“Oh, yes”—again that gesture from Peter—-“my name is on it. But it is not my play.”
“Whose is it then?”
Peter shrugged. “How should I know? Haven't been near them for five months. They were all rewriting it then. They never grasped it. Neuerman, to this day, I'm sure, has no idea what it is about. Can't say I'm eager to view the remains.”
The orchestra struck up. Peter dropped back into his seat. He raised his program again, and again watched Sue from behind it. He had managed to keep up a calm front, but at considerable cost to his already racked nervous system. Sue's smile, her fresh olive skin, her extraordinary green eyes, the subtly pleasing poise of her head on her perfect neck, touched again a certain group of associated emotions that had slumbered of late. Surely she had not forgotten—-the few disturbed, thrilling days of their engagement—their first kiss, that had so surprised them both, up in his rooms....
She couldn't have forgotten! Perhaps his mutilated message might touch and stir her. Perhaps again....
Suddenly Peter's program fluttered to the aisle. He drew an envelope from one pocket, a pencil from another; stared a moment, openly, at her hair and the curve of her cheek; and wrote, furiously, a sonnet.
He crossed out, interlined, rephrased. It was a passionate enough little uprush of emotion, expressing very well what he felt on seeing again, after long absence, a woman he had loved—hearing her voice, looking at her hair and the shadows of it on her temple and cheek—remembering, suddenly, with a stab of pain, the old yearnings, torments and exaltations. Peter couldn't possibly have been so excited as he was to-night without writing some-thing. His emotions had to come out.
The lights went down. The music was hushed. There was a moment of dim silence; then the curtain slowly rose. The sophisticated, sensation-hungry nine hundred settled back in their seats and dared the play to interest them.
I have always thought that there was a touch of pure genius in the job Grace Derring did with The Truffler. Particularly in her rewriting of the principal part. On the side of acting, it was unquestionably the best thing she had done—perhaps the best she will ever do. The situation was odd, at the start. Peter—writing, preaching, shouting at Sue—-had let his personal irritation creep everywhere into the structure of the play. He was telling her what he thought she was—a truffler, a selfish girl, avoiding all of life's sober duties, interested only in the pursuit of dainties, experimenting with pleasurable emotions. He had written with heat and force; the structure of the piece was effective enough. The difficulty (which Grace had been quick to divine) was that he had made an unsympathetic character of his girl. The practical difficulty, I mean. I am not sure that the girl as Peter originally drew her was not a really brilliant bit of characterization. But on the American stage, as in the American novel, you must choose, always, between artistic honesty and “sympathy.” The part of commercial wisdom is to choose the latter. You may draw a harsh but noble character, a weak but likable character, you may picture cruelty and vice as a preliminary to Wesleyan conviction of sin and reformation; but never the unregenerate article. You may never be “unpleasant.” All this, of course, Peter knew. The adroit manipulating of sympathy was the thing, really, he did best. But when he wrote The Truffler he was too excited over Sue and too irritated to write anything but his real thoughts. Therefore the play had more power, more of freshness and the surface sense of life, than anything else he had written up to that time. And therefore it was commercially impossible.
Now Grace Herring was a bachelor girl herself.