A chair and a table were placed suitably for the author, and he seated himself, rather white about the gills, but with a belligerent jut to his chin. He cleared his throat, and Nathaniel broke the expectant silence by asking Stephen for a match.
Stephen produced a box from his pocket, and handed it to his uncle, who began to light his pipe, saying between puffs: "Go on, go on! What are you waiting for?"
"Wormwood," said Roydon throatily. "A play in three acts."
"Very powerful title," nodded Mottisfont knowledgeably. Roydon threw him a grateful look, and continued:
"Act I. The scene is a back-bedroom in a third-rate lodging-house. The bedstead is of brass, with sagging springs, and two of the knobs missing from the foot-rail. The carpet is threadbare, and the wallpaper, which is flowered in a design of roses in trellis-work tied up with blue ribbons, is stained in several places."
"Stained with what?" asked Stephen.
Roydon, who had never considered this point, glared at him, and said: "Does it matter?"
"Not to me, but if it's blood you ought to say so, and then my betrothed can make an excuse to go away. She's squeamish."
"Well, it isn't! I don't write that kind of play. The wallpaper is just stained."
"I expect it was from damp," suggested Maud. "It sounds as though it would be a damp sort of a place." Stephen turned his mocking gaze upon her, and said:
"You shouldn't say that, Aunt. After all, we haven't heard enough to judge yet."
"Shut up!" said Paula fiercely. "Don't pay any attention to Stephen, Willoughby! Just go on reading. Now, all of you! You must make your minds receptive, and absorb the atmosphere of the scene: it's tremendously significant. Go on, Willoughby!"
Roydon cleared his throat again. "Nottingham lace curtains shroud the windows, through which there can be obtained a vista of slate-roofs and chimney-stacks. A tawdry doll leans drunkenly on the dressing-table; and a pair of soiled pink corsets are flung across the only armchair." He looked round in a challenging kind of way as he enunciated this, and appeared to wait for comment.
"Ah yes, I see!" said Joseph, with a deprecating glance at the assembled company. "You wish to convey an atmosphere of sordidness."
"Quite, quite!" said Mottisfont, coughing.
"And let us admit freely that you have succeeded," said Stephen cordially.
"I always think there's something frightfully sordid about corsets, don't you?" said Valerie. "Those satin ones, I mean, with millions of bones and laces and things. Of course, nowadays one simply wears an elastic belt, if one wears anything at all, which generally one doesn't."
"You'll come to it, my girl," prophesied Mathilda.
"When I was young," remarked Maud, "no one thought of not wearing corsets. It would have been quite unheard-of."
"You corseted your minds as well as your bodies," interpolated Paula scornfully. "Thank God I live in an untrammelled age!"
"When I was young," exploded Nathaniel, "no decent woman would have mentioned such things in public!"
"How quaint!" said Valerie. "Stephen, darling, give me a cigarette!"
He threw his case over to her. Roydon asked, trying to control his voice, whether anyone wished him to continue or not.
"Yes, yes, for heaven's sake get on!" snapped Nathaniel testily. "If there's any more about underwear, you can leave it out!"
"You'll have to, anyway," added Stephen.
Roydon ignored this, and read aloud in an angry voice; 'Lucetta May is discovered, seated before her dressing table. She is wearing a shoddy pink negligee, which imperfectly conceals -"
"Careful!" Stephen warned him.
"It is grimy round the edge, and the lace is torn!" said Roydon defiantly.
"I think that's a marvellous touch!" said Valerie.
"It's surprising what a lot of dirt you can pick up from carpets, even where there's a vacuum-cleaner, which I don't suppose there would be in a place like that," said Maud. "I know those cheap theatrical lodging-houses, none better!"
"It is not a theatrical lodging-house!" said Roydon, goaded to madness. "It is, as you will shortly perceive, a bawdy lodging-house!"
Maud's placid voice broke the stunned silence. "I expect they're just as dirty," she said.
"Look here!" began Nathaniel thunderously.
Joseph intervened in a hurry. "Too many interruptions! We shall be putting Roydon off if we go on like this! I'm sure we're none of us so old-fashioned that we mind a little outspokenness!"
"Speak for yourself!" said Nathaniel.
"He is speaking for himself," said Stephen. "To do him justice, he is also speaking for most of the assembled company."
"Perhaps you would rather I didn't read you any more?" suggested Roydon stiffly. "I warn you, it is not meat for weak stomachs!"
"Oh, you must go on!" Valerie exclaimed. "I know I'm going to adore it. Do, everybody, stop interrupting!"
"She sits motionless, staring at her reflection in the mirror," suddenly declaimed Paula, in thrilling accents. "Then she picks up a lipstick, and begins wearily to rub it on her mouth. A knock falls on the door. With a movement of instinctive coquetry, she pats her curls into position, straightens her tired body, and calls, "Come in!" '
The spectacle of Paula enacting these movements in the improbable setting of a respectable drawing-room proved to be too much for Mathilda. She explained between chokes that she was very sorry, but that recitations always had this deplorable effect on her.
"What you can possibly find to laugh at I fail to see!" said Paula, a dangerous light in her eyes. "Laughter was not the reaction I expected!"
"It wasn't your fault," Mathilda assured her penitently. "In fact, the more tragic recitations are the more I feel impelled to laugh."
"I know so well what you mean!" said Joseph. "Ah, Paula, my dear, Tilda is paying you a greater tribute than you know! You conveyed such a feeling of tension in those few gestures that our Tilda's nerves frayed under it. I remember once, when I was playing in Montreal, to a packed house, working up to a moment of unbearable tension. I felt my audience with me, hanging, as it were, on my lips. I paused for my climax; I knew myself to be holding the house in the hollow of my hand. Suddenly a man broke into laughter! Disconcerting? Yes, but I knew why he laughed, why he could not help laughing!"
"I wouldn't mind hazarding a guess myself," agreed Stephen.
This pleased Nathaniel so much that he changed his mind about banning the reading of Wormwood, and bade Roydon, for the third time, to get on with it.
Roydon said: "Enter Mrs. Perkins, the landlady," and doggedly read a paragraph describing this character in terms revolting enough to have arrested the attention of his hearers had not this been diverted by Maud, who was moving stealthily about the room in search of something.
"The suspense is killing me!" Stephen announced at last. "What are you looking for, Aunt?"
"It's all right, my dear: I'm not going to disturb anyone," replied Maud untruthfully. "I just wondered where I had laid my knitting down. Please go on reading, Mr. Roydon! So interesting! It quite takes one back."
Stephen, who had joined Mathilda in the search for the knitting, remarked, sotto voce, that he had always wondered where Joe had picked Maud up, and now he knew. Mathilda, unearthing an embryo sock on four steel needles from behind a cushion, told him he was a cad.
"Thank you, my dear," said Maud, settling herself by the fire again. "Now I can be getting on with it while I listen."
The rest of Roydon's play was read to the accompaniment of the measured click of Maud's needles. It was by no means a bad play; sometimes, Mathilda thought, it hovered on the edge of brilliance; but it was no play to read to a drawing-room audience. As she had expected, it was often violent, always morbid; and it contained much that could with advantage have been omitted. Paula enjoyed herself immensely in the big scene; and neither she nor Roydon seemed capable of realising that the spectacle of his niece impersonating a fallen woman under tragic circumstances was unlikely to afford Nathaniel the least gratification. Indeed, it was only by a tremendous effort of will-power that Nathaniel was able to control himself; and while Paula's deep voice vibrated through the room, he grew more and more fidgety, and muttered under his breath in a way that boded ill for both dramatist and actress.