She had a queer thrill, too, from Vickery’s statement that Winfield had vowed to meet her some day and square himself with her; also to meet “that actor” some day and square himself with him.
This strange man Winfield began to loom across her horizon like an approaching Goliath. She tried to remember how he had looked, but recalled only that he was very big and that she was very much afraid of him.
This confusion of retrospect and prospect was dissipated, however, when Vickery began to talk of the play he had written for her. Then Sheila could see nothing but her opportunity, and that strange self an actor visualizes in a new rôle. The rest of us think of Hamlet as a certain personage. The actor thinks of “Hamlet as Myself” or “Myself as Hamlet.”
Vickery’s play, as Reben’s play-reader had told him, contained an idea. But an idea is as dangerous to a playwright as a loaded gun is to a child. The problem is, What will he do with it?
When Vickery told Sheila the central character and theme of his play she was enraptured with the possibilities. When he began to describe in detail what he had done with them she was tormented with disappointments and resentments. She gave way to little gasps of, “Oh, would she do that?” “Oh, do you think you ought to have her say that?”
Vickery was young and opinionated and had never seen one of his plays after the critics and the public had made tatters of it. He could only realize that he had spent months of intense thought upon every word. He was shocked at Sheila’s glib objections.
How could one who simply heard his story for the first time know what ought to be done with it? He forgot that a play’s prosperity, like a joke’s, lies in the ear of those who hear it for the first time.
He responded to Sheila’s skepticisms with all the fanatic eloquence of faith. He convinced her against her will for the moment. She liked him for his ardor. She liked the reasons he gave. She could not help feeling: “What a decent fellow he is! What a kind, wholesome view of life he takes!”
Woman-like, as she listened to his ideas she fell to studying his character and the features that published it. She was contrasting him with Eldon—Eldon so powerful, so handsome, so rich-voiced, so magnetic, and so obstinate; Vickery so homely, so lean, so shambling of gait and awkward of gesture, his voice so inadequate to the big emotions he had concocted. And yet Eldon only wanted to join her in the interpretation of other people’s creations. This spindle-shanks was himself a creator; he had idealized and dramatized a play from and for Sheila’s very own personality.
She began to think that there was something a trifle more exhilarating about an alliance with a creative genius than with just another actor. In her youth and ignorance she used the words “creative” and “genius” with reverence. She had never known a “creative genius” before—except Sir Ralph Incledon, and she loathed him. Vickery was different.