Al wanted to do the right thing, of course. Mabel wanted to go home. Wanted her mother. Can you figure that, in a woman of twenty-two? Wanting her mother? Of course the Mullers were what is called a very close family. But Al couldn’t swing it. His grant from Pomelo was enough for one, and damned tight for two, and the fare back to Fresno would screw him up. Could Darcourt persuade Mabel to take it easy for a few days, and probably see things differently?
Darcourt said he would look into the matter and do what seemed best.
That meant that he phoned Maria, in Toronto, and put the matter to her. “I’ll come at once,” said Maria.
It was Maria who fetched Mabel from the hospital, paid all the bills, set her up in a room near her own in a hotel, and gave Al a piece of her mind that astonished them both, so conventional was it in tone and content. It was Maria who sent Al to a druggist for a breast-pump, of which Mabel had dire need, and this was Al’s lowest moment. A breast-pump! He would willingly go into a drugstore and ask for condoms. That was dashing. But a breast-pump! The squalor of domesticity engulfed him. It was Maria who drove Mabel to the airport, when she was fit to travel, and bought her ticket to Fresno and mother. Coping with Mabel, who was sentimentally grateful and woman-to-woman, and bereft-mother-to-happy-mother, tried Maria very high, but she endured all, and never uttered a word of complaint or irony, even to Darcourt. Not even Mabel’s frequent, tearful hints that fate was certainly good to the rich, and tough on the poor, provoked her to any speaking of her mind. But to herself she said it was enough to turn her milk.
“You’ve behaved beautifully,” said Darcourt. “You deserve a reward.”
“Oh, but I’ve had a reward,” said Maria. “You remember I was hinting about Wally Crottel? The most wonderful luck—the book’s turned up!”
“But you said you had thrown it away.”
“So I did. But that was the original—you know, that crumpled, stained, interlined, grubby mess that Parlabane left. When I sent it to the publishers, one of them thought a ghost might be able to wrench a book out of it, so he had a Xerox made—quite indefensibly, but you know what publishers are—and sent it to his favourite ghost, who reported that it was pretty hopeless. But recently the ghost sent back the Xerox, which he had unearthed on his desk—obviously a ghost of the uttermost degree of literary messiness—and the publisher, belatedly, but honourably, sent it to me. And I’ve sent it to Wally.”
“But Wally’s in jail, awaiting trial.”
“I know. I sent it to Mervyn Gwilt, with a teasing, palavering letter, full of nifty bits of Latin. Told him to get it published if he could.”
“Maria! You may have committed yourself to some appalling legal claim!”
“Well—no. Not really. I showed the letter to Arthur, and he laughed a lot, but then he got one of his lawyers to rewrite it, and a fine juiceless job he made of it. Not a word of Latin. Lawyers are only half the fun they used to be when they knew Latin. But apparently it’s a watertight letter, admitting nothing, relinquishing nothing, but letting Wally have what he wanted, which was a peep at m’dad’s book.”
“And so that’s that.”
“As Wally seems likely to get seven years at least, that’s probably that.”
“Maria, you do have the Devil’s own luck!”
Al said no word of thanks to Maria about her part in his crisis. It did not occur to him, so engrossed was he in his Regiebuch, and if it had occurred to him, he would not have dared, for a woman who could talk to him as Maria had done was somebody best avoided. The musicologist in Al came uppermost; hadn’t there been an opera called All’s Well That Ends Well? He looked it up. Yes, there it was, by Edmond Audran, whose best opera was La Poupée, which meant The Baby, didn’t it? Remarkable how fate, and music, and life were all mixed up. It made you think.
3
During this incident, which did not impinge at all on the preoccupation of the company, preparations for the opera were going ahead rapidly. The play which had commanded the stage had finished its run of performances, and Powell and his forces had the full run of the theatre. Scenes were hung from the flies and all the forty-five sets of ropes that controlled them were adjusted and balanced for use. A splendid set of curtains was brought in from a rental warehouse and hung behind the proscenium, so that they could be swept aside and upward from the centre in the gloriously theatrical manner of the nineteenth century. Powell demanded, and got, a set of footlights installed. In vain did Waldo Harris demur that nobody used such things any more.
“Hoffmann’s theatre used em, and they are very becoming to the ladies,” said Powell. “We won’t make all the women look like skulls, with nothing but overhead light. And get that bloody rack of lamps taken down from in front of the proscenium; it’s totally out of character and we can do without ‘em; the light from the front of the balcony will be quite enough.”
Powell was busy, so far as was possible, transforming the small opera theatre that belonged to the Stratford Festival into a charming early-nineteenth-century house.
“We’re going to use those pretty little doors that give onto the forestage,” he told Darcourt, “and we’ll just dim the house lights to half, because in Hoffmann’s day the audience sat in full light, and everybody could see their neighbours, and chat and flirt if they didn’t like the show. Flirtation’s a good old sport and due for a revival.”
He had worked with Dulcy Ringgold to prepare pretty cartouches which decorated the little boxes beside the stage; one bore the arms of the town, and the other the arms of the province, but so treated that they had a playful, rather than an official, air. They looked like fine plaster-work, but they were pressed in the same light material as the armour worn by Arthur’s Knights.
All of this activity caused a good deal of noise, but nevertheless the singers stepped onstage from time to time and bellowed or neighed into the auditorium, and agreed that it was a nice resonant house. They were still working in rehearsal rooms under the guidance of Watkin Bourke, who appeared to put in a twelve-hour day.
The company took on new vitality when they were able to claim the theatre as their own, and friendships were struck up, enmities sharpened, and jokes whispered behind hands.
One of these originated with Albert Greenlaw, one of the black singers, who played the role of Sir Pellinore. He had found a great toy in Nutcombe Puckler, who was a comedian by profession, but never thought of himself as comic.
“Do you realize,” said Greenlaw to Vincent LeMoyne, the other black Knight, “that Nutty gets letters from his dog? Yes, I’m not kidding, from his dog! The dog’s in England, of course, but the dog writes twice a week. And in Cockney what’s more! ‘Dear Marster, I miss you terrible, but Missus says we has to be brave and go walkies every day just as if you was ‘ere. My roomatism is chronic but I takes me pills reglar, and don’t have to get up in the night more than a few times, which is an improvement, Missus says. Hurry back, covered with laurels and bring lots of lovely green bones. Love from your Woofy in which Missus joins.’ Can you beat it! I’ve known dog-nuts, but I never met a dog-nut as nutty as Nutty. Why do you suppose the dog talks Cockney?”
“It’s a class thing,” said Wilson Tinney, who played Gareth Beaumains. “Dog must be loving and beloved, but not a social equal. Certainly not a superior. Can you imagine Nutty with a titled dog? ‘Dear Puckler, your wife is looking after me splendidly in your absence, and I look forward eagerly to August 12, when the grousing begins. Accept my assurance that I look upon you not as a master, but as a humble friend.’ That wouldn’t do at all.”
“Do you know what I think?” said Vincent LeMoyne; “I think Nutty’s wife writes those letters. I suspect the dog’s illiterate.”