Spider Boy/Chapter 1
Owing to the congenital diffidence of Ambrose Deacon, the unforeseen success of The Stafford Will Case merely embarrassed him. Before the production of this drama, to be sure, he had enjoyed a modest position in the world of letters. His stories of mail-clerks and milkmen had been accepted for publication with alacrity, if not with enthusiasm, by the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and two of his one-act comedies had been performed on the vaudeville stage to rapidly cumulating returns.
Nevertheless, prior to the production of The Stafford Will Case, the world, artistic, critical, and social, had not exhibited sufficient interest in his mousetraps to make a pilgrimage, actual or figurative, to the home of their inventor. Now, however, he had suddenly become a figure of almost national importance. He had been photographed by Steichen for Vanity Fair, the New Yorker had run his Profile, George Jean Nathan had devoted an entire paper in the American Mercury to a discussion of his original talent, and the directors of the. Theatre Guild had besought him for another masterpiece. It seemed fairly certain that he would receive the accolade of the dramatic critics for having written the best play of the season and that he would inevitably be awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The ultimate result of these and sundry other flattering attentions was to frighten Ambrose Deacon half out of his wits.
Arriving in the metropolis from an inland state some fifteen years previously, he had held positions of one kind or another on a newspaper for ten years, until the stories he was beginning to write about the quaint characters he had known in his boyhood began to bring in enough money to assure him it would be safe to resign his reportership in order to devote himself to what Joseph Hergesheimer had so fittingly described as "a career of beautiful letters." Ambrose wrote without self-consciousness of events and persons that his memory had retained from the years he had passed in the small middle western town of his birth. Typing these tales neatly and dispatching them to plausible periodicals, he was fairly certain to receive a cheque in return.
It was his habit to write most of the day. In the evening, after a plain dinner at some quiet restaurant, Italian or Hungarian, near his home, sometimes he walked in the park, sometimes, although seldom, he visited a theatre, sometimes, more seldom still, he paid a call or received company. His friends for the most part were reporters whose acquaintance he had made in his newspaper days or visitors from his native town.
His appearance was congruous with his manner of existence. About thirty-six years old, he stood a few inches over five feet and weighed too much for his height. His light brown hair was beginning to fall away from his temples and the back of his head. His countenance was round, his complexion inclined to be ruddy. His nose was insignificant, but his mouth, a deep red Cupid's bow, was his best feature. In the depths of his steel-grey eyes could be read the record of his shyness. His hands were pudgy and exceedingly awkward. He constantly dropped books and other objects that he lifted. In the presence of strangers it was even difficult for him to retain his grasp on a fork. Moreover, he frequently stumbled over door-steps or nicked his knees or his elbows on protruding pieces of furniture. Many an ample doorway proved too limited to permit his facile egress. Although he was no misogynist, he had never married. Presumably no woman had yet found him attractive enough to try to gain his attention. As a result of this condition he was shyer with women than with men.
He was fond of his work, fond of the few friends he possessed, although he cherished no ambition to increase their number, fond of his leisurely and modest manner of living. It is probable, had it not been for the unexpected success of his play, that he would have been quite content to continue to preserve his simple habits until the day when death might come to him.
Assuredly, the success of his play had altered the situation completely, but a nature more observant than Ambrose's would have noted even before that event a slow but consistent preparation for the general applause with which he was now being greeted. Certain of his stories had been recommended by the literary reviews as acute studies in middle western realism. A few astute critics had praised his knowledge of character, his ability to penetrate the lower middle class small town mind. Occasionally even his style had been approved as remarkably well adapted to his fictional processes, crude though it might be considered in the abstract. Furthermore, he had received many letters from the readers of the magazine which latterly had afforded him his principal source of income. These letters, to be sure, varied greatly in tone and matter. There were illiterate communications which hailed him as the writers' favourite story teller. There were protests or words of approbation from inhabitants of inland villages who did, or did not, as the case might be, find that his work was true to the reality of small town life. There were letters from lecture bureaux advising him that the season for fall readings was about to commence, adding that his name would contribute lustre to any list of famous names. Whatever their nature, these letters should have served to warn Ambrose that he was in danger of achieving a broader celebrity.
With the writers of these letters and the authors of the brief paragraphs in the literary reviews, however, Ambrose hitherto had beneficently been spared an acquaintance. He read their effusions with a certain pleasurable glow, but they did not make him self-conscious. He had continued to write, as he had always written, out of an unfailing flow of memory. His early life had been spent among the curious characters of an American small town, and these had made sufficient impression upon him so that later he could recall their appearances, their conversations, with ease. Each had his story, his history, in many instances a chronicle of engrossing interest, which, in some cases, Ambrose, listener rather than relater, recalled hearing told many times on the crackerboxes at the general store, or on the corner before the drug-store, or around the stove at the post-office, with additions from month to month as death, marriage, child-birth, or some more unusual adventure befell the subjects.
So later Ambrose, sitting before his typewriter, let his memory flow through the keys. Were it a spring morning and did he happen to gaze out of his window to the street below to see a vendor with a pushcart laden with lilac blossoms, the vision was likely to associate itself in his mind with a long dusty road, a house enclosed in clusters of lilac and snowball and syringa bushes, and with the eccentric old woman living in the house, who, with her wagon and her mule, collected in barrels the village swill wherewith to feed her hungry hogs. He remembered how she went on with this drudgery long after she had scraped together enough money to send her son and daughter to college, even after they had married and gone out into the great world to live, and how, at last, when she died, it was discovered that she was rich enough to provide for the future of her grandchildren. That was all, but Ambrose would envelop this homely history in a wealth of vivid details and the woman with her hogs would arise be fore the reader of the Saturday Evening Post as a character he had always known and even always loved. There was assuredly magic in this and Ambrose's present difficulty owed its existence to the fact that he himself had been unaware of this magic.
