Thus custom is restored and true love reunited by one brilliant comic stroke!
And all this pretty little world, the contribution of a rich young man who came from Philadelphia! How perfectly God-damn delightful it all was, to be sure!
The plays of old Seth Flint, the sour and withered exreporter, were, if of a different colouring, cut from the same gaudy cloth of theatrical unreality. For forty years old Seth had pounded precincts as a newsman, and had known city-rooms across the nation. He had seen every crime, ruin, and incongruity of which man’s life is capable. He was familiar with every trait of graft, with every accursed smell and smear of the old red murder which ineradicably fouled the ancient soul of man, and the stench of man’s falseness, treachery, cruelty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and injustice, together with the look of brains and blood upon the pavements of the nation, was no new thing to old Seth Flint.
His skin had been withered, his eyes deadened, his heart and spirit burdened wearily, his faith made cynical, and his temper soured by the black picture of mankind which he had seen as a reporter — and because of this, in spite of this, he had remained or become — how, why, in what miraculous fashion no one knew — a curiously honest, sweet, and generous person, whose life had been the record of a selfless loyalty. He had known poverty, hardship, and self-sacrifice, and endured all willingly without complaint: he had taken the savings of a lifetime to send the two sons of his widowed sister to college; he had supported this woman and her family for years, and now, when his own life was coming to its close, he was yielding to the only self-indulgence he had ever known — a year away from the city-room of a Denver newspaper, a year away in the rare ether, among the precious and æsthetic intellects of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream of a lifetime, the vision of his youth — a year in which to write the plays he had always dreamed of writing. And what kind of plays did he write?
Alas! Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded perfectly in fulfilling his desire — and, by a tragic irony, his failure lay in just this fact. The plays which he produced with an astounding and prolific ease —(“Three days is enough to write a play,” the old man said in his sour voice. “You guys who take a year to write a play give me a pain. If you can’t write a play a week, you can’t write anything; the play’s no good”)— these plays were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man, and therein was evident their irremediable fault.
For Seth’s plays — so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done — would have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only done them twenty years before. He wrote, without effort and with unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had grown tired of twenty years before. He wrote plays in which the babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in which the rich man’s child goes to the family of the little grocer, and the grocer’s child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune, with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him. And he brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents, with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that was astonishing. His characters — all well-known types of the theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter cynical, and so on — were well conceived to fret their purpose, their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made. He had mastered the formula of an older type of “well-made play” with astonishing success. Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in such plays had vanished twenty years before.
So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.
“Chekhov! Ibsen!” old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face. “You guys all make me tired the way you worship them!” he would whine out at some of the exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher’s class. “Those guys can’t write a play! Take Chekhov, now!” whined Seth. “That guy never wrote a real play in his life! He never knew how to write a play! He couldn’t have written a play if he tried! He never learned the rules for writing a play! — That Cherry Orchard now,” whined old Seth with a sour sneering laugh, “— that Cherry Orchard that you guys are always raving about! That’s not a play!” he cried indignantly. “Whatever made you think it was a play? I was trying to read it just the other day,” he rasped, “and there’s nothing there to hold your interest! It’s got no PLOT! There’s no story in it! There’s no suspense! Nothing happens in it. All you got is a lot of people who do nothing but talk all the time. You never get anywhere,” said Seth scornfully. “And yet to hear you guys rave about it, you’d think it was a great play.”
“Well, what do you call a great play, then, if The Cherry Orchard isn’t one?” one of the young men said acidly. “Who wrote the great plays that you talk about?”
“Why, George M. Cohan wrote some,” whined Seth instantly. “That’s who. Avery Hopwood wrote some great plays. We’ve had plenty of guys in this country who wrote great plays. If they’d come from Russia you’d get down and worship ’em,” he said bitterly; “but just because they came out of this country they’re no good!”
In the relation of the class towards old Seth Flint, it was possible to see the basic falseness of their relation towards life everywhere around them. For here was a man — whatever his defects as a playwright might have been — who had lived incomparably the richest, most varied and dangerous, and eventful life among them; as he was himself far more interesting than any of the plays they wrote, and as dramatists they should have recognized and understood his quality. But they saw none of this. For their relation towards life and people such as old Seth Flint was not one of understanding. It was not even one of burning indignation — of that indignation which is one of the dynamic forces in the artist’s life. It was rather one of supercilious scorn and ridicule.
They felt that they were “above” old Seth, and most of the other people in the world, and for this reason they were in Professor Hatcher’s class. Of Seth they said:
“He’s really a misfit, terribly out of place here. I wonder why he came.”
And they would listen to an account of one of Seth’s latest errors in good taste with the expression of astounded disbelief, the tones of stunned incredulity which were coming into fashion about that time among elegant young men.
“Not really! . . . But he never really said THAT. . . . You CAN’T mean it.”
“Oh, but I assure you, he did!”
“ . . . It’s simply past belief! . . . I can’t believe he’s as bad as THAT.”
“Oh, but he IS! It’s incredible, I know, but you’ve no idea what he’s capable of.” And so on.
And yet old Seth Flint was badly needed in that class: his bitter and unvarnished tongue caused Professor Hatcher many painful moments, but it had its use — oh, it had its use, particularly when the play was of this nature:
Irene (slowly, with scorn and contempt in her voice). So — it has come to this! This is all your love amounts to — a little petty selfish thing! I had thought you were bigger than that, John.
John (desperately). But — but, my God, Irene — what am I to think? I found you in bed with him — my best friend! (with difficulty). You know — that looks suspicious, to say the least!
Irene (softly — with amused contempt in her voice). You poor little man! And to think I