"If I think so, I will say so. Isn't that the idea? You are trying it on the dog to see if it goes?"
"If you think it is rubbish, don't say anything."
"How silly! If you are spending your time on trash, you ought to know it, and get over it, and begin to write sense."
"I feel like one of the Professor's slugs," he muttered.
"Better try us on the simplest one."
"Well, I will read you 'Success.'"
She ran downstairs, and he followed, to the piazza.
There was no sign of the Professor.
"Ardelia," called Bambi, "where is the Professor?"
"I don't know, ma'am. I seen him headed for the garden."
"Professor Parkhurst, come in here!" Bambi called. "We are to hear Jarvis's play."
"Oh, that is it. I couldn't remember why I was placed in that chair, and Ardelia couldn't remember. So it occurred to me that I had forgotten my trowel," he said. He put the trowel, absent-mindedly, in the tea basket, and took the seat arranged for Jarvis.
"Here, you sit in your regular seat," Bambi objected, hauling him up.
"That isn't wise, my dear. I am sure to go to sleep."
"We'll see that you don't," she laughed.
"I've never heard a play read aloud that I can remember," said the Professor.
"You will probably be very irritating, then. Don't interrupt me. If you fumble things, or make a noise, I'll stop."
"That knowledge helps some," retorted the Professor, with a twinkle. "If I can't stand it, I'll whistle."
"Be quiet," said his daughter. "Go ahead, Jarvis."
"What is this play supposed to be about?" Professor Parkhurst inquired.
"The title is 'Success.' It is about a woman who sold herself for success, and paid with her soul."
"Is it a comedy?"
"Good Lord, no! I don't try to make people laugh. I make them think."
"Go ahead."
"Don't interrupt again, father."
Jarvis began to read, nervously at first, then with greater confidence. He read intelligently, but without dramatic value, and Bambi longed to seize the manuscript and do it herself. Once, during the first act, the Professor cleared his throat.
"Don't do that!" said Jarvis, without pausing for the Professor's hasty apology.
The play told the story of a woman whose God was Success. She sacrificed everything to him. First her mother and father were offered up, that she might have a career. Then her lover. She married a man she did not love, that she might mount one step higher, and finally she sacrificed her child to her devouring ambition. When she reached the goal she had visioned from the first, she was no longer a human being, with powers of enjoyment or suffering. She was, instead, a monster, incapable of appreciating what she had won, and in despair she killed herself.
There were big scenes, some bold, telling strokes, in Jarvis's handling of his theme. Again, it was utterly lacking in drama. The author stopped the action and took to the pulpit.
At the end of the first act he stopped and looked at the faces of his audience. The Professor was awake and deeply puzzled. This strange young man was holding up to his view a perfectly strange anomaly which he called a woman. The Professor had never dreamed of such a hybrid. He couldn't grasp it. He gasped at Jarvis's audacity.
Bambi sat curled up in the end of a wicker couch, her feet drawn under her, like a Chinese idol, every nerve attuned to attention. He noticed how, without words, she seemed to emanate responsiveness and understanding.
"Well?" he said.
"Let's wait until you have finished to discuss it," she said.
"Is it any good?"
"In spots it's great. In other spots it is incredibly rotten."
"My child," protested the Professor.
"Go on!" she ordered.
The second act began well, mounted halfway to its climax, and fell flat. Some of the lines, embodying the new individualistic philosophy of woman, roused the Professor to protest.
"Rubbish, sir!" he cried. "Impossible rubbish! No woman ever thought such things."
"Take your nose out of your calculus, and look about you, Professor," retorted Jarvis. "You haven't looked around since the stone age."
Bambi gurgled with laughter, then looked serious.
"He's fallen on an idea just the same, Jarvis. Your woman isn't convincing."
"But she's true," he protested.
"We don't care a fig whether she's true, unless she's true to us," she answered him. "Go on with your last act."
"You don't like it--what's the use?"
"Don't be silly. I am deeply interested. Go on!"
