vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his play for eldon. for months he toiled and moiled upon it. sometimes he would write all day and

all night upon a scene, and work himself up into a state of what he called soul-sweat.

he would go to bed patting himself on the shoulder and talking to himself as if he were a draught-horse and a pegasus combined: “good boy, ’gene! good work, old

genius!”

in the morning he would wake feeling all the after-effects of a prolonged carouse. he would reach for a cigarette and review with contempt all he had previously done.

no critic could have reviled his work with less sympathy.

“by night i write plays and by day i write criticisms,” he would say.

lazily he would cough himself out of bed, cough through his tub and into his clothes, and go to his table like a surly butcher to carve his play with long slashes of

the blue pencil.

at length he had it as nearly finished as any play is likely to be before it has been read. he went to new york, where eldon was playing, and easily persuaded him to

listen to the drama. vickery would not explain the story of the play beforehand.

“i want you to get it the way the audience does.”

he marched his buskined blank verse with the elocution of a poet and all the sonority his raucous voice could lend him. he was shocked to note that eldon was not

helping him along with enthusiasm. his voice wavered, faltered, sank. he was hardly audible at the climax of his big third act.

here the puritan hero, who had left the old world for the new world and liberty, discovered that the other puritans wanted liberty only for themselves, and so abhorred

his principles of toleration that they exiled him into the wilderness, mercilessly expecting him to perish in the blizzards or at the hands of the indians. the hero,

like another roger williams, turned and denounced them, then vowed to found a state where a man could call his soul his own, and plunged into the storm.

vickery closed the manuscript and gulped down a glass of water. he had not looked at eldon for two acts; he did not look at him now. he simply growled, “sorry it

bored you so.”

“it doesn’t bore me!” eldon protested. “it’s magnificent—”

“but—” vickery prompted.

“but nothing. only—well—you see you said it was a play for me, and i—i’ve been trying to like it for myself. but—well, it’s too good for me. i feel like a man

who ordered a suit of overalls and finds that the tailor has brought him an ermine robe and velvet breeches. it’s too gorgeous for me.”

“nonsense!” said vickery. “you don’t have to softsoap me. why don’t you like it?”

“i do! as a work of art it is a masterpiece. the fault is mine. you see, i admire the classic blank-verse plays so much that i wish people wouldn’t try to write any

more of them. they’re not in the spirit of our age. in shakespeare’s time men wore long curls and combed them in public, and tied love-knots in them and wrote

madigrals and picked their teeth artistically with a golden picktooth. the best of them cried like babies when their feelings were hurt.

“nowadays we’d lynch a man that behaved as they did. then they tried to use the most eloquent words. now we try to use the simplest or, better yet, none at all. i

think that our way is bigger than theirs, but, anyway, it’s our way.

“and then the puritans. i admire them in spots. my people came over in one of the early boats. but plays about puritans never succeed. do you know why? it’s because

the puritans preached the gospel of don’t! everything was don’t—don’t dance, don’t sing, don’t kiss, don’t have fun, don’t wear bright colors, don’t go to

plays, don’t have a good time. but the theater is the place where people go to have a good time, a good laugh, a good cry, or a good scare. the whole soul of the

theater is to reconcile people with life and with one another.

“the puritans call the theater immoral. it is so blamed moral that it is untrue to life half the time, for wickedness always has to be punished in the theater, and we

know it isn’t in real life.

“and another thing, vick, why should the theater do anything for the puritans? they never did anything for us except to tear down the playhouses and call the actors

hard names. and what good came of it all?

“here’s a book i picked up about the puritans, because it has a lot about my ancestors. they had a daughter named remember and a son named wrastle. but look at this.

” eldon got up, found the volume, and hunted for the page, as he raged: “now the puritans in our country had none of the alleged causes of immorality—they had no

novels, no plays, no grand or comic operas, no nude art, no vaudeville, no tango, and no moving pictures. they ought to have been pretty good, eh? well, take a peek at

what their governor william bradford writes.”

he handed the book to vickery, whose eyes roved along the page:

anno dom: 1642. marvilous it may be to see and consider how some kind of wickednes did grow breake forth here, in a land wher the same was so much witnesed against,

and so narrowly looked unto, & severly punished when it was knowne; as in no place more, and so much, that i have known or head of . . . . . espetially drunkennes and

unclainnes; not only incontinencie betweene persons unmaried, for which many both men & women have been punished sharply enough, but some maried persons allso. . .

things fearful to name have broak forth in this land, oftener then once . . . one reason may be, that ye divell may carrie a greater spite against the churches of

christ and ye gospell hear, by how much ye more they endeavor to preserve holynes and puritie amongst them . . . that he might cast a blemishe & staine upon them in ye

eyes of ye world, who use to be rashe in judgmente.

vickery smiled sheepishly, and eldon relieved him of the book, exclaiming:

“think of it, those terribly protected people were so bad they could only explain it by saying that satan worked overtime! there is one of the most hideous stories in

here ever published and you can find facts that make the scarlet letter look innocent.”

vickery protested, mildly: “of course the puritans were human and intolerant. that’s the whole point of my play, the struggle of a man against them.”

eldon opposed him still. “but why should we worry over that? the puritans have been pretty well whipped out. liberty is pretty well secured for men in america. why

try to excite an audience about what they all are as used to as the air they breathe? let russia write about such things. why not write a play about the exciting

things of our own days? if you want liberty for a theme, why don’t you write about the fight the women are waging for freedom? turn your hero into a heroine; turn

your puritans into conservative men and women of the day who stand just where they did. show up the modern home as this book shows up the old puritans.”

