Vickery was dazed. Of all the critical suggestions he had ever heard, this was the most radical, to change the hero to a heroine, and vice versa.
He stared at Eldon. “Are you in favor of woman suffrage, you, of all men?”
Eldon laughed. “You might as well ask me if I am in favor of the coming winter or the hot spell or the next earthquake. All I know is that my opposition wouldn’t make the slightest difference to them and that I might as well reconcile myself to them.
“There’s nothing on this earth except death and the taxes that’s surer to come than the equality of women—in the sense of equality that men mean. The first place where women had a chance was the stage; it’s the only place now where they are put on the same footing with the men. They have every advantage that men have, and earn as much money, or more, and have just as many privileges, or more. The one question asked is, ‘Can you deliver the goods?’ That’s the question they ask of a business man, or painter, or sculptor, or architect, or soldier. Private morals are an important question, but a separate question, just as they are with men.
“So the stage is the right place for freedom to be preached by women, because that is the place where it is practised. The stage ought to lend its hand to free others because it is free itself.”
Vickery was beginning to kindle with the new idea, though his kindling meant the destruction of the building he had worked on so hard. He made one further objection: “You’re not seriously urging me to write a suffragette play, are you?”
“Lord help us, no!” Eldon snorted. “The suffragette is less entertaining on the stage than the Puritan, or the abolitionist, or any fighter for a doctrine. What the stage wants is the story of individuals, not of parties, or sects, or creeds. Leave sermons to the pulpits and lectures to the platform. The stage wants stories. If you can sneak in a bit of doctrine, all right, but it must be smuggled. Why don’t you write a play about the tragedy of a woman who has great gifts and can’t use them—a throttled genius like—well, like Sheila Kemble, for instance?”
“Oh, Sheila!” Vickery sighed. But the theme became personal, concrete, real at once. He made still a last weak objection: “But I wrote this play for you. I wanted to see you star in it.”
Eldon thought a moment, then he said: “You write the play for the woman, and let me play her husband. Give her all the fire you want, and make me just an every-day man with a wife he loves and admires and wants to keep, and doesn’t want to destroy. You do that and I’ll play the husband and I’ll give the woman star the fight of her life to keep me from running away with the piece. Don’t make the husband brilliant or heroic; just a stupid, stubborn, every-day man, and give him the worst of it everywhere. That all helps the actor. The woman will be divine, the man will be human. And he’ll get the audience—the women as well as the men.”
Vickery began to see the play forming on the interior sky of his skull, vaguely yet vividly as clouds take shape and gleam. “If only Sheila could play it,” he said.