When he wrote The Stafford Will Case he had employed as material the events surrounding a certain celebrated trial which had come up in the old town court, dividing the village into opposing factions, breaking down ties of friendship and marriage. He re-created the hypocrisy, the meanness, the drama, and the beauty of this sordid trial, reflected through the actions and words of the villagers in their homes, for, unexpectedly in a play with such a title, there was no court-room scene.
On reading the manuscript a prominent manager had at once sensed its stage values and had produced it with a cast and a director who had even augmented its inherent air of reality. The result had surpassed all expectations. Harold Edwards, the manager, had hoped for a modest success of esteem and Ambrose had looked forward to a slight increase in his income. Neither had foreseen the ensuing triumph. The first performance, fortuitously attended by a sympathetic audience, had concluded with so many curtain calls, so many lusty demands for the author, that both actors and producer were annoyed to learn that Ambrose was not to be discovered in the theatre. The morning newspapers had proclaimed The Stafford Will Case a masterpiece; no less an epithet had been freely employed by the reviewers, who had further signalized their enthusiasm by writing long Sunday articles in which they had delved deeply into the motives and methods of the play. It was early advertised, for example, that Ambrose Deacon had invented an entirely novel technique, a technique developed naturally out of the characters and the situations. Ineluctable comparisons, indeed, with the folk plays of Synge and other European dramatists redounded only to the discredit of the latter.
Ambrose was bewildered before the interviewers arrived. Their invasion baffled him. It was simple enough, discounting the trifling hesitancies due to his shyness, to reply to queries which were merely historical or chronological in their nature. He managed, readily enough, all things considered, to tell the date and place of his birth and to give the correct name of the newspaper with which he had been associated, but when earnest young Harvard men peering through horn-rimmed glasses began to question him regarding the thirty-six dramatic situations, when they began to quote Schlegel and Freytag, and to refer subtly to scenes in Werfel and Pirandello, whose plays he had never seen or read, Ambrose was swamped. He had no replies ready for those who asked him to discuss his method. It had never occurred to him before that he had selected a "point of view." Why, he had written his stories from the only point of view in which they had come to him, the point of view of the boy listening with wide open ears in the village store or of the boy who had watched them unfold before his very eyes. His play had developed in a similar fashion. He had written down what had happened, so far as he could remember, what his characters had actually said. He had been amazed to discover that his material was assuming dramatic form, shaping itself, without his conscious intention, for the most part in dialogue. He had not intended, in the beginning, to write a play. He had written a play by accident. To these interviewers then, who were bent on probing into his workshop, he was so completely inarticulate, so unsatisfactory in explanation, that their ensuing articles hinted in some instances at mysticism—The New Mystic Realist was the engaging title of one of these—and in others the authors pitilessly derided the playwright's clumsy efforts to maintain secrecy. Ambrose read these papers with growing alarm.
They had one immediate effect. They made him self-conscious. He began to wonder how he had written this play and the stories which had come before, stories which publishers, in the light of his present renown, had dragged out of old files with prayers for permission to reissue them in book form. He began to wonder if he could write anything new. Determining to test himself one morning, a few weeks after the opening of his play, he seated himself before his typewriter. He selected a theme quite easily from the ragbag of his memory, but he had no sooner decided on his first sentence than anxiety beset him. How was he going to tell his story? What form was it going to take? What point of view should he choose? This consciousness of processes, so recently acquired, produced in him so great a terror, so complete a realization that he knew nothing sufficiently recondite about these matters, that he found himself unable to tell his story at all. After a few such futile attempts to recapture his natural routine he was ready to admit defeat. Discouraged and disheartened, he faced the prospect of an involuntary sterility.
Meanwhile his fame increased. Callers, in the guise of worshipping admirers, grew more frequent, despite his alarming silences in their presence. The interviewers, the photographers, on the whole were far easier to deal with. In vain he endeavoured to cultivate a more knowing manner; he was ignorant of any practical method of achieving this desirable result. Frankly, he was appalled by the social obligations his new position had forced on him. Edwards had entertained him at dinner or late supper once or twice and at these gatherings, which lingered in his memory like so many painful major operations, he had encountered other writers, actors, and even a few people from the richer and more formal social world. These others in their turn began to burden him with invitations. He accepted these invitations—he did not know how to refuse them—and hesitated awkwardly in the corners of over-decorated drawing-rooms whence he was sought out and pawed over. Nevertheless, his unseemly deportment appeared to have no immediate deterrent effect on the quantity of invitations he received. The momentum of his fame was sufficient by now to carry him along by itself.
Under the rays of this unwelcome searchlight Ambrose became chronically uncomfortable and unhappy, sensations enhanced by his apparent inability to write. He was beginning, indeed, to believe that he had walked into an impasse from which there was no turning when among a heap of letters that the postman delivered one morning he descried an envelope addressed in a friendly hand. The letter was from Jack Story, a former reporter-acquaintance for whom Ambrose felt a real affection. Jack had long suffered from a complaint which the doctors at last had diagnosed as an advanced stage of tuberculosis and he had been shipped off to recover on the high and dry New Mexican mountains. The letter—the first that Ambrose had received from him since his departure—congratulated the playwright on his success and went on to describe the delights of western life. Jack wrote that he had found Santa Fe extremely amusing. The people were fine, the climate was delightful. In short, he was enjoying himself. He was not yet permitted to ride, but he sat in his warm garden by the hour, talking to a friend or reading, or he visited his neighbours' gardens.
That morning Ambrose did not open his other letters. He sat for a long time before his desk considering Jack's proposal, so extremely timely, so sensitively accurate in its clear projection of his present state of mind. At the end of his meditations he had decided to go to New Mexico.