But Richard was beside her, not looking at her, his arm scarcely touching hers, but there, to her great content. Pinky and Bertie talked with peculiar energy, making a friendly fuss over Anelida but conveying, nevertheless, a singular effect of nervous tension.
Presently Richard said, “Here’s somebody else who would like to meet you, Anelida.” She looked up at a brick-coloured Guardee face and a pair of surprised blue eyes. “Colonel Warrender,” Richard said.
After his bumpy fashion, Warrender made conversation. “Everybody always shouts at these things, isn’t it? Haven’t got up to pitch yet but will, of course. You’re on the stage, isn’t it?”
“Just.”
“Jolly good! What d’you think of Dicky’s plays?”
Anelida wasn’t yet accustomed to hearing Richard called Dicky or to being asked that sort of question in that sort of way.
She said, “Well — immensely successful, of course.”
“Oh!” he said. “Successful! Awfully successful! ’Course. And I like ’em, you know. I’m his typical audience — want something gay and ’musing, with a good part for Mary. Not up to intellectual drama. Point is, though, is he satisfied? What d’you think? Wasting himself or not? What?”
Anelida was greatly taken aback and much exercised in her mind. Did this elderly soldier know Richard very intimately or did all Richard’s friends plunge on first acquaintance into analyses of each other’s inward lives for the benefit of perfect strangers? And did Warrender know about Husbandry in Heaven?
Again she had the feeling of being closely watched.
She said, “I hope he’ll give us a serious play one of these days and I shouldn’t have thought he’ll be really satisfied until he does.”
“Ah!” Warrender exclaimed, as if she’d made a dynamic observation. “There you are! Jolly good! Keep him up to it. Will you?”
“I!” Anelida cried in a hurry. She was about to protest that she was in no position to keep Richard up to anything, when it occurred to her, surprisingly, that Warrender might consider any such disclaimer an affectation.
“But does he need ‘keeping up’?” she asked.
“Oh Lord, yes!” he said. “What with one thing and another. You must know all about that.”
Anelida reminded herself she had only drunk half a dry Martini, so she couldn’t possibly be under the influence of alcohol. Neither, she would have thought, was Colonel Warrender. Neither, apparently, was Miss Bellamy or Charles Templeton or Miss Kate Cavendish or Mr. Bertie Saracen. Nor, it would seem, was Mr. Timon Gantry to whom, suddenly, she was being introduced by Richard.
“Timmy,” Richard was saying. “Here is Anelida Lee.”
To Anelida it was like meeting a legend.
“Good evening,” the so-often mimicked voice was saying. “What is there for us to talk about? I know. You shall tell me precisely why you make that ‘throw-it-over-your-shoulder’ gesture in your final speech and whether it is your own invention or a bit of producer’s whimsy.”
“Is it wrong?” Anelida demanded. She then executed the mime that is know in her profession as a double-take. Her throat went dry, her eyes started and she crammed the knuckle of her gloved hand between her separated teeth. “You haven’t seen me!” she cried.
“But I have. With Dicky Dakers.”
“Oh my God!” whispered Anelida, and this was not an expression she was in the habit of using.
“Look out. You’ll spill your drink. Shall we remove a little from this barnyard cacophony? The conservatory seems at the moment to be unoccupied.”
Anelida disposed of her drink by distractedly swallowing it. “Come along,” Gantry said. He took her by the elbow and piloted her towards the conservatory. Richard, as if by sleight-of-hand, had disappeared. Octavius was lost to her.
“Good evening, Bunny. Good evening, my dear Paul. Good evening, Tony,” Gantry said with the omniscience of M. de Charlus. Celebrated faces responded to these greetings and drifted astern. They were in the conservatory and for the rest of her life the smell of freesias would carry Anelida back to it.
“There!” Gantry said, releasing her with a little pat. “Now then.”
“Richard didn’t tell me. Nobody said you were in front.”
“Nobody knew, dear. We came in during the first act and left before the curtain. I preferred it.”
She remembered, dimly, that this kind of behavior was part of his legend.
“Why are you fussed?” Gantry inquired. “Are you ashamed of your performance?”
“No,” Anelida said truthfully, and she added in a hurry, “I know it’s very bad in patches.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“What else have you played?”
“Only bits at the Bonaventure.”
“No dra-mat-ic ac-ad-emy?” he said, venomously spitting out the consonants. “No agonizing in devoted little groups? No depicting! No going to bed with Stanislavsky and rising with Method?”
Anelida, who was getting her second wind, grinned at him.
“I admire Stanislavsky,” she said. “Intensely.”
“Very well. Very well. Now, attend to me. I am going to tell you about your performance.”
He did so at some length and in considerable detail. He was waspish, didactic, devastating and overwhelmingly right. For the most part she listend avidly and in silence, but presently she ventured to ask for elucidation. He answered, and seemed to be pleased.
“Now,” he said, “those are all the things that were amiss with your performance. You will have concluded that I wouldn’t have told you about them if I didn’t think you were an actress. Most of your mistakes were technical. You will correct them. In the meantime I have a suggestion to make. Just that. No promises. It’s in reference to a play that may never go into production. I believe you have already read it. You will do so again, if you please, and to that end you will come to the Unicorn at ten o’clock next Thursday morning. Hi! Monty!”
Anelida was getting used to the dreamlike situation in which she found herself. It had, in its own right, a kind of authenticity. When the Management, that bourne to which all unknown actresses aspired, appeared before her in the person of Montague Marchant, she was able to make a reasonable response. How pale was Mr. Marchant, how matt his surface, how immense his aplomb! He talked of the spring weather, of the flowers in the conservatory and, through some imperceptible gradation, of the theatre. She was, he understood, an actress.
“She’s playing Eliza Doolittle,” Gantry remarked.
“Of course. Nice notices,” Marchant murmured and tidily smiled at her. She supposed he must have seen them.
“I’ve been bullying her about her performance,” Gantry continued.
“What a bad man!” Marchant said lightly. “Isn’t he?”
“I suggest you take a look at it.”
“Now, you see, Miss Lee, he’s trying to bully me.”
“You mustn’t let him,” Anelida said.
“Oh, I’m well up to his tricks. Are you liking Eliza?”
“Very much indeed. It’s a great stroke of luck for me to try my hand at her.”
“How long is your season?”
“Till Sunday. We change every three weeks.”
“God, yes. Club policy.”
“That’s it.”
“I see no good reason,” Gantry said, “for fiddling about with this conversation. You know the part I told you about in Dicky’s new play? She’s going to read it for me. In the meantime, Monty, my dear, you’re going to look at the piece and then pay a call on the Bonaventure.” He suddenly displayed the cockeyed charm for which he was famous. “No promises made, no bones broken. Just a certain amount of very kind trouble taken because you know I wouldn’t ask it idly. Come, Monty, do say you will.”