Bad for the play—yes, Valentine thought that. But she knew that she was nettled by anything which gave Roger satisfaction, and she was angry with herself for being so petty. She could not keep up her accustomed tact one day at rehearsal when Roger repeatedly fluffed his lines in a scene with Pearl.
“Roger, it’s far past the time when you should know this scene,” said she.
“Sorry,” said Roger, in a tone which suggested that he thought she was being wearisome and must be humoured.
“It’s useless to say that you are sorry if you have no intention of improving,” she said; “you have said ‘Sorry’ in very much that tone at the last four rehearsals. I am growing tired of it.”
Pearl, moved by the desire for self-sacrifice which is one of the most dangerous characteristics of unwanted lovers, spoke:
“It’s really my fault, Miss Rich,” said she; “I make a move there which puts him off, I think.”
“No, you don’t do anything of the kind,” said Valentine crossly; “you are perfectly all right and you would be much better if you had something to act against.”
“If I am really such a nuisance, Miss Rich,” said Roger, “perhaps it isn’t too late to reconsider the casting.”
“Oh, don’t talk like an idiot,” said Valentine, angrily conscious that she was growing red in the face. “You are the best person for the part, and you know it. You can do it very well, and you will do it very well. If you drop out now you will make all sorts of difficulties for everybody. But I want you to work at rehearsals, and spend less time giggling in the background with Griselda. You are both of you behaving like children. A production like this depends on everybody’s good work and good will. It simply is not fair to behave as you are doing.”
Roger was very angry. That he, a man who had got the better of so many women should be spoken to in that tone by a woman, and in front of a lot of nincompoops! He turned to leave the stage.
“Go back to your place, Roger, and finish your scene,” said Valentine in the voice which had caused two London critics to call her the best Lady Macbeth among the younger generation of actresses.
To Roger’s intense astonishment, he did so, and under the stress of anger, he acted quite well. But as he looked into Pearl’s eyes he saw pity and love there, and he hated her for it until the rehearsal was over, when he promptly forgot her.
At eleven o’clock that night Griselda sat at her window, studying her lines. She had been alarmed and shamed by Valentine’s words; she was also angry. If that was the way Valentine thought about her, she would show that she could behave in any way she pleased, and act Ariel too. She looked out of her window at the upper lawn; there was the spot, there by that tree, where Solly had kissed her. She remembered it with pleasure. But what a mess he had turned out to be! Afraid of his mother! Griselda, who had forgotten what it was like to have a mother, and who could not know what the relationship between a man and his mother can be, was scornful. Roger wasn’t such a softy. It was only since she had met Roger that she had really known how silly most people are.
Was she in love with Roger? She didn’t really know, but she half suspected that she was. Anyhow, she knew who did love Roger, and that was that stupid Pearl Vambrace, whose hems were always uneven, and whose hair looked as if it needed a good wash. But Pearl wasn’t going to get Roger until Griselda had quite made up her mind about him. Yes, very likely she was in love with Roger.
The fact was that Griselda’s notions about love, allowing for differences of sex, were no more clear-cut than those of Hector Mackilwraith. But as she leaned out of her window and took a long breath of the warm spring night, she felt that it was a very fine thing to be eighteen and in love.
On the other side of the house Freddy crept to the window of a darkened closet and looked out. Yes; there it was; just what she had expected to see. A dark shape standing among the trees, not easy to make out, but apparently with its head thrown back and its eyes raised, undoubtedly in worship, toward the windows of her father’s bedroom.
Putting half a walnut shell in her mouth she popped her head out of the window and shouted in her deepest voice: “Who’s that down there?”
There was a wild trampling of shrubbery, and a thickset figure rushed toward the road.
Five
As the time of the opening performance drew nearer there were rehearsals in the grounds of St Agnes’ three or four times a week, and after many of these Griselda offered the actors what she liked to call “a bite”. Roger said that he could not understand why she did it, and it seemed to herself that it was not in her new character as an amused observer of the human comedy. But although the flame of hospitality within her was not a bonfire, it was steady and bright, and it appeared to her to be wrong that people should come to her home and go away again without having received food or drink. Therefore she worked out a plan for giving the Little Theatre bread and cheese and fruit and coffee; she even insisted upon paying for these things herself and serving them herself, so as not to put her father to expense or to make extra work for the servants. The facts that her father did not care about such expenses and that the servants had not enough to do did not enter into the matter; she felt that the Little Theatre was at St Agnes’ because of her doing and that she ought to take care of at least some of their wants. So contradictory is human nature that she could think sneeringly of her fellow-actors while taking considerable pains on their behalf. As Freddy said in her more sentimental moments, Griselda was not a half-bad old boob in her way.
The Little Theatre loved it. Acting is a great provoker of hunger and conviviality, and the bread and the cheese, the fruit and the coffee were consumed in great quantities. Professor Vambrace complimented Griselda upon the classical simplicity of this refreshment; it put him in mind of the meals in Homer, he said. Pearl and he ate heartily upon these occasions, not knowing what Spartan nastiness the preoccupied Mrs Vambrace might have left in the refrigerator for them at home. But Griselda’s hospitality begot hospitality in others, and soon the actors were vying with one another to entertain the cast after a rehearsal; simplicity was forgotten, and hospitality raged unchecked. Some of these affairs were very pleasant; others were markedly less agreeable. Mrs Leakey’s after-rehearsal soirée came well down in the latter category.
What Mrs Leakey felt when she discovered that Leakey was going to other people’s houses to eat and drink, without her, four times a week, was simple jealousy. But it was not Mrs Leakey’s way to admit to base emotions; she sublimated them. So she addressed Leakey thus:
“You can’t very well go on eating everywhere and anywhere, week in and week out, without Repaying Hospitality. We don’t want people to think we’re cheapskates. I don’t know that we’re exactly in a position to entertain. Goodness knows we have little enough in the way of cups and saucers. But if other people are having the cast in after rehearsal, we’ll do it too. So you’d better invite the whole tribe for next Friday night, and get it over with.”
When Mrs Leakey heard that the fare at St Agnes’ was of the simplest, she smiled a superior smile. Beginning at ten o”clock in the morning on the Friday in question, she worked the greater part of the day on the food which she would serve that night. She baked a chocolate cake and a white cake; she iced the former in the difficult and lumpy Log Cabin style, and the latter she covered with a deep layer of sticky stuff resembling marshmallow. She imprisoned little sausages in pastry and baked them. She made an elaborate ice cream, and coloured it green. She made sandwiches of the utmost difficulty, possible only to a thirty-third degree sandwichmaker, in which bananas were tongued and grooved with celery; sandwiches loaded with cream cheese, or encrusted with nuts and olives; sandwiches in which lengths of chilly asparagus were entombed in two kinds of bread; sandwiches in which fish, mayonnaise and onion were forced into uneasy union. She produced pickles of her own making from the cellar cupboard, and created a jelly from which the imbedded bits of fruit stared forth, like fish from a ruby bowl. By evening she was, to use her own phrase; “all in”, and let Mr Leakey know it before he went to rehearsal.