, Casley thought, as he folded his long spare body into a seat in the front row of the balcony, it came to this: If a man could not feel any emotion at the first night of his first play, he might as well die. Much of his six feet of height came between his knee and his hip; the railing of the balcony was uncomfortably close; he crossed his legs with difficulty and leaned back, folding his arms.
“Isn't it thrilling?” murmured his cousin Gertrude, laying her hand for a moment on the hard muscles of his forearm.
He did not answer her at all. He had realized from the first that it was a mistake to bring Gertrude. He had not, as a matter of fact, invited her to go with him; she had simply assumed that it would be a comfort to him to know that she was beside him in a crisis. Besides, she believed that there was a certain intellectual prestige in attending first nights; and she cherished a secret ambition to be the center of a literary group, which, as she was handsome, well off and not very intelligent, was both natural and possible.
He had said to her several times in the slow clear drawl that his lecture rooms knew so well, “It will bore you, Gertrude. It bores me.” But Gertrude had laughed with the manner of one well able to take a joke, and had bought an emerald-green silk wrap with a corn-colored lining, which seemed to her the correct garment for the beautiful inspiration of a successful playwright to wear on the production of his first play.
But Casley had not been joking. One of his crosses in life—or perhaps one of his sources of secret satisfaction, for people gain comfort from strange causes—was that no one ever could tell whether he was in fun or not. His play bored him; worse than that, he hated it—hated it as a man hates a woman to whom he remains bound in some horrible drudgery of daily life long after he has ceased to love her. Like most creative minds, his interest was only in creation, and to be kept working at his play in a manner wholly routine, technical and uncreative filled him with a sort of mental nausea.
At thirty-three he was a full professor of history in a small but respected college. His specialty was the Tudor period, his book, “Owen Tudor: A Parvenu,” having been widely read even outside of academic circles. In fact, he was a conspicuous success, except for the fact that he had discovered that he hated teaching and that from the point of view of his own enjoyment of life his choice of his profession had been mistaken.
One day two years before, he had been lecturing to his class and had found himself saying: “The life of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, is lacking in the political significance of that of her cousin, Anne Boleyn, his second wife, but is as tragic and more dramatic. The miniature beauty of the great house of Norfolk, while still a child, inspired an eternal passion in the heart of a buccaneering young relation; was married by the king when she was eighteen and beheaded when she was twenty, under circumstances”
He thought suddenly, “Why shouldn't I write a play about her and get out of this infernal drudgery—teaching history, about which none of us knows anything, to a lot of young barbarians who don't want to know anything? After all, if Drinkwater has made the historical play possible, this is more romantic material than any he has used.”
He felt an interest in the idea such as he had not felt in anything for years. That very night, for he was a man in whom thought and action were closely connected, he set to work.
He wrote the play in three weeks, and for a third of that time—the first third—he had been almost happy. Then his confidence in it had begun to decline. His clear, unegotistical mind saw that it was not a good play. Nevertheless he had sent it off to Wilfred Weyburn, the most likely of any of the producers to accept it; and it had been accepted. No one was more surprised than Casley. It was characteristic of him that he mentioned the whole incident to nobody, and the first knowledge that came to the faculty and president of Boonton College was when a picture of Casley in cap and gown, walking beside a police dog, appeared in the Sunday papers, with a flattering caption about the youthful professor and his favorite pet and his new play. The photograph was years old and the dog belonged to one of the students—who was suspended subsequently because the dog attacked the night watchman—but the publicity of the Weyburn office was not famed for its accuracy so much as for its continuity and grace.