“I beg your pardon?” said Mr. Hill, quietly but dangerously, stepping to the footlights.
“All wrong!” repeated Mr Goble.
“Really?” Wentworth Hill, who a few years earlier had spent several terms at Oxford University before being sent down for aggravated disorderliness, had brought little away with him from that seat of learning except the Oxford manner. This he now employed upon Mr Goble with an icy severity which put the last touch to the manager’s fermenting state of mind. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me just how you think that part should be played?”
Mr Goble marched down the aisle.
“Speak out to the audience,” he said, stationing himself by the orchestra pit. “You’re turning your head away all the darned time.”
“I may be wrong,” said Mr Hill, “but I have played a certain amount, don’t you know, in pretty good companies, and I was always under the impression that one should address one’s remarks to the person one was speaking to, not deliver a recitation to the gallery. I was taught that that was the legitimate method.”
The word touched off all the dynamite in Mr Goble. Of all things in the theatre he detested most the “legitimate method.” His idea of producing was to instruct the cast to come down to the footlights and hand it to ’em. These people who looked up stage and talked to the audience through the backs of their necks revolted him.
“Legitimate! That’s a hell of a thing to be! Where do you get that legitimate stuff? You aren’t playing Ibsen!”
“Nor am I playing a knockabout vaudeville sketch.”
“Don’t talk back at me!”
“Kindly don’t shout at me! Your voice is unpleasant enough without your raising it.”
Open defiance was a thing which Mr Goble had never encountered before, and for a moment it deprived him of breath. He recovered it, however, almost immediately.
“You’re fired!”
“On the contrary,” said Mr Hill, “I’m resigning.” He drew a green-covered script from his pocket and handed it with an air to the pallid assistant stage-director. Then, more gracefully than ever Freddie Rooke had managed to move downstage under the tuition of Johnson Miller, he moved upstage to the exit. “I trust that you will be able to find someone who will play the part according to your ideas!”
“I’ll find,” bellowed Mr Goble at his vanishing back, “a chorus-man who’ll play it a damned sight better than you!” He waved to the assistant stage-director. “Send the chorus-men on the stage!”
“All the gentlemen of the chorus on the stage, please!” shrilled the assistant stage-director, bounding into the wings like a retriever.
“Mr Goble wants all the chorus-gentlemen on the stage!”
There was a moment, when the seven male members of “The Rose of America” ensemble lined up self-consciously before his gleaming eyes, when Mr Goble repented of his brave words. An uncomfortable feeling passed across his mind that Fate had called his bluff and that he would not be able to make good. All chorus-men are exactly alike, and they are like nothing else on earth. Even Mr Goble, anxious as he was to overlook their deficiencies, could not persuade himself that in their ranks stood even an adequate Lord Finchley. And then, just as a cold reaction from his fervid mood was about to set in, he perceived that Providence had been good to him. There, at the extreme end of the line, stood a young man who, as far as appearance went, was the ideal Lord Finchley,—as far as appearance went, a far better Lord Finchley than the late Mr Hill. He beckoned imperiously.
“You at the end!”
“Me?” said the young man.
“Yes, you. What’s your name?”
“Rooke. Frederick Rooke, don’t you know.”
“You’re English, aren’t you?”
“Eh? Oh, yes, absolutely!”
“Ever played a part before?”
“Part? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, in amateur theatricals, you know, and all that sort of rot.”
His words were music to Mr Goble’s ears. He felt that his Napoleonic action had justified itself by success. His fury left him. If he had been capable of beaming, one would have said that he beamed at Freddie.
“Well, you play the part of Lord Finchley from now on. Come to my office this afternoon for your contract. Clear the stage. We’ve wasted enough time.”