Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/64

I can hardly expect you to understand me, I fear—for, if the truth be told, I understand myself not at all; and of Lucille, my comprehension is, at best, just not misapprehension: though of that, even, I feel at times uncertain enough.

Well, after this morning, I suppose I need not think about it any more. Need not! must not would express it better: the last word, so far as I am concerned in it, has been said; the curtain has rung down upon the little comedy-tragedy that I had (I might say) written, or, at any rate, conceived, entirely by and for myself; and it has left me, the author, in a puzzlement that is, to treat it lightly, extremely disconcerting. I can't help having the preposterous feeling that it is partly my fault that it has ended so, and of course, you know, it isn't, couldn't be!

If we will take our drama in real life, we must not expect the unexpected, we must—strenuously—remember that we are author and audience both, that we see the thing from the inside, that we must be prepared for things actually happening, just as they seem to be going to happen.

I suppose I thought I had thus reasoned it all out, but I see now that my vision was irrevocably warped, that I was looking out, with a playgoer's certainty of anticipation, for the unprepared—for the unexpected. . . . But (I meant to have said sooner) it occurs to me that, if I put it into words for you, if I reduce it, so to speak, to black and white, we may contrive between us to come to some sort of an understanding about it, to unravel at least one or two of the threads, to get, in short, an approximate idea of that slender humorous enigma whom we used to call Lucille Silverdale.

So