“I know. I’ve heard all you’ve said about it. But who will convince the world of it?”
“I will, of course. You’re forgetting my book.”
“Simon, I don’t want to be a brute, but how many people will read your book?”
“If you follow my suggestion, hundreds of thousands of people will read it, because it will explain Francis Cornish’s life as a great artistic adventure. And a very Canadian sort of adventure, what’s more.”
“I don’t see this country as a land botching with artistic adventure, or deep concern about the soul, and if you do, I think you’re off your head.”
“I do, and I’m not off my head. I sometimes think I’m ahead of my time. You haven’t read my book. It isn’t finished, of course, and how it ends hangs entirely on the decision you make. The ending can be fantastic, in both the literal and the colloquial meanings of the word. You don’t know what a good long look at your uncle’s life brings to the surface, in a mind like mine. You’ve got to trust me, and in this sort of thing you don’t trust me, Arthur, because you’re afraid to trust yourself.”
“I trusted myself in this opera venture. I hustled the Foundation into doing something that hasn’t worked out.”
“You don’t know if it has worked out, and you won’t, until long after tomorrow night. You have the amateur’s notion that a first performance tells the whole story about a stage piece. Did you know the St. Louis people are already interested in Arthur of Britain? If the opera doesn’t cause a stir here, it may very well do so there. And in other places. Of course, you hustled us into this job. And now you think it was just the beginning of your mumps. But great achievements have sprung from stranger things than a dose of mumps.”
“All right. Let us proceed. With caution. I suppose I’d better take over, and see these New York people.”
“And I suppose you’d better do nothing of the sort,” said Maria. “You leave it to Simon. He’s a downy old bird.”
“Maria, you are beginning to sound like a wife.”
“The best wife you’ll ever have,” said Maria.
“True. Very true, my darling. By the way, I’m thinking of calling you Sweetness, in future.”
Maria put out her tongue at him.
“Before you degenerate into embarrassing public connubiality,” said Darcourt, “let me call your attention to the fact that the dress rehearsal must now have almost completed the first act of this opera Arthur has decided to hate. We’d better get over to the theatre, and be slighted and neglected, if thats the way it goes. As for this other thing, shall I go ahead?”
“Yes, Simon, you go ahead,” said Maria.
Arthur, characteristically, was calling for the bill.
10
It is the first night of Arthur of Britain.
Gwen Larking speaks through the intercom to all dressing-rooms and the Green Room: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. Half an hour till curtain, please.”
The early birds have been ready long since. In his dressing-room Oliver Twentyman lies in his reclining-chair. He is made up and dressed, except for his magician’s gown, which hangs ready to put on. His dresser has tactfully left him alone, to compose himself. Will this be his last appearance? Who can say? Certainly not Oliver Twentyman, who will go on appearing in operas as long as directors and conductors want him—and they still want him. But this will probably be his last creation of a new role; nobody has ever sung Merlin in Arthur of Britain before, and he intends to give the audience something to remember. The critics, too, those chroniclers of operatic history, upon the whole so much more reliable than their brethren who deal with the theatre. When Oliver Twentyman is no more, they will say that Merlin, undertaken when he was already over eighty, was the best thing he had done since he sang Oberon in Britten’s Dream. He liked being old—and still a great artist. Age, linked with achievement, was a splendid crown to life, and took the sting from death.
Wordsworth knew what he was talking about. Oliver Twentyman murmured the words two or three times, like a prayer. He was a praying sort of man, and often his prayers took the form of quotations.
Onstage Waldo Harris was having the last, he hoped, of many sessions with Hans Hoizknecht about Hair on the Floor. Many years ago—Hoizknecht would not say how many, nor would he identify the opera house (though it was a great one)—he had found, during the last act of Boris Godunov, that he was choking. Choking so that he could scarcely utter. Something had invaded his throat and was strangling him. Instead of singing he was on the verge of throwing up. It was a situation in which the best of the artist must unite with the best of the man to overcome a difficulty all the greater because it could not be identified. Somehow—there were times when he thought it must have been Divine intervention—he had sung his way—sung well and truly, though in agony—to the end of the act and then, when the curtain was down, he had rushed to his dressing-room, and called for the theatre doctor, who, with a forceps, had removed from his throat a twenty-inch human hair! From a wig? From some shedding soprano in the chorus in an earlier scene? Whatever the source, there it was, a hair of great length which had, in its situation, behaved with the malignance of an animate thing! In one of his great intakes of breath while lying, as the distraught Tsar, on the floor, he had sucked up that hair, and he had it yet, preserved in a plastic bag, which he showed to every stage management in every theatre where he appeared, as a warning of what could happen if the stage were not properly swept, not once, but at every possible time, during a performance. He did not want to be a nuisance, nor did he wish to appear neurotic, but a singer meets perils of which the public knows nothing, and he begged—begged with all the authority of his place in the company—that he might have the assurance of Waldo Harris that the stage would be properly swept whenever the curtain was down. Which assurance Waldo gave, sympathetic, but also wishing that Hoizknecht would accept one positive answer, and shut up about hairs on the stage.
In the Prompt Corner, Gwen Larking was fussing. She would not have thought of it as fussing, but as she was redoing and perfecting things that had already been done, and done to perfection, there is no other word for it. Gwen was, in herself, the perfection of a Stage Manager, which meant that she was impeccable in her attention to detail, alert for any mishap and capable of meeting it, and a monument of assurance to nervous artists. And the greatest fusser of them all, beneath an impassive exterior.
She was dressed for her work in an expensive pant-suit, and a blouse of deceptive simplicity. She had made her two assistants and the three gofers dress themselves similarly, as near as it was in their destiny to come to her own stripped-down elegance. Art deserves respect, and respect is mirrored in proper dress. Let those members of the audience who so wished appear in the theatre looking as if they had just come from mucking out the cowshed; it was up to the stage crew to dress as if they were about important work. The gofers had to be warned about bangles and chains that jingled; of course such things could not be heard on the stage but they might be distracting in the wings.
The Prompt Corner was called so because of tradition; nobody could possibly have prompted anyone onstage from it. Indeed, the stage could not be seen from it, except fleetingly. But over Gwen Larking’s desk, which looked like the conductor’s own, lay a full score of the opera, in which every detail of the production was recorded, for instant reference. This was what Al Crane would have given an ear to get his hands on, but Gwen guarded it jealously, just as she guarded the conductor’s full score, which lived in the safe in Waldo Harris’s office.