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.

eldon tossed his hands in despair.

vickery began to babble as the plot spilled down into his brain in a cloudburst of ideas: “i might take sheila for my theme. to disguise her decently she could be—

say—let me see—i’ve got it!—a singer! her voice has thrilled covent garden and the metropolitan and she marries a nice man and has some children and sings ’em

little cradle-songs. she loves them and she loves her husband, but she is bursting with bigger song—wild, glorious song. shall she stick to the nursery or shall she

leave her babies every now and then and give the world a chance to hear her? her mother-in-law and the neighbors say, ‘the opera is immoral, the singers are immoral,

the librettos are immoral, the managers are immoral; you stay in the nursery, except on sundays, and then you may sing in the choir.’

“but she remembers when she sang the death-love of isolde in the metropolitan with an orchestra of a hundred trying in vain to drown her; she remembers how she

climbed and climbed till she was in heaven, and how she took five thousand people there with her, and—oh, you can see it! it’s trilby without svengali; it’s trilby

as a mother and a wife. it’s all womankind.”

his thoughts were stampeded with the new excitement. he picked up the play he had loved so well and worked for so hard, and would have tossed it into the fire if eldon

’s room had not been heated by a steam-radiator. he flung it on the floor with contempt:

“that!” and he trampled it as the critics would have trampled it had it been laid at their feet.

“what to call my play?” he pondered, aloud. “it’s always easier for me to write the play than select the name.” as he screwed up his face in thought a memory came

to him. “my mother told me once that when she was a little girl in the west her father wounded a wild swan and brought it home. she cared for it till it got well,

then he clipped one of its wings so that it could not balance itself to fly. it grew tame and stayed about the garden, but it was always trying to fly.

“one day my grandfather noticed that the clipped wing was growing out and he sent a farm-hand to trim it down again. the fellow didn’t understand how birds fly, and

he clipped the long wing down to the length of the short one. the bird walked about, trying its pinions. it found that, short as they were, they balanced each other.

“she walked to a high place and suddenly leaped off into the air; my mother saw her and thought she would fall. but her wings held her up. they beat the air and she

sailed away.”

“did she ever come back?” eldon asked.

“she never came back. but she was a bird and didn’t belong in a garden. a woman would come back. we used to have pigeons at home. we clipped their wings at first,

too, till they learned the cote. then we let them free. you could see them circling about in the sky. pigeons come back. i’m going to call my play ‘clipped wings.’

how’s that for a title?—‘clipped wings’!”

eldon was growing incandescent, too, but he advised caution:

“be easy on the allegory, boy, or you’ll have only allegorical audiences. stick to the real and the real people will come to see it. go on and write it, and don’t

forget i play the husband; i saw him first. don’t write a lecture, now; promise me you won’t preach or generalize. you stick to your story of those two people, and

let the audience generalize on the way home. and don’t let your dialogue sparkle too much. every-day people don’t talk epigrams. give them every-day talk. that’s as

great and twice as difficult as blank verse.

“don’t try to sweeten the husband. let him roar like a bull, and everybody will understand and forgive him. i tell you the new wife has it all her own way. she’s

venturing out into new fields. the new husband is the one i’m sorry for.

“i hate winfield for taking sheila off the stage, and i hate him for keeping her away. but if i were in his place i’d do the same. i’d hate myself, but i’d keep

her. the more you think of it, the harder the husband job is.

“the new husband of the new woman is up against the biggest problem of the present time and of the future: what are husbands going to do about their wives’

ambitions? what are wives going to do about their husbands’ rights to a home? where do the children come in? it doesn’t do the kids much good to have ’em brought up

in a home of discontent by a broken-hearted mother raising her daughter to go through the same tragedy. but they ought to have a chance.

“there’s a new triangle in the drama. it’s not a question of a lover outside; the third member is the wife’s ambition. go to it, my boy—and give us the story.”

vickery stumbled from the room like a sleep-walker. the whole play was present in his brain, as a cathedral in the imagination of an architect.

when he came to drawing the details of the cathedral, and figuring out the ground-plan, stresses, and strains, the roof supports, the flying buttresses, the cost of

material, and all the infernally irreconcilable details—that was quite another thing yet.

but he plunged into it as into a brier-patch and floundered about with a desperate enthusiasm. his health ebbed from him like ink from his pen. his doctor ordered him

to rest and to travel, and he sought the mountains of new york for a while. but he would not stop work. his theme dragged him along and he hoped only that his zest for

writing would not give out before the play was finished. if afterward his life also gave out, he would not much care.

he had lost sheila, and sheila had lost herself. if he could find his work, that would be something at least.