Peggy nestled into the corner of the cab, with a tired sigh, and there was silence as they moved smoothly up Broadway.
He peered at her in the dim light. She looked very small and wistful and fragile. Suddenly an intense desire surged over him to pick her up and crush her to him. He fought against it. He tried to fix his thoughts on the girl at home, to tell himself that he was a man of honour. His fingers, gripping the edge of the seat, tightened till every muscle of his arm was rigid.
The cab, crossing a rough piece of road, jolted Peggy from her corner. Her hand fell on his.
"Peggy!" he cried, hoarsely.
Her grey eyes were wet. He could see them glisten. And then his arms were round her, and he was covering her upturned face with kisses.
The cab drew up at the entrance to Alcala. They alighted in silence, and without a word made their way through into the hall. From force of habit, Rutherford glanced at the letter-rack on the wall at the foot of the stairs. There was one letter in his pigeon-hole.
Mechanically he drew it out; and, as his eyes fell on the handwriting, something seemed to snap inside him.
He looked at Peggy, standing on the bottom stair, and back again at the envelope in his hand. His mood was changing with a violence that left him physically weak. He felt dazed, as if he had wakened out of a trance.
With a strong effort he mastered himself. Peggy had mounted a few steps, and was looking back at him over her shoulder. He could read the meaning now in the grey eyes.
"Good night, Peggy," he said in a low voice. She turned, facing him, and for a moment neither moved.
"Good night!" said Rutherford again.
Her lips parted, as if she were about to speak, but she said nothing.
Then she turned again, and began to walk slowly upstairs.
He stood watching her till she had reached the top of the long flight. She did not look back.
V
Peggy's nightly visits began afresh after this, and the ghost on the table troubled Rutherford no more. His restlessness left him. He began to write with a new vigour and success. In after years he wrote many plays, most of them good, clear-cut pieces of work, but none that came from him with the utter absence of labour which made the writing of Willie in the Wilderness a joy. He wrote easily, without effort. And always Peggy was there, helping, stimulating, encouraging.
Sometimes, when he came in after dinner to settle down to work, he would find a piece of paper on his table covered with her schoolgirl scrawl. It would run somewhat as follows:
"He is proud of his arms. They are skinny, but he thinks them the limit. Better put in a shirt-sleeve scene for Willie somewhere.
"He thinks he has a beautiful profile. Couldn't you make one of the girls say something about Willie having the goods in that line?
"He is crazy about golf.
"He is proud of his French accent. Couldn't you make Willie speak a little piece in French?"
"He" being Winfield Knight.
And so, little by little, the character of Willie grew, till it ceased to be the Willie of the magazine story, and became Winfield Knight himself, with improvements. The task began to fascinate Rutherford. It was like planning a pleasant surprise for a child. "He'll like that," he would say to himself, as he wrote in some speech enabling Willie to display one of the accomplishments, real or imagined, of the absent actor. Peggy read it, and approved. It was she who suggested the big speech in the second act where Willie described the progress of his love affair in terms of the golf-links. From her, too, came information as to little traits in the man's character which the stranger would not have suspected.
As the play progressed Rutherford was amazed at the completeness of the character he had built. It lived. Willie in the magazine story might have been anyone. He fitted into the story, but you could not see him. He had no real individuality. But Willie in the play! He felt that he would recognize him in the street. There was all the difference between the two that there is between a nameless figure in some cheap picture and a portrait by Sargent. There were times when the story of the play seemed thin to him, and the other characters wooden, but in his blackest moods he was sure of Willie. All the contradictions in the character rang true: the humour, the pathos, the surface vanity covering a real diffidence, the strength and weakness fighting one another.
"You're alive, my son," said Rutherford, admiringly, as he read the sheets. "But you don't belong to me."
At last there came the day when the play was finished, when the last line was written, and the last possible alteration made; and, later, the day when Rutherford, bearing the brown-paper-covered package under his arm, called at the Players' Club to keep an appointment with Winfield Knight.
Almost from the first Rutherford had a feeling that he had met the man before, that he knew him. As their acquaintance progressed-the actor was in an expansive mood, and talked much before coming to business-the feeling grew. Then he understood. This was Willie, and no other. The likeness was extraordinary. Little turns of thought, little expressions-they were all in the play.
The actor paused in a description of how he had almost beaten a champion at golf, and looked at the parcel.
"Is that the play?" he said.
"Yes," said Rutherford. "Shall I read it?"
"Guess I'll just look through it myself. Where's Act I.? Here we are! Have a cigar while you're waiting?"
Rutherford settled himself in his chair, and watched the other's face. For the first few pages, which contained some tame dialogue between minor characters, it was blank.
" 'Enter Willie,' " he said. "Am I Willie?"
"I hope so," said Rutherford, with a smile. "It's the star part."
"H'm."
He went on reading. Rutherford watched him with furtive keenness. There was a line coming at the bottom of the page which he was then reading which ought to hit him, an epigram on golf, a whimsical thought put almost exactly as he had put it himself five minutes back when telling his golf story.
The shot did not miss fire. The chuckle from the actor and the sigh of relief from Rutherford were almost simultaneous.
Winfield Knight turned to him.
"That's a dandy line about golf," said he.
Rutherford puffed complacently at his cigar.
"There's lots more of them in the piece," he said.
"Bully for you," said the actor. And went on reading.
Three-quarters of an hour passed before he spoke again. Then he looked up.
"It's me," he said; "it's me all the time. I wish I'd seen this before I put on the punk I'm doing now. This is me from the drive off the tee. It's great! Say, what'll you have?"
Rutherford leaned back in his chair, his mind in a whirl. He had arrived at last. His struggles were over. He would not admit of the possibility of the play being a failure. He was a made man. He could go where he pleased, and do as he pleased.
It gave him something of a shock to find how persistently his thoughts refused to remain in England. Try as he might to keep them there, they kept flitting back to Alcala.
VI
Willie in the Wilderness was not a failure. It was a triumph. Principally, it is true, a personal triumph for Winfield Knight. Everyone was agreed that he had never had a part that suited him so well. Critics forgave the blunders of the piece for the sake of its principal character. The play was a curiously amateurish thing. It was only later that Rutherford learned craft and caution. When he wrote Willie he was a colt, rambling unchecked through the field of play-writing, ignorant of its pitfalls. But, with all its faults, Willie in the Wilderness was a success. It might, as one critic pointed out, be more of a monologue act for Winfield Knight than a play, but that did not affect Rutherford.
It was late on the opening night when he returned to Alcala. He had tried to get away earlier. He wanted to see Peggy. But Winfield Knight, flushed with success, was in his most expansive mood. He seized upon Rutherford and would not let him go. There was supper, a gay, uproarious supper, at which everybody seemed to be congratulating everybody else. Men he had never met before shook him warmly by the hand. Somebody made a speech, despite the efforts of the rest of the company to prevent him. Rutherford sat there, dazed, out of touch with the mood of the party. He wanted Peggy. He was tired of all this excitement and noise. He had had enough of it. All he asked was to be allowed to slip away quietly and go home. He wanted to think, to try and realize what all this meant to him.