The Woman Pays but the audience won’t.”
As a matter of fact, Reben was about convinced that the play was a failure. It had succeeded in France because it was written for the French. The process of adaptation had taken away its Gallic brilliance without adding any Anglo-Saxon trickery. Reben would make a fight for it, before he gave up, but he had a cold, dismal intuition which he summed up to Batterson in that simple fatal phrase:
“It won’t do.”
He did not tell Sheila so, lest he hurt her work, but he told Prior that the play was deficient in viscera—only he used the grand old Anglo-Saxon phrasing.
He gave Prior some ideas for the visceration of the play and set him to work on a radical reconstruction, chiefly involving a powerful injection of heart-interest. Till this was ready there was no use meddling with details.