He began a little hopelessly, feeling the atmosphere, by that subtle sense that makes the creative artist like a sensitive plant where his work is at stake. The third act failed to ascend, or to resolve the situation. He merely carried it as far as it interested him, and then dropped it. As he closed the manuscript Bambi reached out her hand for it.
"Give it to me, in my hand!" she ordered. He obeyed, questioningly.
"I feel as if it was such a big thing, mangled and bleeding. I want to hold it and help it."
"Mangled?"
"Yes. Don't you feel it? She isn't a woman! She's a monster. You don't believe her. You won't believe her, because you hate her."
"But she's true. She lives to-day. She is the woman of now," he repeated.
"No, no, no! Woman may approximate this, but she doesn't reason it out. Let her be fine, and big, and righteously ambitious. Make us sympathize with her."
"But I am preaching against her."
"All the better. Make her a tragedy. Show the futility of it all. She didn't kill herself. You killed her."
"Do you write plays?" he asked her.
"No, but I feel drama. This is big, but it is all man psychology. You don't know your woman."
"I should hope not," said the Professor. "You needn't tell me there are such women in the world. She is worse than Lucretia Borgia."
"Of course she is in the world, Father Professor. You haven't looked at a woman since mother died, nineteen years ago, so you are not strictly up-to-date."
"I have hundreds of young women in my classes."
"Learning Euclid," interpolated Jarvis.
"Well, Euclid is more desirable than what your heroine learned and taught."
"Not at all. She learned life."
The Professor turned to Bambi.
"Have you any ideas in common with this person, my dear?"
"Oh, yes, some. All of us are freebooters in this generation."
"Why have you never spoken to me of them?"
"Oh, Professor, I never bother you with ideas. Jarvis, I think if you do it over, you could sell it."
"I hate doing things over--the spontaneity all gone."
"Well, you've got to do it over, that's all. You've murdered that woman, and it is wicked. She must be resuscitated and given another chance."
"Will you help me?"
She looked at him with a quick flash of pleasure.
"Oh, I would so love to. I can't help you build it, but I can tell you what I feel is wrong."
"We will begin to-morrow."
"Are all your works as extreme as this?" queried the Professor.
"They are all cross-sections of life, which is extreme," replied Jarvis.
"You young people read riddles into life. It is as simple as two plus two is four."
"There you are--two plus two does not necessarily make four. It makes five or forty. It depends on the symbols. Nothing in the world is exact, or final. Everything is changeable, fluidic. That's the whole fabric of modern thought."
The Professor's horrified glance was turned upon them.
"Oh, dear, oh, dear, there you go, upsetting everything. You are a pair of maniacs, both of you. You ought to be shut away from people, with your wild ideas."
He rushed out into his garden, sure of its calm, its mathematical exactness. He was really disturbed by the ultra-modern theories these ardent young iconoclasts forced him to consider.
"Poor Father Professor," laughed Bambi, at his retreat.
"Why do you let him stay back there in the Middle Ages?"
"He's happier there. It's peaceful. Modern times distress him so when he remembers them."
"I suppose you are not an average family, are you?" he asked.
"I suppose not," she admitted.
"You are irritating, but interesting."
"I warn you to let father alone. He's too old to be hauled up-to-date. Just consider him an interesting survival and let him be."
"I'll let him be. I'll put him in a play. He's good copy."
"He'll never know himself, so it won't matter."
They talked late about Jarvis's work, his methods of writing, the length of time it took him to conceive and work out a play. It all fascinated Bambi. She felt that a wonderful interest had come into her life. A new thing was to be created, each day, under her roof, near her. She was to have part in it, help in its shaping to perfection. She gloated over the days to come, and a warm rush of gratitude to Jarvis for bringing her this sense of his need of her made her burst out:
"Oh, life is such fun!"
He looked at her closely.
"You are a queer little mite," said he.
"The mite is mightier than the sword," she laughed, starting for the garden. "You go to bed, so you can get an early start on that play. I'll round up the Professor. He's forgotten to bring himself in."
He obeyed without objection. He felt, all at once, like a ship at anchor after long years of floating aimlessly, but, manlike, he took his good fortune as his just right, and it never occurred to him to thank Bambi for his new sense of peace and well-being.