Rudyard was not in the least concerned or disturbed by any pointing to an actual fact.
“This is how we can see,” he continued, “that it is good to be the way that we are. It would be no good, if we were unable to play any games at all. But just because we don’t know if we are going to win or lose, just because our powers are limited and the other boys have powers not unlike our own, the game is exciting to play. So you can see that we are all what we ought to be.”
“Just the same,” said Chester, “I would like to hit a homer every time I came to bat.”
“Me too,” said Jeremiah, “for a year, anyway.”
From such interviews Rudyard returned refreshed to his dramatic works. The volley of the conversation, as at a tennis match, was all that he took with him. For what he wanted and what satisfied him was the activity of his own mind. This need and satisfaction kept him from becoming truly interested in other human beings, although he sought them out all the time. He was like a travelling virtuoso who performs brilliant set-pieces and departs before coming to know his listeners.
An old teacher, meeting Rudyard after not seeing him for years, said to him that he showed no little courage in continuing to write works which gained for him neither fame nor money nor production.
“O, no,” said Rudyard, “it requires no courage whatever. I write when I feel inspired. When I don’t feel like writing, I don’t. Thus I am not like other authors. It is not a career, it is like playing a game, and it is not courage, but inspiration, a very different emotion.”
This reply was made in the style which Rudyard felt to be noble and necessary. But after this exchange, Rudyard asked himself if he had spoken truly. He knew very well a passion in himself to be applauded and to be famous, the same as other authors. Triumphant and delighted with himself, Rudyard decided that he did not want to be regarded as a playwright, he truly desired and enjoyed the activity of writing plays. This activity was enough to satisfy him.
The question and the answer inspired Rudyard to write a play in one act which resembled many of his previous dramas. This play contained only one character, a famous lyric poet, and only one scene, his study, in which he is surrounded by books, photographs, objects of art, and the black souvenir album in which are fixed essays and reviews of his poems which testify to his fame. The shades have been drawn down to bar the light of the living street.
The famous poet holds his head in his hands as he sits at his desk. In a monologue full of blank despair, he speaks of the fact that he has been unable to write a poem for two years.
“What difference does it make if I write a poem or I do not write a poem?” he says.
He holds in his hand a volume of his poems and he says:
“If I have done something worth doing, what good does it do me now? What good if I have drawn from the depths of my mind a good poem, if I do not enjoy now the sense of accomplishment and fruitfulness. One might as well tell a singer who has lost his voice that he was incomparable in all the great parts or equally tell a starving man that he was at a banquet two months before.”
He reads aloud passages by critics in which he is awarded the highest praise:
“How can I be sure that they are right?” he says. “Many have been wrong. No poet is ever sure that he has written an important work. The famous in their lifetime are forgotten and nonentities long since in the grave appear as the true poets.”
“And if this praise is true,” he says, after he reads a new passage of praise from the album, “it does not lessen in the least the pain, the boredom and the emptiness which weigh me down now. If it is untrue, I have been deceived like a drunkard by passing imagination?”
He arises and stands before his long looking-glass:
“I might have acquired a great deal of money. I might have tasted the pleasures of the rich or the satisfactions of the normal. I might have enjoyed myself like a child at the seashore, near the breaking waves all through the glittering day. Instead I have grown warped, narrow and weak in this room at this table.”
With his hand, he presses back his brow, looking closely at himself.
“I am too old to turn back and too young to forget my brilliant hopes. I am too intelligent to be uncritical of my fame, and the present is too important to me for me to be at peace because of the laurels I have gained in the past. Praise is worthless, but since praise is worthless, now that I cannot compose new works, I see for the first time, as if this were the first morning of my life, that there is only one reason to write poems: the only reason to write poems is for the sake of the activity of the whole being which one enjoys when one writes poems. This is the only justification.”
He seats himself at his desk again, and he says:
“The silence surrounds me like four o’clock in the morning.”
He draws forth a sheet of paper and takes a pencil from a cup.
“The silence of the white paper is my everlasting place. There is nothing else for me. Everything else is for the sake of this activity. When I cannot write a poem, when I have nothing in my mind but emptiness, then nothing else is good. When, on the other hand, a blazing excitement leaps in my mind, then I do not have happiness, for then all labor, all hope, all illusion are once more loaded on my back, as I sit here in my solitude surrounded by the silence which is like the night before the creation of the world.”
And then, as the curtain falls, the famous poet begins to write upon his sheet of paper.
When this short play was read to the circle, it was received like many other recent plays by Rudyard. They had heard these ideas from Rudyard in conversation and were not much interested or impressed by the dramatic version.
Rudyard was distressed by this reception of his play, for he expected that the admiration of his friends would continue with equal intensity. For some time he had been annoyed with Edmund because Edmund, seeking to please him, would say:
“This new play does not seem to me as good as the first-rate plays you wrote last year.”
“It is the best piece I have ever written,” Rudyard had declared flatly, to vanquish his disappointment.
And when Rudyard had read aloud two plays and Edmund had said:
“I like the second more than the first,” Rudyard also became angry, perceiving the criticism in this judgment.
“Now you can see,” he said to Ferdinand, “the reason I have for reading two plays instead of just one. Then it can always be said that the first is better than the second. Perhaps I ought to read three plays each time. Then it will be possible to say, I like the first better than the second, but I like the third better than the first. Meanwhile I have made it possible to refuse to answer the question of whether any of them are any good! To what infinite limits I go for the sake of making my friends full of tact.”
But when Edmund said of this new play that it was perhaps the best Rudyard had written, Rudyard was disturbed by this praise also, for it seemed to him to suggest a condemnation of his previous works. It was at this moment of annoyed disappointment, that Marcus Gross entered loudly.
“As for your plays,” he said to Rudyard, “what have they to do with anything else? No wonder they are not produced. If you were any good, you would be successful.”
“You are just a Philistine,” Rudyard replied in fury. “Minute by minute, you become more stupid. You can’t tell an idea from a hole in the ground!”
“Your feelings are hurt,” said Marcus with solemn calm, as if he had made a discovery.
“You did not hear this play from the beginning…” Lloyd Tyler began to say.
“It’s not necessary,” said Marcus, interrupting him, “they are all alike.”